“Until Indian Title Shall Be … Fairly Extinguished”: The Public Lands,Indigenous Erasure,and the Origins of Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States

Abstract

Prior to the authorization of the Erie Canal in 1817, it was not taken for granted that governments should directly promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways as a means of stimulating what is now called economic development. This article investigates infrastructure promotion in this early period to examine the origins of the American developmental state. It finds that legislators repeatedly called on the nation’s public lands as a costless and freely available resource—even in the face of legally recognized Native title—for infrastructure finance. Doing so allowed legislators to rely on assumptions of Indigenous erasure to mobilize the public lands as a politically light fiscal resource that reduced the perceived costs of government action. In making this argument, this article develops political lightness as a concept for diagnosing how public budgets can institutionalize power-laden cultural contexts in public policy, makes visible the processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure constitutive of the fiscal calculus of the modern developmental state, and contributes to the theorization of the United States as a case of settler colonial state formation.