Papers presented by Mary Shi since 2019

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

"“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:

This article examines the period in the United States before it was taken for granted that governments should promote infrastructure projects such as roads, canals, and railways as a means of stimulating what is now called economic development. In this period, infrastructure promoters repeatedly called on the “public lands”—the broad swathes of land in the national domain in which title had not been transferred to private owners—to help enable early government experiments with infrastructure promotion. They did so despite the fact that these lands were still encumbered with the costs of selling and surveying vast territories, pacification on the frontier, and even extinguishing legally recognized Native title. By taking for granted the costs and contingencies of acquiring the public lands, infrastructure promoters were able to mobilize the public lands as a politically light resource that minimized the complicated legislative battles, extra financing requirements, and potentially explosive additional taxation that would have otherwise impeded their efforts. Doing so institutionalized assumptions of Indigenous dispossession and erasure in American political and economic development and the fiscal calculus of the early developmental state more generally. In making this argument, this article develops the concept of political lightness as a tool to help scholars diagnose how fiscal negotiations can institutionalize power-laden cultural contexts in expanding states, sheds light on the origins of the developmental state, and contributes to the task of analyzing the United States as a case of settler colonial state formation.

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