ABSTRACT
There are two debates about poverty, one very old, the other comparatively new, invoking very similar presuppositions and employing a virtually identical conceptual scheme, which are not often brought face-to-face for comparison. The first is the long debate about the causes of poverty—the explanations offered for the burdens which press upon Adam’s race—in the historical tradition of Western Europe since medieval times; the second lies within the rapidly growing recent contemporary literature of economic development and the ‘Third World’—the causes of present poverty amongst nations. For an economic historian, caught between faculties as an economist amongst historians and a historian amongst economists, the juxtaposition of these debates makes their comparison less easy to avoid than it appears to be for scholars within the citadels of either discipline.
