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

by Julia McClure

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.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published March 12, 2025

Reviews

[Jorge · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important book that challenges previous conceptions of poor relief and poverty management in the Spanish Empire during the early modern period.

Julia McClure analyses with great detail the social, political and moral changes produced during this period in Europe and how this affected the new colonial societies established in Spanish America. She argues that Spanish colonisers 'reinvented poverty' in the New World to legitimise their colonial enterprise, and regarded indigenous communities as 'uncivilised' and 'childish' in need of protection. At the same time, new forms of labor extraction, land appropriation and tribute collection emerged in Spanish America that were alien to these indigenous societies, further subjugating them to the colonial project.

This new set of moral-political values that emerged at the time merged with new theories of empire and sovereignty, often emphasising the Spanish king as benefactor and protector of the ''Indians''. However, these theories of governance also underlined the contractual nature of the Spanish empire and the importance of the Spanish Monarchs as distributors of justice and rewards. Hence, this set of moral-political values not only contributed to the emergence of what McClure terms, 'colonial capitalism', but it also allowed imperial vassals, including indigenous individuals, to navigate within the Spanish imperial system of litigation and petition in search of rewards, justice, benefits and amparos, permitting the maintenance of pre-conquest social status and privileges in this new colonial society, but also allowing certain social mobility and economic benefits.