Empire of Poverty

The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire

Julia McClure (Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow)

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English

Oxford University Press
06 March 2025

Colonialism & imperialism; Poverty & unemployment; Political structure & processes; Political economy

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.

By: Julia McClure (Senior Lecturer University of Glasgow)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 162mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 570g
ISBN: 9780198933878
ISBN 10: 0198933878
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 06 March 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Introduction 1: New World Wealth and Old World Poverty: The Making of an Economic Legend 2: Indigenous Moral Economies & The political Invention of Indigenous poverty 3: The Moral-Political Economy of Poverty and Theories of Global Sovereignty 67 4: Poverty Politics and State Formation 5: Making Indigenous Poverty for a New World 6: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire in Practice Conclusion

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.

Reviews for Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire

Empire of Poverty provides a superb account of the material and conceptual entanglements of colonialism and capitalism within the global Spanish Empire across the long sixteenth century. Specifically, it provides a compelling analysis of the centrality of moral and political understandings of poverty to arguments on the nature of sovereignty and to practices of distributive justice and welfare. It critiques the standard understandings developed through a predominant focus on the British Empire and examines the significance of the Habsburgs to transformations of laws and institutions that have been understood as modern. * Gurminder K Bhambra, co-author of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory * With a breath-taking command of global, intellectual, legal, religious, economic, cultural, and political history, this book not only offers new, penetrating insights into the history of the first global empire but also tells a novel and fascinating story about the re-making of poverty. Well-written and richly documented through a range of different sources, it takes us from intellectual histories to the institutional workings of poverty in the Spanish Empire. It breaks new ground, shifting the scholarly attention towards a complex understanding of the construction of poverty in history, and supplementing existing studies of the role of concepts of poverty in liberal state formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an invaluable resource in understanding what is at play in contemporary discourses on poverty and inequality. * Christian Olaf Christiansen *