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. Her first monograph, The Franciscan Invention of the New World (2016) explores the role of missionaries in the early Atlantic world. McClure's new book, Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire, scrutinises the role of the ideology of poverty in empire formation. In 2016 she 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.
McClure applied the “Page 99 Test” to Empire of Poverty and reported the following:
Page 99 of Empire of Poverty takes the reader to the middle of Chapter 3, ‘The Moral-Political Economy of Poverty and Theories of Global Sovereignty’. Page 99 focuses on the concepts of wealth and poverty and the politics of obligation contained in the writings of the Italian Jesuit scholar Giovanni Botero (c. 1544 – 1617). It explains that Botero was critical of luxuries and accumulated wealth and advised the state to adopt moral-political economic policies, including taxation, so that only the very richest people in society would be able to adorn themselves with luxury items. Botero warned that the poor should have sufficient resources and saw scarcity as a threat to social and political order. Botero saw providing for the poor as an obligation of the state, since the poor could threaten social and political order if resources were scarce. For Botero this provision of resources for the poor extended to access to employment. Page 99 explains how Botero advocated for moral-economic policies to maintain justice and order across a society defined by inequalities.Learn more about Empire of Poverty at the Oxford University Press website.
The content of page 99 of Empire of Poverty reflects core themes of the book regarding the moral-political economy of poverty and the maintenance of inequalities. Via engagement with the writings of Botero, it provides an example of how moral concepts of poverty and wealth shaped theories of sovereignty and political economic practices for states. Botero discussed the potential for scarcity and disorder in Naples, which at the time was part of the Habsburg Empire. The discussion of Botero’s writings is indicative of some of the main themes in the book, but page 99 does not reflect the book’s broader exploration of the more global dimensions of the Spanish Empire or its extensive engagement with the Indigenous American and Afro-descendant people most affected by Spain’s imperial expansion in the long sixteenth century.
Each of the 6 chapters of Empire of Poverty contribute to main aim of the book to increase understanding of the long history of poverty politics and the roles of moral-political concepts of poverty in imperial state formation, but they also have distinct themes. Chapter One aims to dispel myths about the supposed economic poverty of the Spanish Empire, beginning in the Spanish economic thought of the arbitristas and influencing theories of classic liberal political economy. Chapter Two examines the alternative moral ecologies developed by Indigenous societies prior to the arrival of Europeans as well as the colonial process of the ideological construction of Indigenous poverty. Chapter Three looks at the role of concepts of poverty and moral-political obligations to the poor in theories of state and newly emerging global theories of sovereignty. Chapter Four examines the poverty politics shaping early modern state formation, highlighting the increased governance of the poor, especially their labour. Chapter Five examines how Indigenous people were constructed as poor people in legal terms as part of the political invention of their colonial subjectivity, and then were made poor in socio-economic terms through the dispossessions and subjugations that characterised empire formation. Chapter Five also highlights how Indigenous and Black subjects resisted these processes of impoverishment and subjugation, strategically using the moral-political economic discourses of poverty in petitions made to the Crown. Chapter Six examines the moral-political economy of the Spanish Empire in practice, including uses of the law and regulations of the market. Empire of Poverty concludes with reflections on how poverty politics continue to shape political attempts to maintain order in unequal societies.
--Marshal Zeringue
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