Race, Place, Trace: Essays in Honour of Patrick Wolfe by Lorenzo Veracini & Susan Slyomovics

Author:Lorenzo Veracini & Susan Slyomovics
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

The Mormon settlers would thus be protected from all monopolies, from any private party controlling natural resources, from merchants and credit providers that would profit from a capacity to link the settlers with wider circuits of trade, and from inflation, one of the typical scourges of the market revolution (the Mormon Church controlled prices and charges in the ‘Great Basin Kingdom’).

Leonard Arrington offered that the Mormons saw property in land as a ‘life-lease subject to beneficial use and social direction’. 64 The most important principle informing Mormon notions of ‘stewardship’ was indeed that in no case a speculative monopoly could be obtained and exploited. Brigham Young said he ‘would disfellowship a man who had received liberally from the Lord, and refused to put it out to usury’, and while this applied to Mormons, it also referred to Indigenous and exogenous owners. 65 It is significant that banning land speculation was associated with an explicit repudiation of prior occupation as a legitimating claim. The Mormons claimed a superior title to land simultaneously against Indigenous and exogenous others.

The Mormon settlers would thus be protected from all monopolies, from any private party controlling natural resources, from inflation, one of the typical scourges of the market revolution, the Mormon Church controlled prices and charges in the ‘Great Basin Kingdom’, and from merchants and credit providers that would profit from a capacity to link the settlers with wider circuits of trade. This is why the Church established a monopoly of its own: the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution. This amounts, Arrington concludes, to a ‘group limitation of the rights of private property’. 66 The aim was to establish settlements that could not be undone by market forces. Smith had finally realized that insulation from market forces, preaccumulation, could only be premised on an exclusive sovereign capacity.

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