So in the beginning, all the world was America. Interestingly, the development of Locke's ideas about property and money occurred at a time when European expansion into the New World was just beginning to take hold (source). The very definition of economic imperialism is that countries expand their territories to collect resources in order to reap economic profits. The most robust economies tend to become the most powerful nations, and therefore control of resources is sought in order to monopolize both wealth and power in the world (Lovelace, 2014). Nations that disagree with this general philosophy are threatened with aggressive assimilation tactics which ultimately tend to further strengthen the dominance of the imperialist nation. From there, it became necessary to justify his land claims. In this essay, I will describe the economic ideologies that prompted European expansion into North America, and then describe the specific ways in which they influenced the dispossession of indigenous peoples. The first step to marginalizing a group of people is to describe and highlight the differences between the groups. Nigel Tomas He mentions that Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, had argued that a ruthless struggle for existence, in which each man feared the other, was the basis, or "state of nature" from which civilized humans emerged. This thinking was also adopted by John Locke and was used to reinforce the differences between "savages" and civilized Europeans. Locke's theory of property in the Two Treatises of Government served as the basis for the development of modern colonial policy. A liberal thinker, he believed that all men engaged in honest labor (i.e. participating in an agrarian economy) should have a degree of autonomy. more effective hunting until the entire buffalo population collapses. From the perspective of capitalism, the value of land and its resources was far greater than the value of indigenous labor. To eliminate the problem of indigenous use rights set out in the Royal Proclamation, indigenous people had to be detached from their land in order to be dispossessed and thus make resources available to capital (173). This was necessary to improve the wealth of society relative to the wealth of the individual. They decided to dispossess out of interest in capital and profit, and to progress in the world, in a colony where land was the main resource, depended on land acquisition. Dispossessed peoples are forced to turn to the labor market to survive, creating a pool of cheap labor that industries can exploit..