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The Age of Confiscation
  • Published: 29 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802060560
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 768
Categories:

The Age of Confiscation

Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World

Formats & editions
Hardback
2 Feb 2027
EBook
29 Oct 2026
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A sweeping, resonant, revelatory history of how the expropriation of property made the modern world, by a brilliant young historian

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.
  • Published: 29 October 2026
  • ISBN: 9781802060560
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 768
Categories:

About the author

Nicholas Mulder

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 (Yale, 2022), which received the Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Guardian and elsewhere.
NM

Praise for The Age of Confiscation

Nicholas Mulder shows us that the modern world is largely about the codification of property rights - but it is also about large redistributions of wealth. A major lesson for the age of climate catastrophes, a must-read

Thomas Piketty

Mulder's illuminating study challenges one of capitalism's most enduring narratives: that private property exists apart from state intervention. He reveals expropriation as a central instrument of modern governance, showing how private owners have not only survived but often profited from the very processes that transformed their property

Clara Mattei

Confiscation is back with a bang. Trump demands government shares in business, centrists want to blow up local opposition to development, and the left dreams of remaking the economy. Nicholas Mulder explains with verve and intelligence that property rights were never as solid as they seemed, and sets the scene for what happens next

Henry Farrell

Nicholas Mulder flips the economic history of the last 250 years on its head. A jaw dropping accomplishment

Quinn Slobodian

A revelatory global history of struggle between rulers and subjects over who owns what

Kirkus

Mulder’s gift for lucid synthesis makes it a pleasure to read

Erik Linstrum, Literary Review

A piercing examination of a bedrock mechanism of modern society

Publishers Weekly

Mulder's provocative tour de force beckons readers interested in understanding not only the history but also the implications for the present and future of coercive transfers of property

Library Journal