Moral Economy in the Spanish Empire and Latin America: New Histories of Capitalism in the Spanish-Speaking World
In this discussion, Glauber Wisniewski interviews Edward Jones Corredera and Julia McClure on their two recent books on ideas of moral economy in early modern Spain and Latin America. Julia McClure is the author of Empire of Poverty: The Moral-Political Economy of the Spanish Empire (OUP) and Edward Jones Corredera is the author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (OUP). The discussion focused on the Hispanic invention of ideas of poverty, Latin American visions of peace, and how inequalities forged during the early modern age continue to shape our world.
Glauber Wisniewski (GW): Both of your books argue that early modern and post-independence Iberian worlds played a foundational role in shaping global regimes of inequality—both in conceptualizing them and in resisting them. Julia, you show how the Spanish Empire institutionalized inequality through a moral-political economy grounded in Catholic doctrines of poverty, charity, and spiritual hierarchy. As you write, “[m]arket regulation was not expected to produce equality but to regulate distributions across the newly emerging imperial inequalities. These moral-political economic discourses contributed to the intellectual foundations of colonial capitalism” (McClure, Empire of Poverty, p. 199). At the same time, you show how subaltern actors—such as the collective action by black and indigenous confraternities—appropriated these moral and legal frameworks to challenge domination and negotiate new forms of inclusion. Edward, in your chapter on Mexico, you trace how postcolonial states actively redefined international law to resist foreign economic control. The Carranza Doctrine, as you write, “sought to redefine the meaning of non-intervention and disentangle it from the United States” (Corredera, Odious Debt, p. 119). Given these arguments, how do you each conceptualize the longue durée of moral-political categories such as poverty and debt as historically mobile frameworks? How do you see these ideas shaping the institutions and imaginaries of the present-day international order, particularly in the relationship between developed and developing countries?
Julia McClure (JM): Empire of Poverty sets out to demonstrate that economic beliefs and practices have been shaped over the long durée by moral beliefs. Understanding the mutability of these beliefs over the longue durée is, for me, important to understanding how key concepts like poverty can accommodate the contradictions which make them such malleable political tools. In tracing the moral and religious foundations of economic thought, Empire of Povertychallenges myths about secularisation and the market. As your question points towards, this can help us to understand some of the logic of contemporary economic policies, especially those of development economics. For example, religious beliefs of the salvific efficacy of suffering, that one must suffer to be saved, seem to be sublimated into contemporary economic policies like austerity. Implementations of austerity policies are part of the conditionality of IMF loans to developing countries, and these are known to increase poverty. Here we have an example of deeply rooted moral beliefs about the salvational function of poverty influencing economic beliefs and shaping economic practices. Empire of Poverty offers some signposts of how we arrived at this point over the longue durée.
Edward Jones Corredera (EJC): I would just like to start by emphasising how good Julia’s book is. I think one of the most important contributions this book makes, not just to the study of early history but to the study of the connections between the early and the modern world, is that it shows how ideas of care and charity relate to the concept of scarcity, drawing on very new literature on environmental history but also on more familiar stories of religion and social history. I must say I recently used your book, Julia, in writing an introduction to an edited volume, precisely because of its capacity to capture this sort of self-alienation of the Iberian historiography, and its inability to address with precision what the impact of the Iberian empires had on globalization, how could these empires be both the handmaidens of international economic growth— i.e. the generators of globalization — and the tyrannical engines of poverty? This contradiction, and the moral economy behind it, has not been analysed properly, and your book does a really good job of studying that. And this connects Julia’s work to my own book, where debt is a moral obligation that structures international relations but is also a linguistic and legal quagmire. The problem with debt and its negotiation across borders is that it enhances the problem of the untranslatability of different forms of obligation across what I would define as Catholic and Protestant cultures. I think there’s a turning point in the two narratives that Julia and I study, which is obviously the nineteenth century. And here I see the rise of a principle in international relations and international economics that relates to some of the institutions that Julia has mentioned, like the IMF and other international lending bodies. This concept can seem very historiographical, very abstract, but it merits our attention: retroactivity. Retroactivity, to a historian, is like magic: it allows kings, queens, and jurists to legally rewrite the past. And retroactivity is crucial to understand how in the 1820s, in Latin America’s negotiations with the wider world we’re going to see three competing forms of authority wrestle to establish a hierarchy of obligations through retroactivity. First, following the French Revolution, the nation, through constitutional means, can retroactively claim that the law and order and the norms of a monarch are no longer valid. In the 1820s, what we see is that this revolutionary principle of retroactivity, which is based on constitutionalism and consent, clashes with two other institutions, ideas, or principles that lay claim to retroactivity: international creditors will argue that debt, debt between private creditors and the state, has a retroactive application. But diplomats are also going to suggest that a treaty between two nations carries with it a type of retroactivity. And what will become known as “gunboat diplomacy” in the nineteenth century will actually be a competition for ascendancy, a process of jostling between these three forms of authority that are growing in international law, that are trying to dominate the international order, all mediated through this complex process of retroactivity, which really is a relentless effort to establish what history is serviceable, whose history counts, and when history can be remembered and when it can be forgotten.
