A Property Rights Perspective to the Study of Nationalism

PART I Agrarian Moment: Land and Freedom The frst part of the book deals with the agrarian moment of this history of nationalism in the US and Norway. The time period covered is roughly the years between 1760 and 1815. Within this time period both the elite of the American colonies and in the Kingdom of Norway declared independence from the empires to which they had belonged for centuries. This was based on an ideology of nationalism, which was, at the time, a novelty. In the course of this part of the book, I seek to show how the new ideology of nationalism emerged as a powerful political force in the landed, agrarian societies of colonial America and Oldenburg Norway. The main focus of Part I will be on demonstrating how landed property relations in the two societies were important for how the national ideology formed. After a short general introduction to theagrarian world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Chapter 2 starts by looking at the American colonies. The peculiar property relations of colonial America that was marked by widespread ownership of land will be noted, and then the discussion moves on to the imperial crisis between the colonies and the imperial capital of London. There will be a focus on how key public fgures asserted the property rights of colonial Americans, and how they came to connect this to the idea of popular sovereignty and, fnally, to national independence. Main events covered will be the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention. Next, Chapter 3 moves east across the Atlantic to Norway. As with the American colonies, the chapter on Norway starts by establishing the 32 PART I: AGRARIAN MOMENT: LAND AND FREEDOM relatively widespread ownership of land in Norway. Then the text moves on to discuss the relationship between the Kingdom of Norway and the Oldenburg/Danish Empire to which the Kingdom of Norway belonged, and from which the country was ruled. The chapter then moves on to discuss how events in the Napoleonic war spawned the Norwegian movement for independence. There will be a discussion of key public fgures, and a discussion on how they, like in America, asserted special Norwegian rights to property and connected this to popular sovereignty and to national independence. The main events covered will be Prince Christian Frederik’s campaign for an independence movement and a constitutional assembly. The key point here will be to emphasize how similar the developments in these two societies were. Such a similarity allows us to come up with a theory of the nature and emergence of nationalism as an agrarian, landed phenomenon. THE AGRARIAN CONTEXT FOR THE EMERGENCE OF NatIONALISM IN THE AMERICAN COLONIES AND NORWAY Nationalism in the US and Norway formed during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It is important to remember, as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out long before the study of nationalism became fashionable, that this time period was an age of agriculture. It was a world where the vast majority of wealth came from agricultural production, and where agriculture constituted the livelihood of more than 90% of the people of Europe and America. The major form of property was thus land, and therefore “what happened to land determined the life and death of human beings.”1 There were in this time period various ways in which landed property was organized: from the viewpoint of agrarian property relations, writes Hobsbawm, it makes sense to divide the Western Hemisphere in this time period into three large segments.2 There were the European colonies which were, with the exception of the north- ern part of the British North American colonies, primarily slave driven. Eastern Europe (and parts of Spain and Italy) might be classifed as a 1 Hobsbawm, Eric, The age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, Wiendfeld and Nicholson, London (1962), p. 149. 2 Hobsbawm (1962), pp. 13–18. PART I: AGRARIAN MOMENT: LAND AND FREEDOM 33 second segment where agriculture was done by serfs who were politically and economically unfree. While the distinction in dignity and wealth was not as great as that between slave and master, the difference in power and wealth was still enormous between landlords/aristocrats on one side and cultivators of the soil on the other. The unfree cultivators constituted the bulk of the population in this segment, while a small majority owned the bulk of the land—and ownership of land gave titles, privileges and rank which formed the basis of a social reality of great distinctions. This was similar to the third segment, which covered Western Europe, but here the cultivators of the land had relatively more economical freedom, although landlords were a pervasive feature. In this segment, property in land had gradually emerged as an individual economic right, often decupled from aristocratic privilege and power.3 It was in this segment that private landed property frst became cemented as an economic right, thus also separating it from political, extra-economic powers, such as legal sovereignty. Ellen Meiksins Wood suggested that one of the most distinguished and decisive features of Western development since antiquity is a strong distinction between two sources of power: the state and private property. I will quote at some length from Wood to elaborate on this: developments in what would be Western Europe, with roots in Greco- Roman antiquity and especially the Western Roman Empire, gave property, as a distinct locus of power, an unusual degree of autonomy from the state … [Rome] achieved imperial expansion without a strong state, governed instead by amateurs, an oligarchy of landed aristocrats, in a small city-state with minimal government. While peasants were part of the civic commu- nity, they remained subordinate to the propertied classes … The Roman Empire represents the frst known example of a strong imperial state com- bined with strong private property. This powerful, if sometimes uneasy, partnership is expressed in the Roman concepts of imperium and dominium The Roman concept of dominium, when applied to private property, articulates with exceptional clarity the idea of private, exclusive and individual ownership, with all the powers it entails, while the imperium defnes 3 The issue of land and class relations in western Europe is complex, for a slightly more in depth and detailed overview than that of Hobsbawm, see Aston, T.H and Philipin C.H.E., The Brenner debate: agrarian class structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1985). 34 PART I: AGRARIAN MOMENT: LAND AND FREEDOM the right of command attached to certain civil magistrates, and eventually the emperor himself.4 In short, the uniqueness of Rome was that there existed a clear distinction between imperium and dominium, where imperium gave those possessing it strong exclusive rights and powers over things and people vis-à-vis the emperor. One can trace the relationship between dominium and imperium in the West all the way up until the modern era. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the ffth century, the application of these concepts resulted in what Perry Anderson has called the parcellization of sovereignty in much of Western Europe. This was a situation where political power became fragmented and tied to a complicated chain of dependencies, rights, and dues. A central state with any power of imperium on the scale of the Roman Empire had long not existed in Europe, and political power was exercised by local landlords through dominium from ownership of landed property, which also gave the owner economic power over landless peasants. The parcellization of sovereignty thus invested property with public powers, and this gave property both political (imperium) and private economical (dominium) functions. Property also became less exclusive as many people could have overlapping rights to the same land.5 Thus the distinction between imperium and dominium also became blurred. This is what was normally called feudalism, and it is precisely this parcellization of sovereignty and the infusion of political rights (“extra economic cohesion” in the terms of Anderson6) into landed property that defnes feudalism. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the distinction between imperium and dominium became stronger again as absolutist states emerged in Western Europe. A depoliticization of property happened, making it strictly an economic right.7 At the outset of the 4 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, Liberty and Property: A social history of western political though from the renaissance to the present, Verso, London (2012), pp. 6–7. 5 Anderson, Perry, Passages from antiquity to Feudalism, New Left Books, London (1974), pp. 147–197. Wood, Ellen Meiksins, Citizens to lords, a social history of western political though from antiquity to the late medieval ages, Verso, London (2008), pp. 164–176. 6 Anderson (1974), p. 147. 7 Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State, Verso, London (1974), pp. 15–42. PART I: AGRARIAN MOMENT: LAND AND FREEDOM 35 modern era we have, instead of imperium and dominium, the concepts of sovereignty and property. The most fundamental difference between imperium and dominium, on one side, and sovereignty and property, on other, is that the latter two were universalistic concepts. The nature of imperium and dominium, with its legacy continued from the Roman world into the Middle Period, had been particularistic and hierarchically organized. Even the imperium of the Roman Empire was not universal and abstract (so that it encompassed all domains within the Empire). The imperium of the Empire was precisely that—it was concerned with political issues and the military power of the empire, but was also specifcally connected to the institution or the person of the emperor, not to any abstract idea of “the state” that constituted an all-encompassing sphere of its own.

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