The Routledge History of Poverty, c.14501800
The Routledge History of Poverty, c.14501800 is a pioneering exploration of both the lives of the very poorest during the early modern period, and of the vast edifices of compassion and coercion erected around them by individuals, institutions, and states.
The essays chart critical new directions in poverty scholarship and connect poverty to the environment, debt and downward social mobility, material culture, empires, informal economies, disability, veterancy, and more. The volume contributes to the understanding of societal transformations across the early modern period, and places poverty and the poor at the centre of these transformations. It also argues for a wider definition of poverty in history which accounts for much more than economic and social circumstance and provides both analytically critical overviews and detailed case studies.
By exploring poverty and the poor across early modern Europe, this study is essential reading for students and researchers of early modern society, economic history, state formation and empire, cultural representation, and mobility.
David Hitchcock is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University. His research focuses on poverty and vagrancy in Britain and the Atlantic world. He is the author of Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 16501750 (2016), and is working on a new book-length history of British welfare colonialism.
Julia McClure is a Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow. Her research explores the global history of poverty and charity, with a particular focus on the Spanish Empire. She is the author of The Franciscan Invention of the New World (2016), and is working on a new monograph on the moral economy of poverty and the making of the Spanish Empire.
THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORIES
The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-renowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged.
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The Routledge History of Human Rights
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The Routledge History of American Sexuality
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The Routledge History of Death since 1800
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The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe
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The Routledge History of Poverty, c.14501800
Edited by David Hitchcock and Julia McClure
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First published 2021
by Routledge
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2021 selection and editorial matter, David Hitchcock and Julia McClure; individual chapters, the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hitchcock, David J., editor. | McClure, Julia, editor.
Title: The Routledge history of poverty in Europe, c.1450-1800 / edited by David Hitchcock and Julia McClure.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035333 | ISBN 9781138555006 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315149271 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: PovertyEuropeHistory. | PoorEuropeHistory. | PoorEuropeSocial conditions. | EuropeEconomic conditions. | EuropeHistory14921648. | EuropeHistory16481789.
Classification: LCC HC240.9.P6 R49 2021 | DDC 339.4/60940903dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035333
ISBN: 978-1-138-55500-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-14927-1 (ebk)
For the poor and marginalised; so often missing from history.
Danielle Abdon has recently been awarded her PhD in Art History from Temple University, where she examined hospital architecture across both early modern Iberian and South American geographies. She has published on charity in fourteenth-century Venice, and in a range of venues on medieval and early modern hospital architecture. She has also held visiting fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Art History, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Huntington Library.
Guido Alfani is Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University and an Affiliated Scholar of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality. He has published extensively on inequality and social mobility in the long run, on the history of epidemics (especially of plague) and of famines, and on systems of social alliance. Recent works include The Lions Share: Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe (2019, with Matteo Di Tullio).
Joseph Harley is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Derby. Prior to this he held an Economic History Society fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, London, and taught at the universities of Leicester and Loughborough. He is an expert in poverty, consumption, and welfare over the early modern, Georgian, and Victorian periods. Joseph recently published Norfolk Pauper Inventories, c.16901834 (2020) and has published articles in Historical Journal, Social History, and Continuity and Change.
Amanda Herbert is Associate Director at the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library, where she runs the Fellowships Program, and is Co-Director for Before Farm to Table: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, a $1.5 million Mellon Foundation initiative in collaborative research. She studies the history of the body: gender and sexuality; health and wellness; food, drink, and appetite. She is at work on a book about spas and body politics in the British Atlantic.
