Our theory can explain why governments do not define and enforce property rights. The political history of Afghanistan illustrates the persistence of non-emergence of legal property rights. We also seek to explain why the Hobbesian account of the world in which there can be no sense of justice and no concept of property without a state is mistaken. According to our theory, self-governance would substitute for the state as a source of property rights when organizations have local monopolies, when they possess the capacity to resolve conflicts over land disputes, when their key decision makers face constraints, and when the institutions for local collective action are inclusive. Chapter 5 investigates this claim. Using original evidence from fieldwork, we show that self-governance of property works well in rural Afghanistan because customary governance satisfies the above criteria. Our theory can also explain why the formal property regime remains ineffective nearly two decades after state building commenced in 2001. Importantly, the property institutions in rural Afghanistan are typically private property rights, not unlike property rights in Western contexts. The difference is that customary private property rights in Afghanistan are effective despite not having any legal recognition.

Decadence was not a word used by the historians of ancient Rome during classical antiquity, but the concepts, anxieties, and fears encapsulated by it are without question present in their works. Ancient historians such as Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Appian describe an idealized past in order to draw a contrast with an immoral, inferior present. Spurred on by literary accounts from antiquity, Enlightenment authors such as Montesquieu, a political theorist, and Edward Gibbon, a historian and Member of Parliament, were particularly interested in studying Rome to learn the symptoms of imperial decline. Thus, this chapter explores the language of decadence in the early histories of the Roman Empire, up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, including why later historians such as Niebuhr and Mommsen wished to challenge this language (present from antiquity) and disentwine decadence from Roman imperial history for good.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.