The Age of Confiscation

Expropriation – the forced transfer of property rights – is usually associated with dictators, unstable countries and violent revolution. But, in fact, it has been integral to the political and economic history of the West, enabling everything from the abolition of serfdom and slavery to industrialization, the rise and fall of colonial empires, and the expansion of the welfare state. For better and for worse, much of our modern world was built through coercive acquisition of property.

In this groundbreaking international history of expropriation, Nicholas Mulder charts a gripping course from the eighteenth century to the present, ranging from the French Revolution to the Russo-Ukrainian War, from colonial companies to railway empires, from sales of church land to oil nationalizations, and from the confiscation of patents to asset freezing in the Eurodollar market. He shows how all kinds of political movements – liberal and nationalist, socialist and fascist, imperialist and anticolonial – both dissolved and redistributed property rights. Successful state-building did not depend on extinguishing the confiscatory state, but on mastering its powers and redeploying them for new purposes.

Drawing on a vast range of sources and data across history, politics and economics, Mulder unfolds a bold revisionist history of how property was made and unmade, transferred and converted, stolen and restored. The Age of Confiscation reveals the extent to which expropriation has been part of our recent past, and how, amid rising geopolitical competition, growing inequality, and climate change, it will mark our future.