Hernando de Soto is one of the world's leading public intellectuals. His books The Mystery of Capital and The Other Path have had a tremendous impact on debates about international development, but his work also has been controversial. One of de Soto's core ideas is that the institution of private property is necessary for the proper functioning of a market economy, yet even though many property scholars closely follow de Soto's work, his ideas have been neglected in property law scholarship and mature market economies like the United States. This new collection seeks to remedy this neglect, bringing together a diverse group of scholars to apply de Soto's work to a wide range of contemporary issues in property law and theory. The important contribution it makes to debates and controversies in property law, as well as in related economic fields, will appeal to scholars of both law and economics.

Hernando de Soto is one of the world's leading public intellectuals. His books The Mystery of Capital and The Other Path have had a tremendous impact on debates about international development, but his work also has been controversial. One of de Soto's core ideas is that the institution of private property is necessary for the proper functioning of a market economy, yet even though many property scholars closely follow de Soto's work, his ideas have been neglected in property law scholarship and mature market economies like the United States. This new collection seeks to remedy this neglect, bringing together a diverse group of scholars to apply de Soto's work to a wide range of contemporary issues in property law and theory. The important contribution it makes to debates and controversies in property law, as well as in related economic fields, will appeal to scholars of both law and economics.

A renowned economist argues for the importance of property rights in "the most intelligent book yet written about the current challenge of establishing capitalism in the developing world" (Economist) "The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail? In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly extralegal property arrangements, such as squatting on large estates, to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we've forgotten that creating this system is what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book revolutionized our understanding of capital and points the way to a major transformation of the world economy.

During the nineteenth century, Yucatán moved effectively from its colonial past into modernity, transforming from a cattle-ranching and subsistence-farming economy to a booming export-oriented agricultural economy. Yucatán and its economy grew in response to increasing demand from the United States for henequen, the local cordage fiber. This henequen boom has often been seen as another regional and historical example of overdependence on foreign markets and extortionary local elites. In The Making of a Market, Juliette Levy argues instead that local social and economic dynamics are the root of the region’s development. She shows how credit markets contributed to the boom before banks (and bank crises) existed and how people borrowed before the creation of institutions designed specifically to lend. As the intermediaries in this lending process, notaries became unwitting catalysts of Yucatán’s capitalist transformation. By focusing attention on the notaries’ role in structuring the mortgage market rather than on formal institutions such as banks, this study challenges the easy compartmentalization of local and global relationships and of economic and social relationships.

Explores and challenges existing conventions of inequality in Africa while offering new insights to explain persistent poverty across the continent.