Dr Julia McClure
Senior Fellow, Koch History Centre
Wadham College
julia.mcclure@history.ox.ac.uk
I am a global historian of poverty, inequality, imperialism, capitalism and the environment. I have expertise in the medieval and early modern periods, especially the long-sixteenth century. Much of my work has focused upon Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish Empire. In recent years I have worked with Indigenous communities in the south of Mexico, exploring histories of land use, agroecology, and climate change. My current research project, ‘Beyond the Wealth and Poverty of Nations’, examines the ways in which histories of poverty and wealth have been shaped by ethnocentric concepts from classic liberal economics, and asks how these histories would look different from the perspective of alternative metrics, such as agro-biodiversity, food sovereignty, and community resources.
Research Interests
My publications have examined a wide range of issues, especially relating to global empire formation, global Middle Ages, and global inequality. My first monograph, The Franciscan Invention of the New World (Palgrave, 2016), explored the role of missionaries and the ideology of poverty in empire formation in the early Atlantic world. My second monograph, Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2024), explores how concepts, laws, and institutions of poverty were central to the legitimation, governance, and business of empire and how Indigenous and Black people used concepts of poverty to create ways to resist colonialism. I have also published broadly on the role of law, institutions and cultural practices in shaping patterns of global inequality, and on the socio-economic rights of the poor and the legal history of property and subsistence rights. I have been involved in a number of interdisciplinary projects examining histories of food sovereignty and the importance of agroecology to anti-colonial resistance.
My current research project challenges received narratives concerning the wealth and poverty of nations, scrutinising the colonial invention of global poverty and exploring Indigenous cosmologies and technologies of abundance. I engage with Indigenous histories and queer theory as methodologies for decolonising our understanding of the world and the historic relationship between humans and nature, especially in relation to food production.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/juliamcclure/
Publications
Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire
This book 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. The book 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 reconceptualisation of the poor and how the newly emerging beliefs, laws, and institutions of poverty helped structure the inequalities of the new global order.
In the Media
Podcasts:
- New Books Network, Empire of Poverty, The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire
- BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, Amerindian rights, slavery and just war in the Valladolid debates
Public lectures:
- History Talks, Queen's University Canada: The Failure of the West: Colonial Capitalism and the Climate Crisis
Public writing:
- Toynbee Prize Foundation (2025), ´Moral Economy in the Spanish Empire and Latin America: New Histories of Capitalism in the Spanish-Speaking World´
- History Workshop Online (2022) Scarcity and Risk in the Tropics