Julia McClure

Julia McClure is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in histories of poverty, inequality, imperialism, capitalism and the environment. Much of her work has focused upon colonial Latin America.

Julia co-founded the food sovereignty network which has worked with grassroots organisations in Scotland, Mexico and around the world to examine the challenges to food sovereignty and agroecology.

Julia's project at the Koch History Centre examines the ways in which global histories of poverty and wealth have been shaped by ethnocentric concepts of poverty and wealth inherited from the occidental cosmology of classic liberal economics. Her project explores the histories of alternate value regimes and technologies of abundance that have existed within different cosmological traditions of pre-industrial societies across the Americas and in Europe to re-map the global histories we have been telling about poverty and wealth.

Julia's book, Empire of Poverty, The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire (published by OUP in 2024) examines how moral-political concepts of poverty contributed to the formation of imperial inequalities.