Julia McClure: Poverty and Ideology - the Historic Pathways to Global Inequality 

⬤ What is your background and how did you become interested in global inequality?

My first research interest was in the socio-religious movement that emerged in reaction to the emergence of the market society and moneterisation taking place in Italy in the thirteenth century. This movement, which became the religious institution known as the Franciscan Order, rhetorically rejected market economics whilst simultaneously contributing to its legitimation within the framework of Christian ethics. The Franciscans developed an ideology of poverty which posited an alternative theory of value to that emerging with capitalism in the early modern period. They imagined a world unified by a material poverty but structured by a spiritual hierarchy in which they were spiritual leaders. They developed a reputation as spiritually powerful and consequently received many donations which made them, paradoxically, materially rich. They justified this wealth by seeing themselves as arbitrators of a spiritual economy, whereby they were custodians of possessions ceded by the laity as gifts to God in return to the ‘treasures in heaven’ of eternal salvation. In my first monograph, The Franciscan Invention of the New World, I examined their role in the creation of the colonial society of and in shaping the power dynamics of early globalization, and in a recent article I argued that the Franciscans envisioned a world connected by a unifying but unequal notion of poverty.[1] My work on the Franciscans led to my understanding of the role that beliefs and institutions play in the justifications of the forms of inequality that develop with global empires and global capitalism.

This informs my current book project Empire of Poverty: The Moral Economy of the Spanish Empire.  This explores how beliefs about the deserving and underserving poor and moral order were used to construct the socio-racial hierarchies of newly emerging colonial societies; how beliefs about the social function of property and spiritual values of exchange created an institutional landscape where economic exchanges were embedded within socio-cultural processes; and how paternalistic beliefs about providing for the poor undergirded both an authoritarian ideology of governance and a dynamic system of claims to access resources. My work contends that ideology, beliefs, and moral economies shape patterns of inequality.

During my postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Weatherhead Centre for Global History I became interested in the importance of taking a systematic approach to understanding global processes, especially the ways in which the links between capitalism and colonialism shaped the historic pathways to inequality. During my postdoctoral fellowship at the European University Institute I developed my interest in interdisciplinary methodologies, recognising the challenges and rewards of examining the same subject from different perspectives. I went on to found the Poverty Research Network, which has forged new forms of interdisciplinary approaches to poverty, considering in particular the roles of aesthetics and the politics of representation. I have also participated in interdisciplinary collaborations between history, law, economics, and sociology which aim to increase our understanding of the causes of inequality. In one collaboration we examine the role of constitutions in shaping patterns of inequality, and in other we investigate the legacies of different taxation regimes. Through the sharing of insights and expertise, interdisciplinary research can deepen and sharpen our understanding of the causes of global inequality. Through the poverty research network I have developed global conversations on poverty, which have taught me about the different ways that poverty has been conceptualised and perceived at different times and in different societies. These differing conceptions of poverty that have existed in different times and in different places point towards the real poverty of values which is at the core of the capitalist system. Transforming the value regime that governs the capitalist system is central to addressing questions of global inequality.

⬤ What is global inequality?

We know that we live in a vastly unequal world. According to the Institute of Policy Studies, the world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. [2] Economics has dominated inequality studies, shaping what we know about global inequality. Economic indicators are useful, helping to identify regions of abject poverty and inequality. Since 2010 the UN development programme has incorporated the multi-dimensional poverty index, and the UN has a definition which includes ‘access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as well as the lack of participation in decision-making’.[3] While understandings and definitions of poverty have broadened in the last decades, available macro-data for assessing global inequality tends to rely either on aggregate GDP data or upon income or wealth distribution. Over-reliance on economic indicators of inequality risk flattening the contours of global inequality and obscuring its social, political, and cultural dimensions. Global inequalities also racial, gendered, and classed. Multidimensional measures and representations of global inequality must find a way to account for the ways in which inequalities are structured and experienced intersectionally.

