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This chapter examines some Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian thinkers who argued that religious values and civilizational discourse needed to be front and center in discussions of political economy. The Pan-Islamic thinkers called for new kinds of economic solidarity among a transnational Islamic community that could promote its interests and values within the world economy. Their proposals included Iranian-born Jamal al-Din al-Afghani’s calls for the collective economic modernization of the Islamic world, the endorsement of specific joint economic projects such as the Hejaz railway by Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, and India’s Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi’s focus on the need for all Muslims to embrace a new kind of Islamic Economics. By contrast, the Pan-Asian thinker Sun Yat-sen focused on the interests and values of a transnational community that he conceptualized in civilizational terms. Sun argued that Asian countries’ interests and values could be promoted by development-oriented economic cooperation amongst themselves, their collective pursuit of neomercantilist goals, and an alternative tributary model of international economic governance centered on the principle of the “rule of Right.”
In much of the developing world, legal titling – the registration of land ownership through a formal, judicial process – is viewed as a path to economic development and political order. The introductory chapter explains why legal titling is unlikely to fulfill this promise. It begins by making a case that the new institutional economics and public choice, which were developed and applied to date in mostly Western contexts, are useful in understanding political, economic, and social institutions in the Islamic world. We then introduce our theory of emergence and change in property rights, which explains the situations when we expect the government to define and enforce property rights, when self-governance of property rights can work, and why it is unlikely that legal titling will be feasible as a development strategy in a typical fragile state. We conclude by introducing our empirical study of Afghanistan. The highlights of the empirical study include fieldwork conducted by one of the authors in thirty villages in rural Afghanistan, which resulted in hundreds of interviews with ordinary villagers, customary village leaders, and local government officials.
Although today's richest countries tend to have long histories of secure private property rights, legal-titling projects do little to improve the economic and political well-being of those in the developing world. This book employs a historical narrative based on secondary literature, fieldwork across thirty villages, and a nationally representative survey to explore how private property institutions develop, how they are maintained, and their relationship to the state and state-building within the context of Afghanistan. In this predominantly rural society, citizens cannot rely on the state to enforce their claims to ownership. Instead, they rely on community-based land registration, which has a long and stable history and is often more effective at protecting private property rights than state registration. In addition to contributing significantly to the literature on Afghanistan, this book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on property rights and state governance from the new institutional economics perspective.
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