JM: I’d like to add that I have also already referenced Edward’s work in multiple workshops this summer. One was on the ‘politics of obligation’, and one of the things that Edward contributes to this topic in great clarity is the focus upon debt and how this enables us to see the changing function of the moral political economy of obligation over time. As Edward just said in response to the first question, this draws out the essential role of historians in thinking about the longue durée, because we then ask what the obligations of a state in a time of change are, to whom do people have obligations, and which obligations hold up over time, and how. I think that it’s historians like Edward that help us to analyse this sense of changing obligations over time.
CATHOLICISM AND CAPITALISM
GW: I feel like the biggest contribution of both of your books is the challenge of dominant historiographical models that treat empire, capitalism, and international law as purely material or secular systems. Instead, you foreground how moral, religious, and legal languages—whether rooted in Catholic theology or in postcolonial doctrines of sovereignty—have shaped the ways inequality has been conceptualized and contested. Edward’s book shows, for instance, how debt and default were framed not only in financial terms, but through metaphors of sin, redemption, and moral responsibility. What do you think we risk, as historians, when we flatten these histories into purely economic or secular narratives? And how do your respective projects invite us to rethink the epistemological foundations of the history of capitalism?
JM: In terms of rethinking the epistemological foundations of the history of capitalism, Empire of Poverty aims to make three key interventions: First, to bring in the Iberian world, including the Mediterranean, Latin America, and the Philippines, which has often been missing from histories that focus on the anglophone world and the North Atlantic. Second, to use this repositioning of the narrative to highlight the ways in which capitalism and colonialism have been co-constitutive. And third, to contribute to shifts in understandings that historical transformations such as the transition to capitalism are simply material processes and to instead pay more attention to the active roles played by societal beliefs (moral and religious), laws and institutions. You are right that my book takes aim at the notion that the economy is a free-floating realm, delinked from moral and religious beliefs and social and political institutions. The idea that the way the economy operates, especially through the market, as an independent process with an inherent logic and natural laws is an outgrowth of the classic liberal economic theory that developed in the enlightenment and still plays a role in contemporary economic thinking. The idea that the economy has inherent rules that we must learn and abide by is used to justify punitive political economic regimes, especially that of austerity in today’s world. Empire of Povertylooks at the long moral-political conceptualization of the economy during a key period of transformation, namely the transition to colonial capitalism, and in doing so it seeks to demonstrate that understandings of how the economy works are culturally relative, shaped by moral and political beliefs, and crucially, can change. The broader implications of this are that there is space for us as a society to reconceptualize what and who we see the economy as being for, and to introduce laws and institutions to govern economic practices that are orientated towards different moral and political goals that are different to the current status quo.
EJC: I think one of the most brilliant aspects of [Julia’s] book is precisely this question of religion, taking it seriously and understanding it well. And I think that's something that [Julia is] ideally placed to discuss in relation to a moral economy that is too often forgotten. I think what I tried to do with the book was to denaturalize certain understandings about the rise of capitalism as we traditionally understand it. And, once again here, being a historian of the Iberian World, and more particularly someone who was born and raised in Spain, growing up with the 2008 financial crisis and acronyms like the “PIGS” (Portugal, Italy Greece, Spain) that came up in its aftermath, I felt very early on that cultural factors certainly mattered in evaluating what today we call sovereign debt or we call nations’ finances. And this sort of discouraged me from studying a more positivist approach to politics and I became a historian after that. I was interested in the origins behind the type of language I was seeing said about Spain in the aftermath of the crisis, the language of laziness, a really charged language that had very little to do with numbers, that I became interested in trying to understand the moral roots of debates about economics, but also what Spain’s role in the construction of capitalism is. What I was trying to suggest — and Julia has shown in her book with globalization and poverty — is that the relationship between the history of the Hispanic world and the history of debt was ambivalent. Did sovereign default mean the same thing over time? Why was sovereign default associated with tyranny and moral bankruptcy? Once I centred my analysis on those questions, bankruptcy served as a structuring principle through which to study quite a huge period of history —400 years of history — and the relationship between capitalism, moral economy, the rise and dissolution of the Spanish Empire, and the creation of Latin American nations. In light of this, the question of secularization is really interesting, because I think certain words were never secularized, even if the way we use them became more technocratic. Debt, as captured by the German language, remains about guilt, but it also imbued with certain ideas of shame. In any case, in putting the two books into dialogue, I hope readers will realise that you have to take the question of religion and the development of what we call capitalism today very seriously — not just in the Protestant world, but in the Catholic world, in a way that I think hasn’t been done, and which the two books in tandem can help illustrate.
