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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover credit: Eidsvoll 1814 by Oscar Wergeland/Archives of the Storting Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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