Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T13:40:33.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Trading with the Enemy Acts in the age of expropriation, 1914–49

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2020

Nicholas Mulder
Nicholas Mulder*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Cornell University, McGraw Hall, 141 Central Ave, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: nicholas.mulder@cornell.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of ‘enemies’ and ‘aliens’. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The TEAs made the administrative process of dispossession effective and profitable for liberal states. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from ‘evacuees’ and ‘absentees’. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the ‘age of extremes’ was also in part an ‘age of expropriation’.

Keywords

decolonizationexpropriationFirst World Warglobalizationtotal war
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 81 - 99
Check for updates
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

For valuable comments on this article I am grateful to Sebastian Conrad, Rohit De, Jeremy Kessler, Madhav Khosla, Mark Mazower, Rafi Stern, Lisa Tiersten, and Adam Tooze, as well as to the editors and reviewers of the Journal of Global History.

References

1 Mazower, Mark, ‘Violence and the state in the twentieth century’, American Historical Review, 107, 4, 2002, pp. 1158–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 O’Rourke, Kevin H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., Globalization and history: the history of a nineteenth-century Atlantic economy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001Google Scholar.

3 Ludwig von Mises, Kritik des Interventionismus: Untersuchungen zur Wirtschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftsideologie der Gegenwart, Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1929Google Scholar; Halévy, Elie, ‘Une interpretation de la crise mondiale de 1914–1918’, in L’ère des tyrannies: études sur le socialisme et la guerre, Paris: Gallimard, 1938, pp. 171–99Google Scholar.

4 Cornelius Torp, The challenges of globalization: economics and politics in Germany, 1860–1914, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014, pp. 27–8Google Scholar.

5 Caglioti, Daniela L., ‘Property rights in time of war: sequestration and liquidation of enemy aliens’ assets in western Europe during the First World War’, Journal of Modern European History, 12, 2014, pp. 523–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caglioti, Daniela L., ‘Aliens and internal enemies: internment practices, economic exclusion and property rights during the First World War’, Journal of Modern European History, 12, 2014, pp. 448–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Caglioti, ‘Property rights’, p. 524.

7 Bartov, Omer and Weitz, Eric D., eds., Shatterzone of empires: coexistence and violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., pp. 524–5; Ümit Üngör, Ugur and Lohr, Eric, ‘Economic nationalism, confiscation and genocide: a comparison of the Ottoman and Russian empires during World War I’, Journal of Modern European History, 12, 2014, pp. 500–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerlach, David, The economy of ethnic cleansing: the transformation of the Czech–German borderlands after World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Pravilova, Ekaterina, A public empire: property and the quest for the common good in imperial Russia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014Google Scholar; Schull, Kent F., Safa Saraçolu, M., and Zens, Robert F., eds., Law and legality in the Ottoman empire and Republic of Turkey, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016, pp. 65–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 179–200.

10 Caglioti, ‘Aliens and internal enemies’, p. 459.

11 ‘A proclamation relating to trading with the enemy’, Supplement to the London Gazette, 5 August 1914, p. 6166.

12 Tooze, Adam and Fertik, Ted, ‘The world economy and the Great War’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 40, 2, 2014, pp. 214–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Antonio Gramsci noted in 1929–30 that ‘boycotts are a form of war of position’. See Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds., Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York: International Publishers, 1971, p. 229.

14 Hansard, HC Deb., 16 September 1914, vol. 66, col. 937.

15 Arthur Page, War and alien enemies: the law affecting their personal and trading rights, and herein of contraband of war and the capture of prizes at sea, London: Stevens and Sons, 1915; Schwabe, Walter S., The effect of war on stock exchange transactions: a short treatise on the emergency legislation, London: Effingham Wilson, 1915Google Scholar; George Croydon Marks, The enemy’s trade and British patents, London: The Technical Publishing Company, 1914Google Scholar.

16 Trentmann, Frank, ‘Political culture and political economy: interest, ideology and free trade’, Review of International Political Economy, 5, 2, 1998, pp. 217–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Lucas, Charles P., ed., The empire at war, vol. 5, London: H. Milford: Oxford University Press, 1926, p. 444Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., pp. 446–7.

19 ‘Faits et informations: Angleterre’, Journal du Droit International, 42, 1915, p. 286. GDP figures from Broadberry, Stephen and Harrison, Mark, ‘The economics of World War I: an overview’, in The economics of World War I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 7–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar, tables 1.1 and 1.2.

