Private Property and the Origins of Nationalism in the United States and Norway

231 Pages·2018·2.09 MB·English

by  Eirik Magnus Fuglestad

Private Property and the Origins of
Nationalism in the United States and Norway
The Making of Propertied Communities
eirik magnus fuglestad
Private Property and the Origins of Nationalism
in the United States and Norway
Eirik Magnus Fuglestad
Private Property
and the Origins
of Nationalism
in the United States
and Norway
The Making of Propertied Communities
Eirik Magnus Fuglestad
Ruralis—Institute for Rural
and Regional Research
Trondheim, Norway
ISBN 978-3-319-89949-7 ISBN 978-3-319-89950-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89950-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940736
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For my parents, Tom and Brit Fuglestad, and to the smallholding
farm of Langeli, where I grew up
F
oreword
Debates about the origins of modern nationalism have tended to revolve
around questions of the relative importance of pre-existing ethnic and
cultural identities, the impact of new communication technologies, and
the functional demands of industrial economics and centralized states
for more unified and integrated populations. Eirik Fuglestad brings
a new perspective on these debates by focussing on a crucial but often
neglected issue—the role of private property in this process.
This approach enables him to do two novel things. One is to get
beneath treatments of nationalism as a general effect of capitalism or
class-based politics, to explore the formal connections between concepts
of property and sovereignty that were transforming together in the same
historical context. It turns out the ideas of citizens securely owning their
own property, and citizens collectively “owning” their common terri-
tory and government, are connected in a broader pattern of legitimacy.
Within this he traces an historical shift (c.1760–1880) from an emphasis
on ownership of land as a criterion of political membership, to one on
the ownership of one’s own labor. From national communities of land-
holders, to national communities of workers. This points to his other
achievement, which is to clarify that the shift from agrarian to indus-
trial society that was basic to Ernest Gellner’s influential explanation of
nationalism involved, at least in some early cases, a transitional phase.
Before full industrialization, the role of an independent landholding class
of small to large farmers involved in commercial agriculture turns out to
vii
viii FOREWORD
have provided one of the key seedbeds for nationalist ideas in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Added to these innovations, people rarely think of comparing the US
and Norway as cases of nationalism. For Dr. Fuglestad this counterin-
tuitive research strategy pays off. These two cases neatly illustrate the
underlying pattern of evolving property rights and nationalist ideas,
while also demonstrating the very different ways this played out in dif-
ferent historical, economic and political contexts. Altogether this book
provides a new and provocative way of thinking about the emergence of
modern nationalism, one that deserves to be read and debated.
Scotland, UK Jonathan Hearn
Professor of Political and Historical Sociology
University of Edinburgh
P
reFace
All Western states today define themselves as nation-states, and all of
these states have a political and economic structure in which an individ-
ual’s right to own private property is an underlying and pervasive fea-
ture. Drawing on examples from the historical trajectories of the US and
Norway between c.1760 and 1880, this book explores the development
of nation-states and the role of private property rights in this develop-
ment. The book seeks to demonstrate the fundamental role both of the
idea of private property for the ideology of nationalism, and of the sig-
nificance of a particular kind of property regime (widespread landown-
ing) for the emergence and development of nationalism as an historical
phenomenon.
This book is historical and particular in nature—it deals with events
and ideas in specific places of the distant past—but the purpose of this
book is to understand the world in which we live today. This book might
thus be placed in the tradition of thinkers such as Karl Marx, Emile
Durkheim and Max Weber; it is essentially an attempt to understand the
preconditions for, and the origins of, the modern world of nation-states
with a broad historical view, and to thus illuminate structural historical
processes in their making. The first basic assumption to this approach is
the banal but important historical insight that society is not static: the
institutions, ideas and material relations of the present have evolved out
of earlier forms. The present is historically laden: to understand it, we
must understand from where it came. A second basic insight or assump-
tion that these approaches have in common is the recognition that
ix
x PREFACE
changes in what we might call the material world—that is, changes in
forms of property, population swings, wars, access to resources, changes
in ways of production and appropriation, etc.—have a decisive effect on