JM: Adding to that, I think that Ed's concept of sacred debt that he works with in the book really crystallizes these ideas that he was just mentioning, and it's the only work that I know of that deals with an intellectual history of diverging intellectual traditions between Protestant and Catholic countries, particularly around this really fascinating study he has on the desacralization of international law in Latin America, which is a topic I learned a lot about by reading the book.
GW: Both of your books grapple with the political life of categories that are often assumed to be universal—poverty, debt, sovereignty, charity—but which, in your analyses, emerge as historically constructed and deeply asymmetrical. Julia, in your book, you show how the Spanish Empire moralized inequality through the legal classification of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, and how these moral distinctions were racialized, gendered, and deployed to justify imperial hierarchies. Edward, you demonstrate how Latin American elites and revolutionaries rearticulated debt not as a moral failing, but as a site of injustice and legal redefinition, as can be seen in the deployment of the Calvo Clause by Latin-American countries in several instances. How do you understand the political flexibility of these categories—what allows them to operate both as technologies of domination and as frameworks for resistance?
EJC: I think it's worth stating at the outset that when studying these ideas, the sources I think Julia and I are working with—and Julia, you can correct me—are primarily thinking through two disciplines that we don't think about when thinking about obligation, poverty, or law and economics, which are philology and historiography. I mention this and shepherd this very political question towards a very methodological field because I have found in publishing a book on debt that, in a sense, I was bringing into dialogue legal history and economic history, both of which draw their epistemological basis from very different principles. They're very self-confident and, I think it would be fair to say, siloed subdisciplines that very rarely, to my surprise, enter into dialogue. That does a real disservice to the study of certain ideas, like the Calvo Doctrine, and a number of the other initiatives that you've mentioned, because these disciplines should be interrogated in their own epistemological basis and the very language that they're using, and they can feed off each other by looking at what the blind spots are in law and what the blind spots are in economics. I think they ought to draw more broadly on cultural history, social history, the history of language, intellectual history, and religious history. The epistemological basis with which a lot of economic historians often approach the question of debt is already so loaded with meaning, and there's not much curiosity or interest in questioning and historicizing that self-understanding of their own epistemology. And yet when we look at these revolutionary uses or counter-hegemonic uses of these ideas, I think we're really looking at debates about language, the nature of language, and the nature of translation. I think that a lot of the imperial abuse that we see is legitimated through the abuse of language, basically. Latin American diplomacy was based on having a very acute understanding of language. Again, this might seem like an antiquarian point, but it is important to study this stuff properly.
JM: Yes, just to pick up on what Edward said there, I think our books complement each other methodologically and theoretically, in that we're both working in fields of legal history and economic history — fields that have been quite traditional — and yet we're finding new approaches: thinking about language, thinking about the decolonial turn, thinking about global history, and so on. It's interesting that language has come out as being particularly important within that. The critical concept that Ed's working with is debt, and in my case, poverty — and these concepts have a mutability of understanding that leaves open possibilities for different types of uses. I think that points to the second part of your question, Glauber, which was about the political flexibility of these categories and how they operate both as technologies of domination and as frameworks for resistance. Subaltern classes have a broad repertoire of what Scott referred to as ‘the weapons of the weak’. Some of these are the readily visible strategies of violence and migration. But I think that as historians we must also learn to read the more subtle strategies of everyday resistance that can play a transformative role from within colonial societies, to subvert the hegemonic power regime from within. This often involves employing the techniques of postcolonial and queer theory to read against the grain and to subvert received binaries. Traditional narratives of empire have read power as emanating from Europe and disseminating to other parts of the world where people were organised into newly established imperial societies as colonial subjects. In reality, outside the systematised acts of colonial violence, which should never be diminished, power within the political economy of empire was more negotiated, with subaltern groups actively finding ways to navigate, and sometimes shape, imperial infrastructures, and language plays a big part of this as Edward was saying. Empire of Poverty takes the moral-political concept of poverty as an analytic category through which to read these complexities. As I explain in the book, the concept of poverty became a tool of imperial governance and of global theories of sovereignty. But the concept of poverty was a many headed hydra. The concept of poverty was not solely economic but embedded in moral-political beliefs. These beliefs were informed both by Christian beliefs about the sanctity of the poor and medieval notions of sovereignty. This meant that concepts of poverty, which were regularly deployed within imperial laws and institutions, could be both a tool of governance and resistance. That history can be read, for example, in the discursive legal practices of petitioning and in the strategic use of the moral economy of charity in institutions like confraternities.