20 Dreyfus, Eugène, ‘De la liquidation des firmes ou maisons de commerce anglaises qui fonctionnent en Allemagne et de la saisie des biens anglais en pays occupé’, Journal de Droit International, 44, 1917, pp. 492–6Google Scholar.

21 Scobell Armstrong, John W., War and treaty legislation affecting British property in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and enemy property in the United Kingdom, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1921, pp. 189, 193Google Scholar.

22 Archives diplomatiques, Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, La Courneuve, Paris, serie Blocus 1914–1920, box 145, Will Spens (Foreign Trade Department) to Comité R, Paris, 28 January 1918, fols. 2–3.

23 Panayi, Panikos, ‘German business interests in Britain during the First World War’, Business History, 32, 2, 1990, pp. 249–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 McDermott, John, ‘Trading with the enemy: British business and the law during the First World War’, Canadian Journal of History, 32, 2, 1997, pp. 201–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Caglioti, ‘Aliens and internal enemies’, p. 458.

26 Coates, Benjamin A., ‘The secret life of statutes: A century of the Trading with the Enemy Act,’ Modern American History 1, 2, 2018, pp. 151–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Taggart, Michael, ‘From “parliamentary powers” to privatization: the chequered history of delegated legislation in the twentieth century’, University of Toronto Law Journal, 55, 3, 2005, pp. 575–627CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Miller, Edward S., Bankrupting the enemy: the U.S. financial siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007, pp. 29–32Google Scholar.

29 Ibid., p. 33.

30 Act Oct. 6, 1917, CH. 106, 40 STAT. 411, available at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50a/usc_sup_05_50_10_sq1_20_sq1.html (consulted 5 September 2019).

31 Sunderland, Edson R., ‘Who is an alien enemy?’, Michigan Law Review, 16, 1918, pp. 256–8Google Scholar.

32 Hand, C. H. Jr, ‘Trading with the enemy’, Columbia Law Review, 19, 2, April 1919, p. 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Nagler, Jörg, Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg: ‘Feindliche Ausländer’ und die amerikanische Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkriegs, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000Google Scholar; Hodges, Adam, ‘“Enemy aliens” and “silk stocking girls”: the class politics of internment in the drive for urban order during World War I’, Journal of the Gilded and Progressive Era, 6, 4, 2007, p. 434Google Scholar.

34 Wilkins, Mira, The history of foreign investment in the United States, 1914–1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 9Google Scholar.

35 ‘German industrialism as menace to peace: Palmer says that enemy-owned business here will not be restored after the war’, New York Times, 8 November 1918.

36 Wilford Garner, James, International law and the World War, London: Longmans, Green, 1920, p. 104Google Scholar.

37 Hinrichs, A. E., ‘The spread eagle vs. alien property rights’, The Nation, 10 November 1920, p. 529Google Scholar.

38 ‘Enemy property held by the alien property custodian on July 31, 1918’, Economic World, 10 August 1918, p. 198.

39 Ibid., p. 199.

40 Adam Hodges, ‘“Enemy aliens”’, p. 434.

41 Fite, Emerson D., ‘Germany’s losses in America’, Current History, February 1921, p. 270Google Scholar.

42 Report of the US alien property custodian: 15 February 1919, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919, p. 9.

43 Ibid.

44 ‘Disposal of German corporations’, Board of Trade Journal, 101, 1918, p. 287.

45 Douglass North and Barry Weingast, ‘Constitutions and commitment: the evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England’, Journal of Economic History, 49, 4, pp. 803–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Report of the US alien property custodian, p. 15.

47 Ibid., p. 17.

48 Ibid., p. 18.

49 Wigan Salazar, ‘German economic involvement in the Philippines, 1871–1918’, PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2000; Richard Hawkins, ‘Heinrich Hackfeld’, in William J. Hausman, ed., Immigrant entrepreneurship: German-American business biographies, 1720 to the present, volume 2: the emergence of an industrial nation, 1840–1893, German Historical Institute, 2017, available at https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/ (consulted 14 May 2019).

50 Feis, Herbert, Europe: the world’s banker 1870–1914, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961, p. 74Google Scholar.

51 ‘Hayti: liquidation of enemy firms’, Board of Trade Journal, 101, 1918, p. 287.

