Speculative Expropriation

This article introduces the concept of "speculative expropriation" to reframe Marx's analysis of expropriation in the context of settler colonialism and capitalism in the West. I begin by examining Marx's ideas of primitive accumulation and original expropriation, showing how his incomplete analysis of social relations to land can be extended to the trans-Atlantic context. Drawing on Marx's pre-Capital manuscripts, I examine his treatment of ground rent and its relationship to feudalism, highlighting how the development of capitalism in the West relied on mechanisms overlooked in conventional readings of Marx's work. I argue that settler colonialism in the New World did not follow the same logic as European primitive accumulation, where land was taken from peasants. Instead, speculative expropriators gave land to settlers, but only under specific racial and gendered conditions that tied landowners to the financial and political systems of the settler state. The land was often granted with mortgages and preemptive land sales, which placed settlers in debt and subjected them to the control of colonial institutions. This financial framework, grounded in the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples, allowed capitalism to expand through speculative real estate and colonial constructs. By theorizing speculative expropriation, I show how the dynamics of settler colonialism reinvented capitalist accumulation, turning land ownership into a means of controlling settlers through debt rather than directly extracting their labor. This framework provides a new lens for understanding how capitalism expanded across the Atlantic and solidified its global reach in tandem with Indigenous dispossession and population replacement.