GW: Julia, one of the more striking arguments in your book is that poverty was not simply represented but actively produced and regulated by the Spanish Empire. Could you elaborate on how Franciscan ideals of voluntary poverty became entangled with colonial hierarchies and institutions?
JM: Not only Franciscan, which was the focus of my first book, The Franciscan Invention of the New World. This book looks more broadly about the changing concepts of poverty, particularly the emerging moral distinction between deserving and undeserving poor, shaped colonial hierarchies and institutions. One of the things I investigated in particular was something that earlier Franciscans had actually opposed, which is the criminalisation of the wandering poor as immoral vagrants. The mobility of the poor was something that had been important to the mendicant way of life of the early Franciscans in the Middle Ages, and some Franciscans had opposed the new policing of the mobility of the poor in the sixteenth century. The category of vagrancy was particularly important for policing populations and ensuring their legibility to the imperial state in Spain and the Americas. Sedentary populations practicing agriculture that could be taxed were more likely to be classed as ´deserving´ poor and assimilated into the imperial moral-political economy as subjects, while more mobile populations, especially those practicing nomadic of semi-nomadic ways of life, were more likely to be classed as vagrants, the undeserving poor. This latter category was increasingly seen in civilisational terms, a way to classify people as barbarians and naturally bellicose, and in this way moral concepts of poverty helped lay the foundations of racialised capitalism.
GW: You critique the enduring influence of Max Weber’s confessional historiography, especially his claim that Catholicism lacked the moral and institutional capacities to foster capitalist development. As you write, “[t]he contributions of scholars from the Catholic territories of Southern Europe … to economic theory has historically been obscured by the legacy of the ideas of the German sociologist Max Weber” (McClure, Empire of Poverty, p. 49). Against this, you highlight how early modern Catholic thinkers—especially within the Spanish Empire—actively debated the moral dimensions of poverty, wealth, and economic governance. You use the concept of a moral-political economy to capture this entanglement of value systems, legal norms, and imperial institutions. How does your framework of moral-political economy seek to revise Weberian accounts of capitalism’s origins? Is your intervention primarily aimed at restoring Catholic intellectuals to the history of economic thought, or at challenging the secular assumptions that underpin dominant models of political economy altogether? And more broadly, what does taking Catholic moral traditions seriously allow us to see about the governance of inequality in early modern empires—and perhaps in global regimes today?
JM: Some years ago now I was a Max Weber fellow at the EUI in Florence, and I feel like I've been chasing the ghost of Max Weber that haunts many economic theories ever since. Empire of Poverty does a number of things to challenge Weberian accounts of capitalism. It asks us to take seriously the intellectual contributions of southern Europe, and this move allows us to see certain moral beliefs that become hardwired into the capitalist system. In so doing it challenges Weberian myths of secularisation and rationalisation, highlighting the moral beliefs that have shaped theories of economic practices and development, and also the nature of inequality.
ECONOMICS AND SOVEREIGNTY
GW: You argue that the mendicant orders helped to construct the concept of poverty as both a spiritual condition and a tool of imperial management by regulating conversion, labour, and charity in ways that entangled Indigenous peoples in new moral economies of dependence and discipline. Given the prominence of mendicants in shaping early modern imperial governance, how should we rethink the role of religious institutions in the making of global political economy in the early modern and modern periods? How do you see Catholicism shaping the political economy of the Spanish Empire? And more broadly, how does paying attention to these theological categories help us understand the moral foundations of global inequality?
JM: My first book, The Franciscan Invention of the New World, explored the Franciscans´ role in the construction of early colonial society in the Americas. Empire of Poverty presents poverty as a hotly contested concept that multiple different parties had stakes in. Colonial officials, regular church institutions, and religious orders all mobilised moral discourses of poverty to negotiate authority within the emerging colonial society, just as colonial subjects used the moral language of poverty in their petitions to highlight the moral-political obligations of colonial society. The mendicant orders contributed to the proliferation of confraternities amongst Indigenous and Black communities and these were at once religious, social, and economic institutions that enabled some subaltern groups to pool resources and negotiate civic status. Exploring imperial formations from the perspective of religious institutions and concepts demonstrates the fluid boundaries between the moral, economic, and political realms and helps us to diversify our understandings of different types of capital and corporate communities.