52 Akçam, Taner and Kurt, Umit, The spirit of the laws: the plunder of wealth in the Armenian genocide, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2015CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Üngor, Ugur and Polatel, Mehmet, Confiscation and destruction: the Young Turk seizure of Armenian property, London: Bloomsbury, 2011Google Scholar.

53 Morack, Ellinor, ‘Refugees, locals, and “the” state: property compensation in the Province of Izmir following the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, 2, 1, 2015, pp. 147–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morack, Ellinor, ‘Turkifying property, or: the phantom pain of Izmir’s lost Christian working class, 1924–6’, Middle Eastern Studies, 55, 4, 2019, pp. 499–518CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 The National Archives, Kew, London, Cabinet Office files (henceforth TNA, CAB) 47/3, paper ATB 65, W. Arnold Foster, ‘Sanctions and trading with the enemy’, 26 December 1926, p. 6.

55 Panayi, ‘German business interests’, p. 254.

56 ‘Riposta russa al memorandum delle Potenze (Conferenza di Genova – 11 maggio 1922)’, Politica, 12, 1922, p. 83.

57 Huberich, Charles, The law relating to trading with the enemy, New York: Baker Voorhis Company, 1918Google Scholar; Garfield Hays, Arthur, Enemy property in America: a survey of the Trading with the Enemy Act, Albany, NY: Matthew Bender & Company, 1923Google Scholar.

58 Edwin Borchard, introduction to Gathings, James A., International law and American treatment of alien enemy property, Washington, DC: American Council on Public Affairs, 1940, p. vGoogle Scholar.

59 Ibid., p. vi.

60 Conrad Fehr, Joseph, ‘Disposal of enemy property’, North American Review, 216, July 1922, pp. 10–20Google Scholar; ‘Budget statement no. 1’, in Message of the President of the United States transmitting the budget for the service of the fiscal year ending June 30 1924, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1922, table A5.

61 ‘Amendments to the Trading with the Enemy Act limit presidential power to regulate international economic transactions’, Maryland Journal of International Law, 3, 2, 1978, pp. 413–20.

62 Katznelson, Ira, Fear itself: the New Deal and the origins of our time, New York: Knopf, 2013, p. 123Google Scholar.

63 Friedman, Milton and Jacobson Schwartz, Anna, A monetary history of the United States 1867–1960, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 463, 464Google Scholar; Edwards, Sebastian, American default: the untold story of FDR, the Supreme Court, and the battle over gold, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018Google Scholar.

64 TNA, Treasury files T160/693/11, John Simon to Neville Chamberlain, fols. 26–7; report on sanctions by Sir F. Philipps and N. F. Warren Fisher, 18 December 1937, fol. 31.

65 TNA, CAB 47/1, Committee of Imperial Defence, Advisory Committee on Trading and Blockade in Time of War, ‘Conclusions of the fourteenth meeting’, 19 April 1929.

66 TNA, Foreign Office files FO 371/23931, W15235/14783/49, Sir Ernest Fass to E. M. Hodgson, 20 October 1939.

67 Medlicott, W. N., The economic blockade, 2 vols., London: HMSO, 1952Google Scholar.

68 Domke, Martin, Trading with the enemy in World War II, New York: Central Book Company, 1943, pp. 10–22Google Scholar.

69 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, British policy towards enemy property during and after the Second World War, History Notes, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, no. 13, 1998, pp. 5–10.

70 Bishop, Joseph W. Jr, ‘Judicial construction of the Trading with the Enemy Act’, Harvard Law Review, 62, 5, 1949, p. 721CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 Public papers of the Presidents of the United States: Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 11, New York, 1950, p. 154.

72 Garson, John R. and Miller, Jeffrey G., ‘The foreign direct investment regulations: constitutional questions and operational aspects examined’, Boston College Industrial and Commercial Law Review, 11, 2, 1970, pp. 143–74Google Scholar.

73 Proclamation no. 4074, 3 C.F.R. 60 (1971–75 comp.), reprinted in 85 Stat. 926, 1971; Nester, William R., American power, the new world order and the Japanese challenge, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993, p. 200CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bowles, Nigel, Nixon’s business: authority and power in presidential politics, College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2005, p. 165Google Scholar.

74 ‘The International Emergency Economic Powers Act: a congressional attempt to control presidential emergency power’, Harvard Law Review, 96, 5, 1983, pp. 1102–20.

