Merchants, Speculators, and Real Estate Capitalists: Central New York Real Estate Data from the late 18th to early 20th centuries

Keywords: real estate, data, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper examines historical uses of real estate data in central upstate New York and their relevance for contemporary housing markets and social movements. In the 1790s, land speculators who bought and sold stolen Haudenosaunee lands on the “Central New York Military Tract” also invested heavily in colonial mercantile trade in the Caribbean, US South, Latin America, and East Asia. Real estate has long been interlinked with global circuits of capital and rebellions by enslaved Africans and Indigenous nations. New York City merchants and speculators relied upon familial and commercial correspondence, supercargoes’ notes at various ports, geographical surveys from wagon trains of speculators, and journals of continental soldiers in genocidal US military campaigns. In the 1890s, buyers and sellers sought out scattered real estate dealers who kept handwritten appraisal notebooks of the racial and immigrant composition of Syracuse neighborhoods, as the city grew into an industrial capitalist center. In the 1910s and 1920s, real estate capitalists reviewed property deeds of white settler homesteads on outskirts of the city to populate the suburban fringe with rising white professional and business classes. This paper offers a conjunctural analysis of real estate data in Central New York decades prior to federal redlining policies and explains how these forms and uses of real estate data shift alongside resistance and the objective conditions of (global) capital. This paper also considers ethical and political commitments in repurposing property deed and other data for left political education projects, such as maps and databases of racially restrictive covenants.