New Books In Economics

You’ve got to speculate to accumulate. We apply that notion to individuals in pursuit of wealth, but what about countries? The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820–73 (U of British Columbia Press, 2025) is the first comprehensive history of Canada’s nineteenth-century public debt. Beginning in the 1820s, loans gave British North American settler governments access to unprecedented amounts of capital at low interest rates. The credit for such loans derived from colonial appropriation of Indigenous territories, and this process essentially created a market value for stolen land. Dr. Angela Tozer explores the role of public debt financing in the consolidation of the Canadian settler state: Upper Canada’s first public debt, issued as securities on the London Stock Exchange; the unique government land tenure of Prince Edward Island and attendant impact on Mi’kmaw homelands; and the purchase of Rupert’s Land via a loan. She analyzes how an economic system centred on credit a