75 Coates, Secret life of statutes, p. 153.

76 Morack, Ellinor, The dowry of the state? The politics of abandoned property and the population exchange in Turkey, 1921–1945, Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2017Google Scholar.

77 Campbell, Henry, The law of trading with the enemy in British India, Calcutta: Butterworth & Co., 1916Google Scholar; Ghosh, Praphullachandra, The effects of war on contracts, Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1920Google Scholar.

78 Khan, Yasmin, India at war: the subcontinent and the Second World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 163–6Google Scholar; Raghavan, Srinath, India’s war: World War II and the making of modern South Asia, New York: Allen Lane, 2016Google Scholar, ch. 14.

79 Khan, Yasmin, The great Partition: the making of India and Pakistan, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 63Google Scholar.

80 Ibid., p. 33.

81 Ordinance no. XX of 1946, Article 97 (d), in A collection of the Acts of the Central Legislature and ordinances of the governor generals for the year 1946, Simla: Government of British India, 1946, p. 24.

82 Trading with the Enemy (Continuance of Emergency Provisions) Act, Act no. 16 of 1947 (20 March 1947).

83 Khan, Great partition, pp. 101–2.

84 Aiyar, Swarna, ‘“August anarchy”: the Partition massacres in Punjab, 1947’, South Asia 18, 1995, pp. 13–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chatterji, Joya, Bengal divided: Hindu communalism and Partition, 1932–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 220–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Butalia, Urvashi, The other side of silence: voices from the Partition of India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 107, 238Google Scholar.

86 Mazower, ‘Violence and the state’, p. 1166.

87 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The long partition and the making of modern South Asia: refugees, boundaries, histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 120–59Google Scholar.

88 ‘Pakistan and India fail to agree on treatment of evacuee property’, Pakistan Affairs, 3, 32, July 1949, p. 4.

89 Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Long partition, p. 125.

90 Concerning evacuee property, New Delhi, 1950, p. 6; Mitchell, B. R., International historical statistics: Africa, Asia and Oceania 1750–1993, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998, pp. 1028, 1034Google Scholar.

91 Ghosh, Partha S., Migrants, refugees and the stateless in South Asia, New Delhi: SAGE, 2016, p. 204Google Scholar.

92 De, Rohit, ‘Taming the Custodian: rethinking the archive of evacuee property’, in Prakash, Gyan, Laffan, Michael, and Menon, Nikhil, eds., The postcolonial moment in South and Southeast Asia, London: Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 87–106Google Scholar.

93 Schechtman, Joseph B., Population transfers in Asia, New York: Hallsby Press, 1949Google Scholar; ‘Evacuee property in India and Pakistan’, Pacific Affairs, 24, 4, December 1951, pp. 406–13.

94 Schechtman, Population transfers, p. 21.

95 Ibid., p. 42.

96 Mazower, Mark, ‘The strange triumph of human rights’, Historical Journal, 47, 2, 2004, pp. 387–90Google Scholar; Mazower, Mark, No enchanted palace: the end of empire and the ideological origins of the United Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, pp. 104–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 Bialer, Uri, Cross on the Star of David: the Christian world in Israel’s foreign policy, 1948–1967, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 166–7Google Scholar, 180.

98 Morris, Benny, The origins of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 83–4Google Scholar.

99 Fischbach, Michael R., Records of dispossession: Palestinian refugee property and the Arab–Israeli conflict, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 Schechtman, Population transfers, pp. 129–30.

101 Forman, Geremy and Kedar, Alexandre (Sandy), ‘From Arab land to “Israel Lands”: the legal dispossession of the Palestinians displaced by Israel in the wake of 1948’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22, 2004, p. 813CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 Katz, Yossi, Partner in partition: the Jewish Agency’s partition plan in the Mandate era, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 42–5Google Scholar.

103 Cited in Forman and Kedar, ‘From Arab land to “Israel Lands”’, p. 816.

104 Holzman-Gazit, Yifat, Land expropriation in Israel: law, culture and society, London: Routledge, 2007, p. 110Google Scholar.

105 Fischbach, Records of dispossession, p. 25; Kedar, Alexandre, ‘Expanding legal geographies: a call for a comparative approach’, in Braverman, Irus, Blomley, Nicholas, Delaney, David, and Kedar, Alexandre, eds., The expanding spaces of law: a timely legal geography, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014, pp. 95–113Google Scholar.

106 Maier, Charles, Leviathan 2.0: inventing modern statehood, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, p. 8Google Scholar.