GW: In chapter 5, you emphasize that the socio-economic construction of poverty during the colonial period had deeply gendered dimensions, but that these were neither uniform nor entirely disempowering. You note, for instance, that in the Maya region, colonial disruptions such as resettlement and male outmigration forced Indigenous women to renegotiate their social and economic roles, while in the broader Hispanic world—including parts of the Spanish Americas—women retained legal and property rights rooted in medieval Iberian traditions. As you write, women across the empire, including Indigenous women, could act as litigants, landowners, and economic agents—even as they were embedded in patriarchal and racialized structures. In what ways did women use legal traditions to resist, adapt to, or benefit from the moral-political economy of empire? And do you see these legal and economic strategies as exceptions to the rule—or as evidence that the gendered ordering of the Spanish Empire was more porous and negotiable than is often assumed?
JM: Students often arrive at the start of courses with fixed ideas both of gender and of progress. At the University of Glasgow, I have often taught a class on ‘queering the colonial encounter’ as part of the gender history Masters course. In my class I ask students to look at the way in which interrelated categories of gender and ethnic difference were constructed through the process of colonialism, rather than seeing gender in terms of fixed categories that can be traced across time. As in all things, moral beliefs have played a role, and moral beliefs about poverty interacted with the way in which imperial gender regimes emerged and played out. Within this, particularly gendered categories of widows and orphaned girls played a role, and these notions could be strategically deployed as part of ongoing negotiations of people navigating imperial society. Highlighting this history is not to downplay the gender-based violence which has been the norm of imperial societies, but to move gendered histories beyond the binary of victim-perpetrator. Highlighting the legal history of women as property owners in the Spanish Empire, and the way different groups of women, including Indigenous American and Afro-descendant interacted with property, was important to me as people often have assumptions about the history of women and property that come from the Anglophone world and assume that has been the norm for categories of women across history. Queer history teaches us that nothing should be universalised and that all boundaries and categories are often more porous and negotiable than is often assumed.
GW: Edward, what I found to be one of the most striking arguments in Odious Debt is your rethinking of sovereign default and bankruptcy not as failures of statehood, but as moments in which new forms of sovereignty were actively articulated. You mention, for instance, Fidel Castro’s portrayal of default on foreign loans as the natural and long- awaited conclusion of the independence process started in the 1820s by Latin American revolutionaries. You also show that nineteenth-century debates about sovereign debt were not just about economics—they were also about moral geography. European and North American commentators often framed U.S. defaults in sympathetic terms, emphasizing national development and blaming reckless British lenders, while Latin American defaults were cast as moral failings. As you note, “an ever-expanding Britain provided the United States with generative loans. By contrast, a revanchist Spain sought to saddle Latin America with crippling debts.” (p. 80) How do you interpret this asymmetry in the moral framing of debt across the Atlantic? What role did race, imperial rivalry, and geopolitical aspiration play in shaping the way different debtor nations were judged?
EJC: I think there's two parts to that question, so I'm going to address the first one first, regarding how this is a book about through deliberations on debt and default nations were built. I should say at this point that odious debt refers to a specific problem of international law, which remains a debate in international law today: what happens to the debts of a tyrant when they fall? Say a tyrant falls, a dictator is overthrown from power, and the liberated nation then inherits the debts from said despot. Should this nation-state absorb these debts that nominally once served to undermine and oppress the people, or should they repudiate them and not recognize them as their own? In the book I show this question goes back to Grotius’s characterization of Philip II’s moral bankruptcy. In studying the relationship between sovereign debt and the Crown of Spain, Grotius invented both the idea of sovereign debt and the problem of odious debt. When Grotius was writing, it was an impossibility for a king to go broke. What I mean by that is that the Castilian and Spanish kings used debt as a browbeating exercise against different banking interests, and the threat of default was a way of gaining leverage. The moral failing was not in failing to repay these profane debts, but in not paying back the debt to God as Abrahamic shepherd of Catholic vassals on earth. That debt had to be repaid through conquest and the salvation of souls. It responded to a set of moral obligations that were very different from those that Grotius, who had a very Protestant idea of obligation, would impose on a king. Grotius applied the moral code of a merchant to a king —he bound a king to the moral code of a merchant — and argued that when the King of Spain defaulted on his debts, the Spanish troops in Antwerp were not paid, which led to the infamous mutiny and ransacking of the city, which in turn became a famous staple of what today we call the Black Legend — the myth of Spanish barbarity and religious zealotry. So, on the one hand, Grotius said a king can have sovereign debt and is responsible for that sovereign debt as part of the broader social contract with the people, and in breaching the payment of that debt, he is not necessarily failing just a banker but actually fuelling barbarism, and corrupting the religious authority that he has over the people and the contract he has with God. What I track in the book is