Empire of Poverty provides a superb account of the material and conceptual entanglements of colonialism and capitalism within the global Spanish Empire across the long sixteenth century. Specifically, it provides a compelling analysis of the centrality of moral and political understandings of poverty to arguments on the nature of sovereignty and to practices of distributive justice and welfare. It critiques the standard understandings developed through a predominant focus on the British Empire and examines the significance of the Habsburgs to transformations of laws and institutions that have been understood as modern.

Gurminder K Bhambra, co-author of Colonialism and Modern Social Theory

With a breath-taking command of global, intellectual, legal, religious, economic, cultural, and political history, this book not only offers new, penetrating insights into the history of the first global empire but also tells a novel and fascinating story about the re-making of poverty. Well-written and richly documented through a range of different sources, it takes us from intellectual histories to the institutional workings of poverty in the Spanish Empire. It breaks new ground, shifting the scholarly attention towards a complex understanding of the construction of poverty in history, and supplementing existing studies of the role of concepts of poverty in liberal state formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is an invaluable resource in understanding what is at play in contemporary discourses on poverty and inequality.

Christian Olaf Christiansen