The Age of Confiscation

For readers of Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Why Nations Fail, a bold, revelatory history of confiscation, or the government seizure of private property, stretching from medieval Europe to World War II and illuminating its role in the biggest atrocities—and most revolutionary social advancements—of our time.

Expropriation 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 decolonization, Allied victory in two world wars and the birth of the modern 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 capitalists mastering its powers and redeploying them for their own 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 how much expropriation has been part of our recent past, and how amid rising geopolitical competition, growing inequality, and climate change, it will mark our future.

• “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, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century