the Catholic reception of this problem, which comes about mainly in the 1820s when Latin American states had to engage with the question of what they owed the Crown of Spain. They had to deal with a parallax view of the Spanish Empire and its past, which reflected both what they had inherited from their own histories of their own past, and what the history of Spain that was embedded in Grotius’ international law. They found that the two didn’t match, so they literally had to rewrite the history of international law — and the emphasis there is as much on the history as it is on the international law. This was a profound historiographical exercise as much as it is a story about international law as a discipline. Your second question — how this affects what you called the moral geography of this dilemma — is what I’m working on now. The book I'm currently writing is a history of sovereign debt from a British and North American perspective, which complements the Spanish and Latin American side I studied in Odious Debt. I was struck by how little comparative reflection there was in the mainstream anglophone literature on these topics. For example, in the 1860s, the world witnessed one of the worst examples of European imperial excess: the imposition of Maximilian I as Emperor of Mexico — a puppet emperor saddled with debt by Napoleon III, who ensured that Maximilian promised to pay for the cost of the expedition, the troops, and the court with French loans. When Maximilian was executed, there was the question of whether Mexico had to pay back these loans, incurred by Maximilian on its behalf. The idea that through constitutional reform the Mexican government might be able to repudiate these debts required countless diplomatic studies and deliberations. What’s striking is that at the same time, the United States was wrestling with the problem of the fallout from the Civil War and the Confederate debt. With a hard-fought constitutional amendment which mostly focused on the question of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States repudiated half its national debt. The North insisted on repudiating the Southern debt, incurred in a rebellion against the nation, but the insolvent South had to shoulder the Northern debt. Constitutional reform was allowing for the repudiation of sovereign debt at the same time, over the same years, and yet there are no comparative studies about this, so Allison Powers Useche are now working on this together. Here we have two moral vindications of sovereign bankruptcy and default happening simultaneously on both sides of the Americas—and these have never been put into dialogue, to my huge surprise. I think that tells you a lot about how we understand the history of capitalism, the history of debt in relation to nation-making, and how often the histories of the United States and Latin America are written and told without much of a comparative gaze.
GW: Odious Debt is remarkable not only for its conceptual ambition but also for its methodological range. You reconstruct how Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina—each with its own political traditions, legal frameworks, and revolutionary genealogies—actively shaped the moral and legal architecture of international finance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In doing so, you also place these postcolonial republics in dynamic conversation with Spain and Britain, whose imperial legacies and financial institutions loomed large over Latin American sovereignty. What were the principal methodological challenges you faced in working across these multiple historiographical, legal, and archival traditions—particularly in terms of interpretive frameworks and historical self-understandings? How did you guard against flattening local differences while still drawing out broader transnational patterns?
EJC: I actually think I was really lucky in that I was building on a very well-developed set of historiographies. I'm thinking here of Hilda Sabato, Tulio Halperín Donghi, Enrique Krauze, and many others who wrote about the process of nation-building in Latin America from a comparative perspective. In terms of the day-to-day materials I worked with, the main primary sources in the book — beyond four figures in the second half of the nineteenth century, which I'm happy to talk about later — are really the constitutional debates of the 1820s. It's quite interesting because, while there's been a lot of work on the constitutions and the national leaders, the parliamentary debates have generally been ignored by historians. And yet they contain some of the richest historiographical conversations I've ever read. There's a sense of weight behind the historical reading that is being applied to the past in making the nation, and there is perhaps no greater sense of responsibility than in the historical reading being adopted when addressing the question of what these new nations owed to the empire they had recently defeated. This empire was, after all, the handmaid of Catholicism, as I say in the book: was it an arbiter of piety or a tyrannical regime? These historical debates take on a loaded legal dimension in these parliamentary debates. The way I structured the writing process of the book was by studying those debates first, reading them through, and then building out the narrative. On a practical level, the challenge was finding these sources across Europe, particularly during COVID. At the time, I was spending most of my time in London, Cambridge, and Frankfurt, and I was very lucky to have access to great libraries. I was also very lucky to go to Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina to use the national archives. But the main challenge was getting access to these congressional debates, because the historiography had largely agreed that they had little value. They were not seen as significant in terms of parliamentary history or constitutional history, since they were viewed as discardable rough drafts of what would eventually become law. And yet as I argue in the book, they served as travaux préparatoires and informed the periodisation of a lot of the historical writing of the time, which would become integration to the national understanding of the origins of the nation.
