In 1967, Tanzania nationalized many foreign companies as part of the Arusha Declaration’s effort to create socialism and self-reliance. Among the most important were the dominant British banks that shaped investment and exported capital. Building on transcripts, private diaries, correspondence from Barclays Bank, as well as other sources, this chapter analyses how politically independent Tanzania endeavored to remake finance. Economic self-determination depended, in part, on the negotiations between Barclays and Tanzania over how much compensation government would pay for the 1967 expropriation. At stake was not merely a final price; instead, the struggle for economic sovereignty depended on the ability to determine the accounting protocols through which price would be calculated and even to define the bundle of different assets that would be subject to valuation. It was on these technicalities that postcolonial statecraft depended, meaning formulas and figures were imbued with political importance and ethical significance. Yet, ultimately, Tanzania found its authority to govern value was stymied by the enduring inequalities of the global capitalist order.

The chapter examines the role of forced displacement in increasing the demand for state intervention and expanding the size of the state bureaucracy in West Germany. It discusses the government elites’ strategies for dealing with the needs of expellees and receiving communities and reviews expellees’ ability to influence government policy. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that counties with a greater proportion of expellees to population had more civil servants per capita.

The chapter examines how the size and diversity of the migrant population shaped economic outcomes in western Poland using statistical analysis. It shows that when state institutions were extractive, the composition of the migrant population played no role in shaping economic performance. Once institutions became more inclusive, however, municipalities settled by more regionally diverse populations registered higher incomes and entrepreneurship rates. The chapter then rules out a series of alternative explanations for these findings.

The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

This chapter identifies why the descriptive changes observed in Chapter 2 took place. To answer this question, it proposes a model of structural change being responded to by the key actors during the nomination process. These structural changes are grouped into three categories: changing electoral incentives, new regulatory reforms, and technological developments. These changes elicited responses from actors within the party network in terms of organizational structure and electoral strategy, by candidates in terms of whether and how they ran for office, and among voters in terms of their participation and motivation in nationalized congressional primaries.

This chapter considers the concept of permanent sovereignty over natural resources as articulated in the New International Economic Order (NIEO) project. At the NIEO’s core was the push to consolidate the legal status of ‘permanent sovereignty’ over natural resources. This idea’s champions argued that ownership and control of resources is an essential and necessary element of statehood, one that involves the right to nationalize foreign-held property. By contrast, its critics contended that no state could lawfully seize assets of foreign investors without compensation. They also insisted that the quantity of such compensation should be determined by international law, or through international arbitration, in the event of disagreement. While most aspects of the NIEO, including resource sovereignty, had been debated for some time, partly during broader discussions of neocolonialism and uneven development within the UN Conference on Trade and Development, it was only in 1974 that the project was formalized in a set of General Assembly resolutions. This project was largely the expression of a desire on the part of political and legal elites in the global South to renegotiate their roles in the world capitalist system, reforming rather than repudiating the existing international order.

This chapter explores the reclamation of property rights in the 1980s at a local state-owned enterprise in eastern Shanxi. It draws on previously unexamined company archives and local government documents to trace how descendants of Shanxi’s “small capitalists” petitioned the government to recognize their ownership and redeem the loss of private property when the new communist government had nationalized the factory without compensation in the early 1950s. The chapter highlights the tensions in administering historical justice in a transitional environment, where a mix of revolutionary practices, family traditions, and modern law came to shape the procedures, capacity, and legitimacy of a socialist state.

In 1951, Mohammed Mosaddeq rose to power in Iran and nationalized the country’s British-owned oil industry. The nationalization triggered an international crisis as the British, together with major oil companies, placed an embargo on Iran, effectively de-integrating Iranian oil from the global oil market. Convinced that pressure on Mosaddeq would worsen Iran’s political instability and push the country toward communism, the United States attempted to broker a settlement that would produce a suitable definition of “nationalization,” satisfying Iranian nationalism while preserving the dominance of the oil oligopoly. Successive negotiations in 1951 and 1952 failed to produce a settlement. A myth of Iranian incapacity obscured the companies’ use of market power to isolate Iran while the United States helped redirect flows of oil to make up for Iran’s de-integration.

