The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World
About this ebook
Expropriation—the act of forcibly taking property—is usually associated with dictators and unstable countries. But in fact, it has been integral to the political and economic history of the West, enabling the abolition of serfdom and slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and essential parts of the modern welfare state. For better and for worse, much of our world today was built through the coercive acquisition of property, a process that will continue to shape our future.
In this groundbreaking history, Nicholas Mulder charts a new path from the eighteenth century to the present, showing how governments of all kinds—liberal and nationalist, socialist and fascist, imperialist and anticolonial—have dissolved and redistributed property rights in the service of their ideologies and ambitions. Ranging from the French Revolution to the Russo-Ukrainian war, from railway empires to oil nationalizations, and from the confiscation of patents to financial asset freezing, The Age of Confiscation upends our understanding of state-building and economic development, showing how they are at their core a struggle over property: its making and unmaking, transfer and conversion, and theft and restoration.
In the spirit of Thomas Piketty and Daron Acemoglu, Mulder reveals how the power to take property has shaped our past—and how, amid rising geopolitical competition, growing inequality, and climate change, it will mark our future.
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About the author
Nicholas Mulder is associate professor of history and Milstein Faculty Fellow at Cornell University. He specializes in political and economic history and is the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, which received the Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association and the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
