The Age of Confiscation

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 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.