Julia McClure, a Senior Lecturer in global history at the University of Glasgow, discusses her groundbreaking work on the Spanish Empire's moral-political economy of poverty. She traces how evolving perceptions of poverty shaped imperial governance and societal inequalities. McClure reveals the paradox of wealth accumulation during colonization and the legal constructs that justified exploitation. Additionally, she highlights Indigenous resistance, underscoring community solidarity as a challenge to colonial identity. Her insights connect historical poverty to today's social justice issues.
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Early Political Poverty Concept
Poverty was a political subject long before the 18th century, shaping empires in the 16th century.
Moral and political concepts of poverty helped build colonial laws, institutions, and inequalities.
insights INSIGHT
Medieval Christian Poverty Views
In medieval Christian Europe, poverty was a religious condition, not just economic state.
Poverty had legal status implying moral responsibility of the church to protect the poor, influencing later colonial governance.
insights INSIGHT
New World Wealth-Poverty Paradox
Spanish expansion caused moral and legal anxiety on indigenous peoples’ status and wealth.
The New World’s wealth was abundant, but indigenous people were considered poor and dispossessed.
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Julia McClure's "Empire of Poverty" delves into the evolution of poverty concepts during the 16th century, revealing their profound influence on the structures of states and empires. The book challenges the conventional understanding of poverty's politicization, tracing its roots back further than the 18th century. It examines how moral and political economies intertwined, shaping imperial inequalities. McClure analyzes the Spanish Empire's development and governance, highlighting the role of poverty's moral-political economy in shaping sovereignty negotiations, inequality construction, and resistance strategies. The book ultimately demonstrates how the transition to global capitalism and imperialism during this period created a moral crisis, transforming poverty's understanding and influencing the global order's inequalities.
Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Julia McClure 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.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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