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

Julia McClure, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow

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.