Capitalist Pasts and Pluriversal Futures: Challenges to Canadian Imperial Political Economy

In the eighteenth century, an emergent credit economy facilitated a capitalist social organization that universalized land as property with market value. The colonial governments that formed Canada claimed the territories of Indigenous Nations as assets in order to borrow capital and thus bonded Indigenous lands and waters to the global credit economy. By underscoring the plurality of ways of being and knowing land, this article foregrounds the financial mechanisms at play in settler colonialism to explore the possibilities of anticolonial and anti-imperial political economy that decouples Indigenous lands and waters from global markets. This paper is part of the SPE special theme “Pluriversal Political Economy.”