UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how emergent forms of finance and law facilitated settler colonialism and helped to transform the Native South into Slave Country in the era preceding Removal. To do so, it chronicles one of the most important but misunderstood episodes of early U.S. republic: the Yazoo Land Sales. In 1789 and again in 1795, the state of Georgia sold preemption rights to millions of acres of southeastern Indian land to private land companies. Georgia’s sale of its western land claims in 1795 is usually studied because of the corruption that enabled the sale, and because it prompted the landmark Supreme Court case of Fletcher v. Peck in 1810. But as this dissertation explains, Yazoo and Fletcher played a critical role in bringing together the material, ideological, and legal forces that undergirded settler colonialism, and which drove the political and economic transformation of southeastern North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

“Yazoo’s Settlement” argues that post-Revolutionary struggles over sovereignty and territory in the southeastern borderlands produced the Yazoo sales, and that Yazoo’s financial, legal, and political dimensions propelled Indigenous dispossession in the Southeast. Following the American Revolution, Creek Indians’ resistance to settler territorial expansion precipitated the sale of these lands in forms that derived their value mostly from speculation. New financial networks, institutions, and practices diffused the Yazoo claims by enabling their conversion into land company stock, embedding them in speculative contracts, and entangling them in a multitude of other routine commercial transactions. Financialized and widely traded, these Yazoo claims circulated across the Northeast and in western Europe, expanding both the geographic and social ambit of claims to southeastern Indian territory. At least twelve hundred claimants acquired this prospective property whose value depended on an expectation of future dispossession and the determinations of Congress and the courts. To defend the value of their prospective property, Yazoo speculators and their advocates promulgated arguments that characterized Indigenous land ownership as an impermanent right of occupation. These ideas were not new. But the securitization of the Yazoo claims vastly increased the number of people whose financial interests depended on these ideas being enshrined in law. Ultimately, by vesting a wide range of people in its legal and political resolution, the Yazoo sales produced a set of overlapping ideas, interests, and expectations – a shared national project – that impelled Native dispossession in the Southeast.

Drawing on research in thirty archives documenting the ideas, activities, and interests of a multitude of lawyers, Indigenous leaders, foreign investors, government officials, Indian traders, and Spanish administrators, this dissertation explains why Fletcher’s consecration of contracts required the pruning of Indian land rights and demonstrates how the legal foundation of finance capitalism hinged on dispossession. Yazoo’s history suggests that finance operated as a powerful technology of settler colonialism and dispossession, one of comparable significance to more conventional modes of expropriation involving the assertion of claims through violence and force. Indeed, legal claims to Indigenous land could be capitalized and circulated through the financial system long before violence and diplomacy secured territorial possession. By explaining how this happened, this dissertation uncovers neglected connections between settler colonialism, capitalism, and futurity.