This chapter engages with the neglected correlation between the religionization of the Israeli military and the religionization of politics. It is argued that we can identify four main stages of the relationship between the religionization of military and politics. During the formative period of the state and the military (1950s–60s), the partial religionization of the military reflected similar processes in the general society. In the second stage, following the 1967 War, the responses to the war’s aftermath strengthened ethno-national religionization. However, ethno-national religionization prompted the proponents of this process – the national-religious sector – to develop an extra-military avenue for upward mobility in the form of the settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories. The third stage (1980s–90s) was characterized by the denationalization of Israeli politics with the Oslo Accords at its center, during which the national-religious sector increased its strongholds in the military by leveraging new opportunities created by the partial retreat of secular groups from the military as an avenue of upward social mobility. The fruits of this move were felt in the fourth stage (2000s), when the religionization of the military occurred in tandem with, and was bolstered by, the religionization of politics.

This chapter traces a rising national consciousness in English law and legal institutions, focusing on the implications of this for the broader shift from medieval privileges to modern intellectual property. The shift is presented through a narrative highlighting the roots of Parliament in the legal principles and transcendent appeals established in the wake of thirteenth century baronial revolts. We see the impacts of this nationalizing legal revolution in the thought-world of the great monastic chroniclers at the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. And we see the historical legacy of this nationalizing legal revolution in the rise of statutory supremacy and positive legality. These interrelated developments occurred through processes of semantic legal ordering, in which Parliament appropriated traditional rights of prerogative kingship and the church, establishing itself as the guardian of property owned by an increasingly-vocal class of subjects invested (materially and spiritually) in the Protestant Reformation. Two statutory foundations for modern intellectual property resulted from these complex developments: the Statute of Monopolies (1624) and the Statute of Anne (1710).

This chapter explores how Jews and the indigenous inhabitants came to see themselves as members of national communities. It begins with a description of “culture of nationalism” –– a collective belief in society that the assumptions that undergird nationalism are part of the natural order. It then describes how the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine and the Jews of mainly Eastern Europe, embedded within empires undergoing transformations that imbued them with structures associated with modern states, came to see themselves as a homogeneous grouping. In the case of the indigenous population of Palestine, that grouping was imperial in scope. The Jews of Eastern Europe, however, were “othered” by the majority community, and thus came to see themselves as a people apart.

This chapter examines land reform and property rights globally. First, it generates an original account of the principal features of property rights over land that governments have granted to beneficiaries in the course of all major redistributive land reform programs from 1900 to 2010, including land titling, nationalization, collectivization, and the formation of cooperatives. Second, it shows that democracy, dictatorship, foreign pressure, coalitions among landed elites, political elites, and peasants, and legislatures under democracy impact the opening and closing of property rights gaps around the globe as in Latin America. Finally, it conducts process-tracing exercises in Portugal and China to demonstrate further support for the theory's causal mechanisms and weigh that support against alternative explanations tied to ideology and limited state capacity. The discussion of China illuminates the enormous economic, social, and human costs – and political benefits – of retaining a large property rights gap for decades on end. Weak property rights contributed to the Great Famine, and then partial property rights reforms ignited national development in the countryside and in cities.

This chapter shows that, when they are angry, voters are more likely to vote for their own party’s presidential candidate. This chapter further shows that, in an era of nationalized politics, anger toward the opposing party’s presidential candidate can lead to voter loyalty in subpresidential (e.g., House and Senate) elections. Moreover, I show that anger leads to a higher probability of a voter casting a straight-ticket ballot for his or her party. In sum, this chapter shows that an angry voter is a loyal voter.

This chapter inquires into the role of money, debt, and finance in colonial expansion, as well as practical attempts to decolonize financial and monetary regimes.

The book begins with three paradoxes of Libya, Venezuela, and Congo that juxtapose the profound importance of nationalization in the global natural resource economy with its economic risks and potential costs. The chapter then previews the answer to the puzzle of operational nationalization: when faced with the choice of nationalization, weak rulers discount the long-run costs of state intervention to seize its short-term gains; by contrast, strong leaders maintain the status quo of privately run operations to ensure long-term gains from private production. Next, the chapter illustrates the relevance of nationalization in a variety of research contexts: the effects of state intervention in the market; the roles of domestic leadership and international conditions in institutional choice; the significance of this choice during state formation; and the logic of the predatory state. After briefly introducing the theory of how, why, and when different operational nationalization pathways matter for politics, the chapter concludes by outlining how the remaining chapters of the book explain and test the operational nationalization theory.