There is another problem with leaving economics to define inequality, and that is that large parts of the discipline of economics is underpinned by the ideology and normative assumptions of liberalism and neoliberalism. Classical and neoclassical economics both emphasise the importance of individualised economic growth, which they see as predicated upon the naturalisation of the market in society. New Institutional Economics expands this logic to demonstrate how institutions and laws which protect private property and the right of individuals to make a profit facilitate economic growth. The predominance of economic models enables global inequality to be defined according to a certain cosmos of values. Without interdisciplinary critique of ideological premise of certain forms of economic analysis, and a broadening of perspective to understand the role that laws and institutions play in enabling the capitalist market system to create inequalities, there will always be a poverty of perspective.

From space, the globe appears as a contiguous unit, with land masses joined by the same seas, hanging under the same skies. Zoom in and you see that the global unit is fractured into competing political units, many of which take the form of nation states. Local conditions shape the characteristics of global inequality. Nation states and their policies still matter. The global does not erase the local, but rather the two sets of conditions interact to shape patterns of inequality.

With the Poverty Research Network I have worked in Senegal, Brazil, Mexico, all of which are on the ODA (Official Development Assistance) country list, classed as lower or middle income countries. Countries that are notable for their wealth inequality in relation to other countries, often have high levels of inequality also within the country. In Senegal, Brazil, and Mexico, a high proportion of income is spent on private security to guard private wealth, and often this investment in private security is driven by fear of high levels of poverty juxtaposed with pockets of relative wealth. This has made me think about the current condition of nation states, and the way in which sovereignty and power are, in reality, fractured into private units that are below the surface of the state. This realisation sparked my interest in early-modern corporate constitutionalism, the way in which private trading companies and businesses expanded both empire and capitalism by being awarded privileges which were effectively a kind of franchising of sovereignty.[4] From this perspective we can start to understand global inequality as the product of the blurred boundaries between the public and the private. If we are to understand the historic pathways of inequality we need to understand the complex ways in which sovereignty is fragmented and can be cannibalised and operationalised away from the common good to advance private interests.

My work on global poverty has taught me that poverty is conceptualised in different ways in different times and in different places and that it often reflect different value systems. International institutions often define poverty in terms of economic indicators of growth and the consumption of certain commodities. Prioritisation of these capitalist indicators often erases local values. For example, many indigenous communities have different ways of valuing the natural world within their epistemological and cosmological schemas. The way that indigenous communities experience inequalities may not be in terms of their reduced purchasing power or commodity consumption but the erasure of their values. Rather than being ‘empowered’ to operate more efficiently within the market, indigenous communities would suffer fewer inequalities if there were more limitations on commercial expansion and industrial production in and around indigenous territories.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

It is hard to deny that the world is characterised by inequality, but there is less consensus around its causes. For years it was assumed that the wealth disparity was somehow natural, the result of European exceptionalism, or ‘European miracle’. Protagonists of European exceptionalism posit that global inequality was historically caused by the unprecedented trends of economic growth that fitfully began in the sixteenth century and became sustained from the nineteenth and were the result of endogenous European factors. The global turn has demonstrated that European economic growth which drove global inequality trends from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, were not driven endogenous European factors, but by the global context of European imperialism. Global history has taught us that the poverty of the global south and the wealth of the global north are intrinsically connected through the history of imperialism. The global turn demonstrates that the context of colonialism is critical to any understanding of the long-term causes of global inequalities.

We are now over two decades into the global historical turn, and approaches to the historic causes of global inequality continue to branch in new directions. The global history of capitalism is generating new insights into the ways in which the capitalist system and the global inequality it engenders have been made possible by the colonial appropriation of resources and labour. The conjoined processes of capitalism and colonialism have hard wired economic and racial inequalities into the world system. Mapping the way in which this happened is important to processes of decolonisation. Global intellectual history is also important to deepening our understanding of the historic causes of inequalities as we seek to understand the roles that beliefs and ideologies have played in governing human actions and legitimating inequality regimes. How have people imagined what is equal or fair? How have they rationalised and justified what is not? What do different societies value? How is access to the things that people value mediated across different groups? It is important to understand the social and cultural processes in which actions are embedded if we are to slice into the problem of global inequality and place the rich tissue of historical causality under the microscope.

