David Hitchcock is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University. His research focuses on poverty and vagrancy in Britain and the Atlantic world. He is the author of Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650-1750 (2016), and is working on a new book-length history of British welfare colonialism.

Julia McClure is a Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Modern Global History at the University of Glasgow. Her research explores the global history of poverty and charity, with a particular focus on the Spanish Empire. She is the author of The Franciscan Invention of the New World (2016), and is working on a new monograph on the moral economy of poverty and the making of the Spanish Empire.