John Locke and Colonial Capitalism: Money, Possession, and Dispossession

Abstract

This paper offers a fresh perspective on possession and dispossession in Locke’s theory of property by focusing on his arguments on money and monetization. The long-standing (and presently dormant) debate on Locke’s ideas on private appropriation and capitalist accumulation has recently been compounded by revisionist scholarship that discloses his justifications of early-modern English colonialism and Amerindian dispossession. These controversies on possession and dispossession pivot mainly on how to interpret Locke’s labor theory of property. In contrast, I designate monetization and commercialization, rather than laboring, as the principal vector of both appropriation and expropriation in Locke’s theory. I contend that the adequate context for reconstructing Locke’s arguments on possession and dispossession is neither seventeenth-century England nor settler colonies in America, but the early-modern Atlantic economy as a network of intercontinental commodity chains that articulate different moments and modalities of expropriation, appropriation, and accumulation, and different regimes of free and unfree labor. Against this context, I concentrate on the crucial relationship between “non-consensual private appropriation” and “universally consensual monetization” as the intersection point of appropriation and expropriation in Locke’s theory. The optic of money, I conclude, reveals that “possessive individuals” (C. B. Macpherson) and “utilizable individuals” (James Tully) are not antithetical, but instead configure, together with “discardable individuals,” within the same analytic field of Atlantic colonial capitalism.