In this dissertation, I examine practices of eviction in two settler colonial cities: Atlanta and Vancouver, to provide a genealogical account of modern day evictions through the lens of racialized capitalist dispossession. Beginning with the assertion that evictions are fetishized by modern social science as a particular act, or as a contemporary phenomena of advanced capitalism, I argue that instead they are foundational to our society. I identify four mechanisms through which the power relations of eviction unfold: authoritative (the law), technological (textuality), infrastructural (spaces of adjudication), and spectacular (public notice). Using this analytic framework, I consider a spectrum of legal, illegal, and extra-legal realms in both sites to explore evictions emergence, and its residual afterlife in landlord-tenant and private property relations. First, I explore practices of survey and land granting in the settler colonial encounter, as well as the development of landlord-tenant law and its textual technologies throughout the 1800s, to elucidate how they are foundational in establishing racial and dispossessive logics of property-making (extinguishment, enslavement, confinement, banishment). I then trace the lease, the warrant and the writ of possession as key textual technologies that delimit contractual relations that prefigure and ultimately enact eviction. As authorizing documents, they travel tenants through multiple spaces of adjudication, ensnared through unequal power relations of specific actors whose enactments belie categories of 'legal' or 'illegal'. Those same actors work to institute rent and debt, not only as a mode of accumulation, but a relationship of deterritorializing control that is explicitly colonial and racial in its function and effects. Throughout, I consider tenant responses to eviction, as a symptomatic reading of how futurities are foreclosed and prefigured by private property, of which evictions are ultimately a symptom - a means to express property's end. This dissertation argues that in order to understand eviction we must expose their colonial-racial contours, or, our "past's presence". Ultimately, a rendering of evictions as racialized capitalist dispossession has key implications for theorizing the urban, as it better positions housing scholars to discern an accounting of what is 'new' and what is not new about evictions in our current moment.