Tabla de Contenidos:
  • List of Maps, Figure, and Tables; Preface; 1 Introduction; Claim Clubs: A Few Examples; Three Levels of Social Control; Claim Clubs and the Process of Institutional Change; The Frontier of This Book; Part I The Origins of Private Property Institutions; 2 A Theory of Claim Clubs; Spontaneous Order and Its Limits; Spontaneous Emergence of Institutions; Breakdown of Spontaneously Arising Institutions; Political Theories of the Origins of Property Institutions; Private-Order Governments: How Claim Clubs Substitute for the State; Are Claim Clubs "Spontaneous Order?"; Conclusion.
  • 3 The Constitution of Claim ClubsAgricultural Land; First-Possession Norms: How Farmers Allocated Land without Conscious Design or Enforcement; The Fair Play System; The Proliferation of Agricultural Claim Clubs; The Constitution of Agricultural Clubs; The Demise of Agricultural Claim Clubs; Mineral Land; Claim Clubs and the California Gold Rush; Mining Camps: The First Organizations on the Gold Fields; Mining Districts: The Political Origins of Property Institutions on the Gold Fields; Claim Clubs, Property Institutions, and Nevada's Mining Boom.
  • Did Miners Establish Private Property Institutions?Timberland; Rangeland; Conclusion: Does the Theory Fit the Facts?; Appendix to Chapter 3: Examples of Claim Club Constitutions; 4 Rivals to the State; Clarity of Allocation; Alienability; Security from Trespass; Credibility of Persistence; Conclusion to Part I; Part II Change in Private Property Institutions; 5 The Distributive Politics of Squatters' Rights; Efficiency and Distributive Perspectives on Institutional Change; An Efficiency Hypothesis; A Distributive Hypothesis; Is This Land Worth the Trouble?
  • Are You Sure You Want to Throw Your Hat In?You're Not Welcome Here; This Land Is My Land; Give Them an Inch and They Take a Mile; Squatters' Rights and the Process of Institutional Change; The Status Quo: State Ownership; The Creation of Land Markets in the Post-Revolutionary Period; The Decline of Competitive Markets for Agricultural Land; Squatters' Rights as a Test of Competing Theories; Were Squatters' Rights "Efficient?"; Conclusion: The Distributive Politcs of Squatters' Rights; 6 The Political Economy of Free Land; Who Wants Free Land? Hypotheses for Institutional Change.
  • Econometric Analysis of Homestead Votes, 1852-60House and Senate Votes, 1852; House and Senate Votes, 1854; House and Senate Votes, 1859 and 1860; National Security and the Veto of the Homestead Bill; Economic Analysis of Homesteads; Land and the Welfare State; 7 The Open Floodgate in the Far West; The Mining Act of 1866: Efficient Instituitonal Change or the Fruit of Rent Seeking?; Property Rights to Timberland; The Politics of Property Rights on the Open Range; Revenue Lost: Assessing Alternative Explanations; Collateral Effects: Land Laws and Speculation.