Book Launch The Age of Confiscation with Prof Nicholas Mulder

• Department of History
• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies

Prof Nicholas Mulder (Cornell) will present his new book The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane / Little, Brown and Company, 2026)

Nicholas Mulder (Cornell University) will present his latest book, The Age of Confiscation: Making and Taking Property in the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane / Little, Brown and Company, 2026). Mulder’s research focuses upon the political and economic history of Europe during the period from the 1850s to 1945, even as he specializes in the history of geoeconomics. This latest book as well as Mulder’s first monograph, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (Yale University Press, 2022), look to and trace the historical development of economic coercion in the global system. In this international history of expropriation – namely, the forced transfer of property rights – Mulder ranges from the eighteenth century to the present, 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. The Age of Confiscation demonstrates how all kinds of political movements – liberal and nationalist, socialist and fascist, imperialist and anticolonial – both dissolved and redistributed property rights. Successful state-building does depend on extinguishing the confiscatory state, Mulder argues, but on mastering its powers and redeploying them for new purposes.

Please register to get a seaat or to receive the ZOOM link