Julia McClure

Julia McClure is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow.

McClure specialises in histories of poverty, inequality, imperialism, capitalism and the environment. Much of her work has focused upon colonial Latin America. McClure’s recent book, Empire of Poverty, The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire, examines how moral-political concepts of poverty contributed to the formation of imperial inequalities. 

Her 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.

McClure 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.