Poverty and Ideology: Historic Pathways

Abstract

Julia McClure is a global historian specialising in poverty, charity, and inequality in the Spanish Empire. A senior lecturer in late medieval and early modern global history at the University of Glasgow, she is the founder of the Poverty Research Network, and involved in numerous interdisciplinary projects on global inequality. She is the author of The Franciscan Invention of the New World (2016), and is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Empire of Poverty: The Moral Economy of the Spanish Empire. In the following, McClure tells her fascinating story of how she became interested in global inequality. It is a story which takes us back to the Franciscans, the Spanish Empire and global history, and moves forward to her present-day involvements in contemporary poverty research and the lives of Indigenous communities.