social forms and dominant ideas in society. To understand social change,
we must take into account the material forces that shape the lives of peo-
ple. Karl Marx was one of those who first strongly accentuated changes
in the material world as a driving force, as it were, in history; and Marx’s
emphasis on changes in the mode of production—specifically changes in
property regimes—for the formation of new ideas and social forms is the
basis on which this book is built. The book focusses specifically on how
the property regime in societies is related to the idea and ideology of
nationalism. It is the institution and idea of private property, and its role
in the national ideology, that is the central aspect of this book. The claim
is made that the existence of a particular type of property regime (those
to be found, for example, in the US and Norway in the early nineteenth
century) was particularly favourable for the formation of nationalism. A
second central claim is that landed property rights was also an integral
part of the ideology of nationalism.
The main points that the book makes are that it was the emergence of
more widespread smallholding of land that was one of the most decisive
preconditions for the emergence of nationalism in the US and Norway.
It is furthermore suggested that widespread ownership of land resulted
in the emergence of a form of nationalism in which ownership of landed
property was crucial because it became tied up with the idea of national
popular sovereignty. Put in a simplified way: sovereignty was popular
because property was popular (widespread). This connection was made
mainly, on the one hand, from the real historical tie between owner-
ship of land, juridical sovereignty and political powers and, on the other
hand, from the more conceptual similarity between property rights or
ownership and sovereignty.
The book identifies two forms of nationalism based on the way that
property was understood in the national ideology. Hence, the book
is organized in two main parts. Part I deals with what we can call the
agrarian moment, and it deals with the independence movements of
the North American British colonies and the Kingdom of Norway in
the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. This part
describes an agrarian phase or moment of nationalism where it was real
landed property that was seen to be crucial to the creation of national
sovereignty. Part II of the book looks at what we can call the industrial
PREFACE xi
moment in the history of nationalism. With the coming of industrial
property and the expansion of wage labour, landed property lost its sig-
nificance, and instead the right to the fruits of one’s labour was under-
stood as the most important part of the property right. I have called this
a shift from land to labour, or a transvaluation of property.
This property rights perspective on nationalism in the US and Norway
contributes to a new understanding of nationalism not only in these
places but perhaps also in the Western world in general. Developments
in the US and Norway can be seen in the wider context of the decline
of feudalism and absolutism and the emergence of democratic, industrial
societies in the Western world. The landed, agrarian form of nationalism
might in effect be a “missing link” between pre- or proto-national forms
of society (feudal, religious, absolutist, mercantilist, etc.), and the fully
modern industrial form identified, for example, by Ernest Gellner. It is
the connection between property (from land to labour) and sovereignty
that unites them.
In the broadest sense this book is about the world in which we live,
and it deals with the development of the United States and Norway into
modern societies, but it is to debates in nationalism studies that this
book is intended to contribute first and foremost. The Ph.D. dissertation
on which this book is based was conceived and written in the stimulating
milieu of nationalism scholars and students at the School of Social and
Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK; and it is very much
a product of this experience. My first year in Edinburgh as a graduate
student on the MSc in nationalism studies deeply inspired me to think
about nationalism, its origins and its nature. Of course, I also brought
with me some baggage from home, as it were. Being myself the son of a
Norwegian farmer, and having studied the Norwegian national narrative
with its focus on the free smallholder at the University of Stavanger, I
met the international theories of nationalism and its students with this
particular background. One of the things that struck me early on, when
my own knowledge met with the international theories and students
in Edinburgh, was the lack of literature on landed property rights and
nationalism. It seemed to me, from my knowledge of Norwegian nation-
alism, that this was a central aspect of nationalism. Yet it was difficult to
find literature that dealt with, or acknowledged, what seemed to me a
clear and present connection between the early emergence of nationalism
and landed property rights. Thus began my own inquiry into this topic
as a graduate student during my MSc degree. When I completed my