In 1860, historian Alan Taylor reminds us in American Republics (2021), “the monetary value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the nation’s banks, factories, and railroads combined.”

We have learned a great deal about the economy of enslavement in recent years. But there was another economy at work at the time, about which many Americans have much to learn: the economy of displacing Native people from their lands, a theft whose effects are still being felt.

Malcolm Harris takes this as a case in point in his third book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Little, Brown, Feb. 14), writing about the Bay Area region in which he grew up. The book, much less irreverent than its 2020 predecessor, Shit Is Fucked Up and Bullshit: History Since the End of History, opens and closes with a consideration of the Ohlone people, the original inhabitants of this land. Through a combination of political machinations, hitherto unknown diseases, and outright genocidal violence, the Ohlone were dispossessed to make the world safe for the mansions of railroad magnates, venture capital palaces, tinkerers’ garages, and the corporate laboratories of modern Silicon Valley—all of them connected to the mighty citadel of Stanford University.

Speaking to Kirkus by telephone from his present home outside Washington, D.C., Harris notes that because California is by most reckonings the fifth-largest economy in the world, it needs to be seen in a global context. “California’s relationship to China, for instance, is way more important than its connection to Europe,” he says. “It’s a Pacific power. That relationship may be more important than even the state’s connection to the East Coast of the United States.”

When the Spanish arrived in the Bay Area in the early 18th century, Harris holds, there “was no natural tendency toward the elimination of the California Indians.” This is not, he adds, to minimize or rationalize Spanish colonialism. But there was a material difference between putting the Indigenous people to forced labor in the agricultural fields and the “bottom-up, settler-led process” of extermination and expropriation that the Americans introduced, at first in their quest for gold—as Harris reminds readers, Jacob Sutter posted the heads of murdered Indians around Sutter’s Mill as a stark emblem of his intent—and then for agricultural wealth.

In that second wave of enrichment, Harris observes, the newcomer Americans turned not to enslaving Native people but instead to importing Chinese farmworkers, some of whom were shunted off to work building Leland Stanford’s railroads. The Chinese had no political rights and by law were considered something less than human. Meanwhile, the most successful European newcomers to the Bay Area were the Catholic Irish and Italians who were shunned as being somehow less than White in the Protestant states to the east.

Far from being sympathetic to the cause of other oppressed people, these newcomers willingly participated in or at least tolerated the displacement and exploitation of Native and Asian peoples. The pattern of segregation and exclusion continued, Harris writes, in the postwar era in the Bay Area, but in a different way: the Palo Alto City Council forbade the construction of multistory apartment buildings anywhere near residential areas, meaning those who could afford single-family homes wouldn’t have to have their views sullied by the dwellings of the less well-to-do.

“That still goes on today,” Harris says. “It’s really cutthroat in California right now. There was a knock-down, drag-out fight to build housing for lower-income people that was eventually defeated, and the same happened with a move to build housing for lower-income elderly people. Palo Alto is supposed to be a big, comfortable suburb, and it’s meant to look like the suburbs forever and never change. The people there don’t want more people living next to them, especially if they’re poor. That’s a class war that’s gone on for a long time—though, historically speaking, it’s really just the blink of an eye.”

For all the resistance of that wealthy enclave, though, change is likely to come. Asked what Palo Alto and Silicon Valley might look like in 50 years, Harris responds, “There’s no point in writing history if you can’t tell people that the future can be different. If we survive ecological change, I think we’re going to be better. Consume the land, excavate everything, and don’t stay in one place for too long—that was the American way. But we can learn to be at home here without destroying it.”

And what about the Ohlone people? “They’ve endured the most aggressive, genocidal activities of the 19th century—which is a really high bar—and they’re still here,” says Harris. Stanford University now acknowledges the Ohlone to be the rightful owners of the land on which it sits. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Stanford is going to hand over the keys, but Harris closes his sweeping history of the area’s last two centuries with the provocative thought that at the very least Stanford—and the rest of Silicon Valley—should pay reparations. “All empires fall,” Harris concludes. The fall of American technocracy holds the promise, then, of bringing history full circle—or, as he writes in Palo Alto, “away from exhaustion and toward recovery, repair, and renewal.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.