The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450-1800

by David Hitchcock (Editor), Julia McClure (Editor)

Overview

The Routledge History of Poverty, c.1450–1800 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367682408
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	08/01/2022
Series:	Routledge Histories
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

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, 1650–1750 (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.

Table of Contents

List of figures x

List of tables xii

List of contributors xiii

Introduction: poverty in early modern history David Hitchcock Julia McClure xvi

Part I Structures 1

1 The regulation of charity and the rise of the state Joanna Innes 3

2 The economic history of poverty, 1450-1800 Guido Alfani 21

3 Poverty and empire Julia McClure 39

4 The vagrant poor David Hitchcock 60

5 Poverty and environment in early modern England John Emrys Morgan 79

Part II Impacts 101

6 Losing wealth: debt and downward mobility in eighteenth-century England Tawny Paul 103

7 Poor bodies and disease Kevin Siena 120

8 Motives of control/motifs of creativity: the visual imagery of poverty in early modern Europe Tom Nichols 138

9 The worthiest to be relieved: disabled veterans in England, c. 1580-1630 Abby Lagemann 164

10 Consumption and material culture of poverty in early-modern Europe, c1450-1800 Joseph Harley 185

Part III Institutions 207

11 Institutional care for the sick and aged poor in later medieval England Carole Rawcliffe 209

12 Poverty and the workhouse Alannah Tomkins 234

13 Relief for the body, comfort for the soul: the case of Portuguese Misericórdias Sara Pinto 250

14 Architecture in relief hospitals for the poor in Venice and Lisbon Danielle Abdon 265

Part IV Connections 291

15 Peddling and the makeshift economy Rosa Salzberg 293

16 Poverty, law and labour in the Ottoman Empire Hayri Göksín Özkoray 309

17 Spas for the sick poor in the early modern British Atlantic world Amanda Herbert 329

18 Barefoot children in a 'fine room': Robert Owen, Adam Smith, and social regeneration in Scotland Cornelia Lambert 345

Further reading 364

Index 371