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The Trading with the Enemy Acts in the age of expropriation, 1914–49

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2020

Nicholas Mulder
Nicholas Mulder*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Cornell University, McGraw Hall, 141 Central Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: nicholas.mulder@cornell.edu
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Abstract

This article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of ‘enemies’ and ‘aliens’. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The TEAs made the administrative process of dispossession effective and profitable for liberal states. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from ‘evacuees’ and ‘absentees’. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the ‘age of extremes’ was also in part an ‘age of expropriation’.

Keywords

decolonizationexpropriationFirst World Warglobalizationtotal war
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 81 - 99
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

†

For valuable comments on this article I am grateful to Sebastian Conrad, Rohit De, Jeremy Kessler, Madhav Khosla, Mark Mazower, Rafi Stern, Lisa Tiersten, and Adam Tooze, as well as to the editors and reviewers of the Journal of Global History.

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