Empire of Poverty The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire

Empire of Poverty examines how changing concepts of poverty in the long-sixteenth century helped shape the deep structures of states and empires and the contours of imperial inequalities. While poverty is often understood to have become a political subject with the birth of political economy in the eighteenth century, this book points to the longer history of poverty as a political subject and a more complicated relationship between moral and political economies. It focuses upon the critical transformations taking place in the long-sixteenth century, with the emergence of the world´s first global empire and the development of colonial capitalism. The book explores how the 'moral-political economy of poverty' - defined as a new and changing conceptualisation of and approach to poverty, across laws, institutions, and acts of resistance - played a critical role in the development and governance of the Spanish Empire. In so doing it offers insights into the negotiated nature of sovereignty, the construction of inequalities, and strategies of resistance. Empire of Poverty explains how the combined processes of the transition to global capitalism and imperialism in the long-sixteenth century wrought a moral crisis which led to the transformation of poverty and reconceptualization of the poor and how the newly emerging beliefs, laws, and institutions of poverty helped structure the inequalities of the new global order.

Julia McClure, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow

Julia McClure is a global historian of poverty, inequalities, charity and empires. McClure specialises in the history of the Spanish Empire in the long sixteenth century, and its significance for the transition to colonial capitalism. McClure´s first monograph, The Franciscan Invention of the New World (Palgrave, 2016) explores the role of missionaries in the early Atlantic world. Her second, Empire of Poverty: the moral-political economy of the Spanish Empire, scrutinises the role of the ideology of poverty in empire formation. In 2016 McClure was awarded an AHRC network grant to develop the Poverty Research Network, an inter-disciplinary and international collaboration which aims to deepen our understanding of the historically constructed nature of poverty as a way of offering new insights into how poverty is caused and addressed today.