Episode 13: Claire Priest
On this episode we speak to our colleague, Claire Priest, about her new book, Credit Nation: Property Laws and Institutions in Early America. We discuss her research into the early American laws that commodified real and personal property as well as how those laws facilitated the rise of credit markets and helped entrench slavery. We also discuss the relationship between property owners and the state as well as the formalization of property rights during this period.
Additional Reading:
Matthew Desmond, In Order to Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You have to Start on the Plantation, N.Y. Times (Aug. 14, 2019).
Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (2006).
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (2003).
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999).