Empire of Poverty

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 *
Julia McClure's Empire of Poverty is a sharp, deeply researched account of how poverty was turned into political fuel ... [it] is more than a work of history. It is a forceful and timely call to rethink how care, justice, and responsibility are conceptualized and institutionalized. For scholars, it expands the conceptual vocabulary for understanding economic governance. For educators, it offers a textured, historically grounded example of how ideologies translate into social policy. And for those engaged in the politics of development, it is a stark reminder that moral discourses, even when couched in benevolence, may ultimately preserve the very hierarchies they claim to redress. * Abdellatif El Aidi, World Affairs *
This is fine work that builds on substantive research. * Christoph Rosenmüller, Hispanic American Historical Review *
Julia McClure rightly puts the spotlight on the role of discourses of poverty in the making of early modern capitalism and global empire. McClure helps correct and disprove deeply embedded yet disconcertingly narrow notions concerning the development of 'modern capitalism'. McClure directs the perspective on the moral-political economies of globalisations back to the sixteenth century, which is utterly necessary. * Harald E. Braun, University of Liverpool *
Empire of Poverty...demonstrates that the history of modern empire and its role in making colonial capitalism is rooted in this moment. In terms of the debates it sparked and the outcomes it occasioned, Spain's sixteenth-century imperium established the baseline for all that came after. That the story has not always been told this way is part of McClure's erudite and consequential global history of ideas and their effects. * Brian Owensby, Journal of Modern History *