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Empire of Poverty examines the ways in which the concept of poverty has been a building block of empires, race, and imperial inequalities.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: New World Wealth and Old World Poverty: The Making of an Economic Legend
- 2: Indigenous Moral Economies and 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
About the author
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.
Summary
Empire of Poverty examines the ways in which the concept of poverty has been a building block of empires, race, and imperial inequalities.
Additional text
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.