GW: Although the odious debt doctrine has never been formally codified in international law, it continues to resonate in grassroots movements, public discourse, and sovereign debt negotiations—from calls to cancel Haiti’s indemnity to France, to critiques of IMF conditionality in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Your book traces how the moral language surrounding debt — its legitimacy, enforceability, and benefit to the people — remains central to how debtor nations frame their claims. How do you see the legacy of odious debt shaping present-day debates over global financial justice? Do you think the concept still offers a viable challenge to creditor power, or has it been absorbed into a language of humanitarian exception?
EJC: In a sense, the problem of odious debt pours intensifies a tension in liberal international governance, which is the tension between its adherence to the principle of democratic consent on the one hand, and the sanctity of private property on the other. What happens if a nation decides, through deliberative means, that it no longer wants to pay certain national debts? What principle should trump the other? I don't necessarily think the doctrine offers a normative way forward, beyond the fact that I think it emphasizes that democracy and consent ought ultimately to be the way these matters are settled across the world — whether in Latin America, the United States, or in international institutions. I think I’m less interested now in the problem of odious debt today and more interested in why the Latin American proposed solution to it — which was to globalize bankruptcy norms — failed. At the start of the twentieth century, after a century of imperial abuses based on debt, Latin American international lawyers asked why can private creditors take shelter in bankruptcy proceedings — why can’t states? Why is it that corporations have rights that states don’t? Why do merchants have rights that states don’t? I think rather that there has to be a rule — a consistent application of a rule — for sovereign default, one which respects and responds to the demands of democratic politics. As most lawmakers have said for centuries: the moment you borrow, you have to understand that at some point you might default. If you accept that, you deactivate the accusation that default is a moral failing and you pursue practical solutions instead.
GW: In Odious Debt, you note that thinkers like Hugo Grotius helped institutionalize a vision of international law grounded in Protestant moral and legal universals, displacing earlier Catholic traditions that had emphasized sin, restitution, and charity. This shift, you argue, had long-term implications for how debtor nations—especially in the postcolonial world—were judged, disciplined, and excluded from the moral community of sovereign states. Could you elaborate on how this theological transformation influenced the global architecture of credit and sovereignty? How did the move from Catholic to Protestant conceptions of debt recast the meaning of default, responsibility, and legal personhood?
EJC: When we're talking about debt, we're very often talking about sin. But most studies of debt-as-sin have focused on the Protestant tradition. You and I had this conversation, Glauber, about forgiveness and the perdón, and the perdones generales in the empires. The Catholic language of grace, forgiveness, and perdón is everywhere if you study the Spanish Empire, and the problem of finding the path to atonement is everywhere if you study Protestant empires. Going back to the comparison of the two books, Julia and I were both looking at concepts in poverty and debt that established who can be forgiven, who ought to be forsaken, what was unforgivable. Forgiveness, in the way that Julia constructs poverty, shows how poverty was manufactured. In colonial Spanish America, forbearance, like poverty, was a regulating mechanism for a moral order that was contested and strategically ambivalent. In the nineteenth century, it became an imperial mechanism in international relations. I'm thinking here of the ways that Protestant doctrines of atonement informed British and North American approaches to Latin American nations. We see a double standard develop during this period where, on a national level, we can track efforts to reform punishment and imprisonment over debt in Britain and the US on the basis of humanitarian and evangelical principles. At an international level, we see a hardening of the punishment for default abroad. At home, debt forgiveness becomes more common; abroad, it becomes more punishable. So, going back to your original question, I am not sure the transition in international law is what we think it is, or that is that even. What I try to say in the book is that forgiveness is a question of political authority. Who has the power to forgive? Showing who gets to forgive is really one of the biggest ways of exposing power in international affairs, and it explains why to this day global bankruptcy norms are riddled with inconsistencies.
NEW HISTORIES OF CAPITALISM IN THE SPANISH-SPEAKING WORLD
GW: Both of your works engage with empire through a lens that foregrounds ambivalence — the co-existence of domination and resistance, moral claims and violent realities. What role do you think the discipline of history should play in unsettling developmentalist narratives of the past?
