Money, Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

Abstract

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.

The racial and colonial dimensions of gentrification

“…3 Highlighting the close connection between colonialism within and outside the US, Allen (1969, p. 73) notes that the president of the Ford Foundation key in designing this velvet-glove approach was McGeorge Bundy, who had previously worked in the White House as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and was an architect for the US invasion of Vietnam. 4 Also see for example Park (2016). Though this work does not specifically focus on gentrification, it provides a lucid historical argument that the quotidian practice of mortgage foreclosure in the US emerged as a strategy used by British settler colonizers to dispossess Indigenous people of their land in what is now called New England.…”

Conquest and Slavery as Foundational to the Property Law Course

“…In particular, chattel property, but not real property, had long been liable to seizure for the nonpayment of debts. 61 Though mortgages were common, failure to pay debts resulted in divisions of interests that no longer exist in the same way, such as the owner's loss of usufructual rights, or the right of a lender to take possession of a property and harvest the fruits and rents of land. 62 The enclosure of common fields was a relatively new development during the period of colonization in England too.…”

Notes on Monetary Institutions in State and Class Formation Processes

“…Banner, 2005, pp. 72, 82, 143; Park, 2016). Before turning to these intra‐settler controversies, I show how they emerged from the colonial and wartime periods.…”