"Changing Concepts of Economic Justice in the Transition to Colonial Capitalism"

Debates about the moral meanings of poverty and wealth, their causes, and their distribution, were central to medieval and early modern intellectual worlds and shaped the political economic policies of the states and empires that emerged in this period. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Old Testament concepts of poverty and wealth were providential and linked to the agrarian mode of production. Original sin, conceptualised as debt, condemned humanity to the necessity of labour and vulnerability to poverty, but honest work, especially of the land, was seen as the source of wealth: ´ Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies will have their fill of poverty´ (Proverbs 28:19). The New Testament shifted the focus from providence to salvation. Christ´s death and resurrection was supposed to redeem humanity from original sin, but instead of ending poverty it placed a sacralised concept of poverty at the heart of the Christian tradition. Agricultural labour continued to be conceptualised as a morally just source of wealth. Medieval Christian concepts of economic justice accommodated distributional inequalities of wealth but placed moral limits on excess wealth. By the late middle ages, agriculture was increasingly commercialised, money was becoming a more common unit of exchange, markets were expanding, and merchants and bankers became a more distinct social group able to mobilise new forms of economic capital. Moral theologians helped theorise the moral framework of this changing world. By the sixteenth century this transition to commercial capitalism was shaped by the development of global empires, initiating the era of colonial capitalism. These material transitions were accompanied by renewed questioning of the moral origins of wealth in society and its proper distribution. The global expansion of colonial capitalism required concepts of economic justice that could accommodate new forms of distributional inequality and provide a conceptual framework for new forms of business ethics. Questions of the moral origins of wealth and poverty remained central to these concerns.