Racial Capital, Public Debt, and the Appropriation of Epekwitk, 1853–1873

Abstract

This article argues that public debt financing facilitated the appropriation of the territories of Indigenous nations in the British settler colonies and does so through a detailed examination of Prince Edward Island’s public debt. The island’s government used public debt financing as a technique to direct capital into the colony, but to receive loans, the colonial government first needed credit. Settler-colonial credit derived from colonial governments’ claiming the territories of Indigenous nations as government assets. This history highlights the deeply racial characteristics embedded in the expansion of global public debt financing that characterized finance capitalism beginning in the 1820s. In this way, the unique history of the island and its “land question” can be placed into the broader global context of debt markets and processes of racial capital. Specifically, the 1853 Land Purchase Act used public borrowing to purchase lands from British landowners so that the island’s government could hold the land title. British landowners had their ownership rights secured despite the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship Treaties that guaranteed the Mi’kmaq nation rights to their territory, which included Epekwitk, what the British named Prince Edward Island.