Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

Purchase Greenland? Really?

Well, IR Scholarship has something to say about that!

[THREAD]

https://twitter.com/ProfPaulPoast/status/1162119146395623425

Years ago, I saw an excellent presentation at MPSA by Katrina Browne, then a grad student at @cornellgov. Here is the working paper (which I kept because I thought the paper was so cool).

The paper highlights some of the famous instances of land sales, such as...

Louisiana Purchase (a personal favorite, since Napoleon needed the money for war financing purposes)

Spain's sale of colonies to Germany in 1899

Seward's 1867 purchase of Alaska from Russia (which Russia considered "Siberia's Siberia)

Here's the $7.2million check!

But there are also relatively recent examples, such as Tajikistan's sale/lease/ceding of land to China
reuters.com/article/us-taj…

And land sale was even a way for Greece to address its debt problems (as described in this 2011 @WSJ article)

wsj.com/articles/SB100…

Going back to the paper, Browne proposed using George Ackerlof's classic 1970 @QJEHarvard piece, "Market for Lemons"

academic.oup.com/qje/article-ab…

The idea is that land sales aren't more common because, well, you don't want a lemon.

Think of Alaska. Russia viewed it as "Siberia's Siberia". People called it "Seward's folly". Only later did we discover that it had oil. LOTS OF OIL

So land purchases are rare because such asymmetric information over quality prevents the transactions.

Though straight out land sales are now rare, land "renting" is not. After all, how do you think the US government acquires the land for all of it's overseas bases?

Source: politico.com/magazine/story…

@CooleyOnEurasia touches on this in his @CornellPress book "Base Politics"

books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr…

Of course, the financial terms of US basing has very much been a focus on Trump's time as President

latimes.com/nation/la-na-t…

So definitely a need for more international relations work related to land sales.

It was more common in the past than today. But the act isn't unprecedented, even in the 21st century.

[END]

Addendum: Historian Dominic Alessio has published a number of pieces in IR journals related to US land purchases as empire building (h/t @MDRBrown & @The_RickMc)

These include...

...a @FPA_Jrnl piece published this year (on US purchases in Micronesia)

academic.oup.com/fpa/article-ab…

...and an International Studies Perspectives piece on the broader phenomenon of US empire via purchases

academic.oup.com/isp/article-ab…

These pieces remind me of @dimmerwahr's new book "How to Hide an Empire"

books.google.com/books/about/Ho…

@dimmerwahr Addendum 2: @jonasbunte, Burak Giray, & @patrickshea_ps have a working paper on sovereign land leases -- long term leases are rampant in IR (ties nicely back to the above point about basing):

dropbox.com/s/rkte4p5fnq3u…

@dimmerwahr @jonasbunte @patrickshea_ps Addendum 3: As for Greenland itself, this isn't the first time the US considered buying it:

https://twitter.com/TheAPJournalist/status/1162117054146719744