A Cultural History of Poverty in the Age of the Emerging Atlantic World, vol. 4

Abstract

(...) The topics above have attracted abundant studies addressing a wide range of questions and considerations, almost always reflecting the time when they were written. Using different thematic approaches, the chapters that follow aim to contribute to this literature with either more theoretical analyses or a greater focus on case studies. They cover a vast geographical range seen from a predominantly European viewpoint since the period in question (1650–1800) is associated with European expansion around both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in the Americas and in West Africa. During this Age of the Emerging Atlantic World, the colonies played an active role in European social policies—and not only because they supplied the imperial powers with resources, as this volume also shows. (...) Taken together, these contributions reveal the long-lasting nature of behaviors and procedures and frequently demonstrate people’s resilience when faced with attempts at categorization, criminalization, homogenization, and certain economistic policies that issued from the centers of power. They also show how people reacted to a crisis, whether it affected an individual or the community, a space of dynamic, multidimensional relations in which the distributors of relief and its recipients interacted, the former often seeking to uphold the existing social order, the latter merely trying to survive. Whatever the form of poor relief and however the poor may have reacted to the policies aimed at them, it is safe to say that institutional relief was confined to a very small number of individuals in the early modern period. And, as these chapters also show, poverty as a historical phenomenon—and, hence, a contingent and variable one—does not allow itself to be pinned down within uniform, rigid categories and interpretations.