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

In the wake of the pandemic, many people are re-imagining the future of global inequality. But transformations of the patterns of global inequality will not happen naturally. They must be created through both the imagining of alternate ways of living and ordering society and through the creation of the governing structures and popular consensus that will enable change to take place.

The combined and conjoined pressures of climate change and capitalism will continue to shape the contours of global inequality. To address the problem of global inequality will require systemic change, away from the fetishization of economic growth, the cycles of over-production and over-consumption, and an ideological shift away from belief in the invisible hand of the market as a naturalised solution to the complexities of exchange. We are increasingly conscious that human societies have surpassed the ecological limits of economic growth. We need to re-imagine an economic model that fulfils social needs without surpassing environmental limitations. This requires systemic change, the codes of our laws and institutions, and ideological change, to bring about a revolution of value.

The capitalist system has operated through transforming humans’ conception of basic needs to include an increasingly wider range of commodities and through the increased commodification of all aspects of daily life. From the sixteenth century the expansion of capitalism and colonialism went hand in hand as more of the natural world of colonised regions was placed into the stream of commodities for the commercial benefit of colonising nations. To create more equal societies in the future we must address both the legacies of colonialism that have created not only inequalities between countries but also racial inequalities between peoples, and the legacies of capitalism which have created inequalities between human societies and the natural world.

Ending global inequalities requires a revolution of values driven by the decommodification of the natural world and a shift of shared conceptions of human needs away from commodities. The possibility of future global equality requires both less capitalistic and less anthropocentric social and economic models underpinned by more harmonious relationships with our complex ecological contexts.  We need to transform the way we produce and consume, and to re-value the things that are necessary for life. We must move away from predominantly economic metrics of global poverty and inequality, to find a place for social and ecological values. To this end, the ontologies and epistemologies of indigenous peoples, who have resisted many waves of colonialism to maintain more harmonious agro-ecological practices, can give important lessons. However, it is important that in the rush to find alternate ways of living that we don’t participate in the co-option of indigenous ontologies for the greenwashing of capitalism. To this extent we must work towards not only a revolution of value, but a transformation of governance, creating space and legitimacy for polycentric governance.

References

⬤ What is global inequality?

We know that we live in a vastly unequal world. According to the Institute of Policy Studies, the world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 45 percent of the world’s wealth. [2] Economics has dominated inequality studies, shaping what we know about global inequality. Economic indicators are useful, helping to identify regions of abject poverty and inequality. Since 2010 the UN development programme has incorporated the multi-dimensional poverty index, and the UN has a definition which includes ‘access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as well as the lack of participation in decision-making’.[3] While understandings and definitions of poverty have broadened in the last decades, available macro-data for assessing global inequality tends to rely either on aggregate GDP data or upon income or wealth distribution. Over-reliance on economic indicators of inequality risk flattening the contours of global inequality and obscuring its social, political, and cultural dimensions. Global inequalities also racial, gendered, and classed. Multidimensional measures and representations of global inequality must find a way to account for the ways in which inequalities are structured and experienced intersectionally.

There is another problem with leaving economics to define inequality, and that is that large parts of the discipline of economics is underpinned by the ideology and normative assumptions of liberalism and neoliberalism. Classical and neoclassical economics both emphasise the importance of individualised economic growth, which they see as predicated upon the naturalisation of the market in society. New Institutional Economics expands this logic to demonstrate how institutions and laws which protect private property and the right of individuals to make a profit facilitate economic growth. The predominance of economic models enables global inequality to be defined according to a certain cosmos of values. Without interdisciplinary critique of ideological premise of certain forms of economic analysis, and a broadening of perspective to understand the role that laws and institutions play in enabling the capitalist market system to create inequalities, there will always be a poverty of perspective.

From space, the globe appears as a contiguous unit, with land masses joined by the same seas, hanging under the same skies. Zoom in and you see that the global unit is fractured into competing political units, many of which take the form of nation states. Local conditions shape the characteristics of global inequality. Nation states and their policies still matter. The global does not erase the local, but rather the two sets of conditions interact to shape patterns of inequality.

