Nicholas Mulder

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

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

Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World

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 strengthening 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 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 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.

The Age of Confiscation

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Nicholas Mulder

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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- ...

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, ...

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