JM: It's really interesting listening to Ed, and I think he makes a really important case for why we need to bring moral history back into thinking about economic history, and how this helps us understand the political, intellectual, and legal pathways to global inequality today. What’s been nice about putting these two works in dialogue is seeing the ways they complement each other. Both contribute to global intellectual history, both show the importance of history to fields of law and economics. In a recent publication, the lawyer Anne Orford described historians as claiming to be ‘radical disruptors of orthodoxy’, a claim that Orford dismissed. Actually, I think in both of the narratives we offer in these books, we see some of that radical disruption of orthodoxy at work. For me, history gives us a methodological tool to navigate epistemic uncertainty and to recover a plurality of possible understandings, values and ways of being in the world and relating to other humans and nature. In my own work I use this to pluralise concepts of wealth and poverty and to shift away from notions of the natural poverty and wealth of nations and the inevitability of material processes, to see the different values and the active roles played by societal beliefs, and resulting laws and institutions, in the way that markets and societies are constructed and how they distribute or fail to distribute resources.
EJC: Thanks, Julia, that's a very thought-provoking response. One of the things I enjoyed the most in reading Julia's book is that, as I was reading one of the chapters —particularly, I think, the one on the vagrant poor — I thought, “Wow, it would be so great to see the migration history angle to this?” And I turned the page, and that's exactly where the story went. I think that speaks to your capacity, Julia, to use migration history to offer a different way of understanding nation-building that doesn’t just de-centre the organicist understanding of the nation but also explores the language that was used to do so. Famously, it was migration historians who came up with the idea of methodological nationalism — the idea that people were natural agents of power and communities formed through movement, and there was nothing organic about nations. I really like this idea of historians as radical disruptors of orthodoxy. I think historians today are either seen as kind of stuffy and tweedy or as very radical. A lot of orthodoxy makers and students don’t really know what to do with historians nowadays.
GW: If you could each recommend one additional text — archival, historiographical, or theoretical— that deeply shaped the writing of your respective books, what would it be and why?
JM: It feels like both Ed and I are driven by books that have promulgated the false claims made about the Spanish Empire and, in my case, also the causes of wealth and poverty. The book that has driven this project most, in a way, is kind of a negative example of this approach by new institutional economics, with Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail. That certainly drove parts of my initial inquiry into the history of economic thought. And it sounds like the book I want to read next is the one that Ed is writing, that re-situates a comparison between Latin America and the USA — so I’m looking forward to reading that. But I wouldn’t’t recommend that people have to go away and read these books that have driven us to write the books we’ve ended up writing. In terms of a book that inspired me — one that’s helped me to crystallize my thinking on the cultural relativity of understandings of wealth and poverty — was the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whom I cite in the second chapter of my book, in particular his Original Affluent Society chapter from Stone Age Economics. The work is a little bit dated now, but I think it’s a way into seeing the different poverty and wealth values generated by Indigenous societies. But if I were going to recommend one book, it’s the more recent work by the scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, whom I cite in the conclusion. She offers an important Indigenous perspective on alternative concepts of economic practice. This is particularly important as the work I’m trying to do next is to pluralize our understandings of the values of wealth and poverty and their causes.
EJC: That's really interesting. Like Julia, I read widely when writing this book: I think Natalie Zemon Davis’ Fiction in the Archives is an example in concision and a great book for anyone interested in the relationship between fiction, law, and the rationalisation of crime or failure. After consulting many accounts of US foreign policy towards Latin America, it was Jay Sexton’s Monroe Doctrine that really helped me understand its underlying philosophy and purpose. However, I think the most important contemporary texts I read were Manuel Payno’s writings on international law, and if I had to really pick one book and one book only, that would be a volume of Juan Bautista Alberdi’s complete works. I would recommend Alberdi’s works to anyone hoping to understand the relationship between the Iberian Empires, poverty, and globalisation. After all, the historiography of the Iberian Empires started in nineteenth-century Latin America, but that is a conversation for another day.
Edward Jones Corredera is an Assistant Lecturer at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). He is the author of Odious Debt: Bankruptcy, International Law, and the Making of Latin America (OUP), the co-author of The Unseen History of International Law (OUP), and the editor of the forthcoming volume Supplicant Empires: Searching for the Iberian World in Global History (Brepols).
Julia McClure is a senior lecturer in late medieval and early modern global history at the University of Glasgow. McClure is the author of Empire of Poverty: the moral economy of the Spanish Empire (Oxford, 2024) and the co-editor of Imperial Inequalities: The Politics of Economic Governance across European Empires (Manchester University Press, 2022).
Glauber Wisniewski is a student in the PhD program in Medieval History at Saint Louis University, where he works under the supervision of Dr. Damian J. Smith. His research focuses on the interreligious interactions that shaped the development of medieval and early modern Iberian society, and his dissertation examines the relationship between Jewish communities and the religious military orders within the Kingdom of Aragon.