With the Poverty Research Network I have worked in Senegal, Brazil, Mexico, all of which are on the ODA (Official Development Assistance) country list, classed as lower or middle income countries. Countries that are notable for their wealth inequality in relation to other countries, often have high levels of inequality also within the country. In Senegal, Brazil, and Mexico, a high proportion of income is spent on private security to guard private wealth, and often this investment in private security is driven by fear of high levels of poverty juxtaposed with pockets of relative wealth. This has made me think about the current condition of nation states, and the way in which sovereignty and power are, in reality, fractured into private units that are below the surface of the state. This realisation sparked my interest in early-modern corporate constitutionalism, the way in which private trading companies and businesses expanded both empire and capitalism by being awarded privileges which were effectively a kind of franchising of sovereignty.[4] From this perspective we can start to understand global inequality as the product of the blurred boundaries between the public and the private. If we are to understand the historic pathways of inequality we need to understand the complex ways in which sovereignty is fragmented and can be cannibalised and operationalised away from the common good to advance private interests.

My work on global poverty has taught me that poverty is conceptualised in different ways in different times and in different places and that it often reflect different value systems. International institutions often define poverty in terms of economic indicators of growth and the consumption of certain commodities. Prioritisation of these capitalist indicators often erases local values. For example, many indigenous communities have different ways of valuing the natural world within their epistemological and cosmological schemas. The way that indigenous communities experience inequalities may not be in terms of their reduced purchasing power or commodity consumption but the erasure of their values. Rather than being ‘empowered’ to operate more efficiently within the market, indigenous communities would suffer fewer inequalities if there were more limitations on commercial expansion and industrial production in and around indigenous territories.

⬤ What are the main historical causes of global inequality?

⬤ What are the most pressing contemporary challenges concerning global inequality and how do we deal with them?

In the wake of the pandemic, many people are re-imagining the future of global inequality. But transformations of the patterns of global inequality will not happen naturally. They must be created through both the imagining of alternate ways of living and ordering society and through the creation of the governing structures and popular consensus that will enable change to take place.

The combined and conjoined pressures of climate change and capitalism will continue to shape the contours of global inequality. To address the problem of global inequality will require systemic change, away from the fetishization of economic growth, the cycles of over-production and over-consumption, and an ideological shift away from belief in the invisible hand of the market as a naturalised solution to the complexities of exchange. We are increasingly conscious that human societies have surpassed the ecological limits of economic growth. We need to re-imagine an economic model that fulfils social needs without surpassing environmental limitations. This requires systemic change, the codes of our laws and institutions, and ideological change, to bring about a revolution of value.

The capitalist system has operated through transforming humans’ conception of basic needs to include an increasingly wider range of commodities and through the increased commodification of all aspects of daily life. From the sixteenth century the expansion of capitalism and colonialism went hand in hand as more of the natural world of colonised regions was placed into the stream of commodities for the commercial benefit of colonising nations. To create more equal societies in the future we must address both the legacies of colonialism that have created not only inequalities between countries but also racial inequalities between peoples, and the legacies of capitalism which have created inequalities between human societies and the natural world.

Ending global inequalities requires a revolution of values driven by the decommodification of the natural world and a shift of shared conceptions of human needs away from commodities. The possibility of future global equality requires both less capitalistic and less anthropocentric social and economic models underpinned by more harmonious relationships with our complex ecological contexts.  We need to transform the way we produce and consume, and to re-value the things that are necessary for life. We must move away from predominantly economic metrics of global poverty and inequality, to find a place for social and ecological values. To this end, the ontologies and epistemologies of indigenous peoples, who have resisted many waves of colonialism to maintain more harmonious agro-ecological practices, can give important lessons. However, it is important that in the rush to find alternate ways of living that we don’t participate in the co-option of indigenous ontologies for the greenwashing of capitalism. To this extent we must work towards not only a revolution of value, but a transformation of governance, creating space and legitimacy for polycentric governance.

References

To cite this source, kindly cite as follows:

Julia McClure, “Poverty and Ideology - the Historic Pathways to Global Inequality,” in Key Questions on Global Inequality, edited by Christian Olaf Christiansen, Mélanie Lindbjerg Guichon, Oliver Bugge Hunt & Priyanka Jha, online version August 7th 2020, http://global-inequality.com/the-historic-pathways-to-global-inequality/