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Rethinking Property Rights in the Light of Credit Nation
Lamoreaux, Naomi R.
Lamoreaux, Naomi R.
Abstract
The publication of Claire Priest’s new book, Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America, is an occasion well worth marking. Several years ago, when I read her article Creating an American Property Law, the first piece in the project that became this book, I was dumfounded. The subject of that article, the Act for the More Easy Recovery of Debts in His Majesty’s Plantations and Colonies in America, enacted by the British Parliament in 1732, was a major, unilateral revision of property rights to land in the colonies, though not in Britain. The act not only made it possible for creditors of colonial borrowers to seize land in payment of unsecured debts, but it stripped future generations of property rights that had long been secured to them under English law. How could it be that a redistribution of this importance was so little known until Priest called attention to it? How could it have been so completely ignored in writing on colonial political, legal, and economic history, especially in accounts of the British impositions that led to the Revolution? Much more minor afflictions, such as Virginia Governor Dinwiddie’s attempt in 1752 to levy the fee of one pistole for sealing land patents, have been singled out as precursors to the rebellion: “Liberty & Property and no Pistole!” Priest’s work not only remedies this omission, but by connecting the debt recovery act to later Revolutionary-era events, provides a deeper understanding of the protests over Dinwiddie’s fee, as well as over later, more consequential, levies such as the Stamp Act.