Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

Radical History Review

Long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers caught the attention of journalists and policy makers in the fall of 2008, an event now emblematic of the financial crisis that momentarily unsettled neoliberal common sense, that crisis was gathering its momentum through "subprime" markets that targeted low-income nonwhite borrowers. 1 Any historical resonances that echoed in this predatory and racialized expropriation were quickly disavowed, however, as the government sought to ameliorate what it perceived to be the most egregious excesses of financial speculation and the disintegration of the derivatives markets. In trying to contain the crisis in this way, governmental triage aimed to safeguard financialization as a disciplinary mechanism and asymmetrical social relation that cultivates permanent indebtedness as a mode of continuous profit. 2 Financialization and "primitive accumulation" have been complementary rather than chronologically distinct, and even as housing markets foundered, this reciprocity continued apace as corporate agribusiness, extractive industries, and biofuels producers orchestrated vast "land grabs," which reached an all-time annual high of 139.9 million acres (56.6 million hectares) globally in 2009. 3 A much longer history nevertheless attends the correlation between profit derived from financial transactions and profit from territorial seizure. Exploring the presentday constellations of financialization in the United States, this essay traces their genealogies, revealing how they begin within and continue to work through social relations already configured by racialized subordination and settler colonialism.

Western Historical Quarterly, 2019

Although consent and commerce were dominant principles of revolutionary political culture, early American expansionists engaged in the continual appropriation of indigenous land. How were these principles of consent and commerce combined with processes of territorial conquest? Rather than a Lockean right of conquest where labor establishes the right to property, architects of early American expansion drew on a pos-sessory right to property in which property is established by social convention rather than natural right. Political thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox enlisted the possessory right to property in the justification of early US colonization, emphasizing the importance of purchasing Indian land. Yet when Indian nations refused to sell their land, these same figures cast indigenous resistance and coercive reactions to it as exceptions to the norm of commercial expansion, giving rise to a discourse of commercial conquest that aided in the justification of native dispossession.

Transatlantische Historische Studien, 2018

In early America, the notion that settlers ought to receive undeveloped land for free was enormously popular among the rural poor and social reformers. Well into the Jacksonian era, however, Congress considered the demand fiscally and economically irresponsible. Increasingly, this led proponents to cast the idea as a military matter: Land grantees would supplant troops in the efforts to take the continent over from Indian nations and rival colonial powers. Julius Wilm’s book examines the free land debates of the 1790s to 1850s and reconstructs the settlement experiences under the donation laws for Florida (1842) and the Oregon Territory (1850).

Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-8223-7146-5 (paper); ISBN: 978-0-8223-7139-7 (cloth)

Continuity and Change, 2015

Princeton Historical Review, 2024

In “‘Soulless Capital and Grasping Speculation’: A Comparative Genealogy of the Homestead Act of 1862,” Alex S. MacArthur provides a fresh look at the much-debated but little-understood titular act of legislation. In fact, MacArthur contends, the lack of consensus in recent historiography around the many meanings of the Homestead Act reflects the conflicting ideological forces that shaped its passage. MacArthur charts the lives and thoughts of two contemporary figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings captured the anxieties around the expansion of American commercialism that underpinned the Act, and Galusha A. Grow, the Speaker of the House who steered it into law. As MacArthur argues, these two men embraced the ideal of petty agrarianism but stopped short of rejecting market relations altogether. Emerson believed the emerging division of labor in the North poisoned Man, but his “rhetoric was tinged with the imperial impulse toward Native displacement, westward expansion, and the development of land” (12). As for Grow, with the collapse of Reconstruction, he abandoned his Jacksonian roots and became a successful capitalist. In the final analysis, the Homestead Act was “a comparatively radical yet reactionary American attempt to distribute property among the toiling masses—a measure at once resistant to the forces of capital and yet couched in capitalist logics of development, displacement, and expansion” (20).

Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership, 2018