Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism (McGill-Queen's Native and Northern)

Earth into Property explores the relationship between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the making of global capitalism. Beginning with Christopher Columbus's inception of a New World Order in 1492, Anthony Hall draws on a massive body of original research to produce a narrative that is audacious, encyclopaedic, and transformative in the new light it sheds on the complex historical processes that converged in the financial debacle of 2008 and 2009. Bridging huge expanses of chronology and geography, character and circumstance, Hall explores multiple motifs of globalization through a wide array of interpretive lenses. In the process the author brings fresh perspectives to our understanding of empire builders like Magellan, John Jacob Astor, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Adolf Hitler. Hall balances his history of imperial globalization with an attentive focus on the prophets and proponents of decolonization, from Tecumseh to Martin Luther King Jr., from Gandhi to Nelson Mandela, to Sitting Bull and Splitting The Sky. With the dismantling of the formal empires of Europe after the Second World War, the US corporate state moved to fill the vacuum of power. Hall shows that the US government, in seeking to replicate its role in the Cold war by mounting the Global War on Terror, is extending trajectories of conquest that began with invasions of Indian nations to further the expansionary course of American Empire.