Summary

At the beginning of the modern era, in Catholic spaces, the lexicon of poverty was linked to a vast semantic repertoire related to scarcity, impotence, and inferiority that was reorganized in theological and judicial sources after intellectual debates in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the 16th century, when it was possible to observe another moment of change in reflections on the poor in Europe, the political incorporation of the natives of the New World and the advance of the enslavement of Africans added new challenges to governing the “poor.” Not only because it was necessary to extend the use of the vocabulary of poverty to populations that were little or not at all known, but also because the experience of the Americas presented an ethnical dimension of previously unexperienced proportions. In this way, whether in the Iberian peninsula or in the Americas, references to the poor assumed political perspectives that sought to intervene in the daily life of communities and which organized themselves under the ethical and moral precepts of second scholasticism.

In Portuguese America, as colonization advanced, religious orders, ecclesiastic institutions, establishments that provided care and welfare, municipal councils, and administrative bodies formulated their own uses of this vocabulary through an intellectual heritage which added new forms of identification of shortage and necessity. Initially, this did not involve recognizing the material penury of city populations. Rather, it was concerned with developing justifications for governing free populations—whether Portuguese, Indigenous, African, or mestizo—which composed the political vocabulary of colonial spaces. In turn, enslaved Africans and indigenous people were integrated into specific social groups, defined by their judicial status and their moral minority, which excluded them from the civic language that characterized reflections on poverty in the Western tradition.