Hernando de Soto Book order

Hernando De Soto's 1609 account offers a vivid exploration of Florida, detailing its geography, natural resources, and native peoples. Through descriptive narrative and accompanying maps, readers gain insight into the early exploration of North America. This historical document serves as a valuable resource for understanding the dynamics of exploration and colonization during that era. The facsimile reprint preserves the original's cultural significance, despite potential imperfections, emphasizing the commitment to safeguarding literary heritage.

Cultural Writing. Political Science. Hernando de Soto and Francis Cheneval have edited a collection of ground-breaking cases as part of the Swiss Human Rights Book series which deal with property rights as human rights. Topics include Resource Conflict in the Sudan, Land Reform in Zimbabwe, Rural Property in China, Land Rights for Rural Women, etc.

In this, his classic book on the informal economy of Peru and the reasons why poverty can be a breeding ground for terrorists, Hernando De Soto describes the forces that keep people dependent on underground economies: the bureaucratic barriers to legal property ownership and the lack of legal structures that recognize and encourage ownership of assets. It is exactly these forces, de Soto argues, that prevent houses, land, and machines from functioning as capital does in the West -- as assets that can be leveraged to create more capital. Under the Fujimori government, de Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy wrote dozens of laws to promote property rights and bring people out of the informal economy and into the legitimate one. The result was not only an economic boon for Peru but also the defeat of the Shining Path, the terrorist movement and black-market force that was then threatening to take over the Peruvian government. In a new preface, de Soto relates his work to the present moment, making the connection between the Shining Path in the 1980's and the Taliban today.

Why does capitalism triumph in the West but fail almost everywhere else? Elegantly, and with rare clarity, Hernando de Soto revolutionizes our understanding of what capital is and why it has failed to benefit four-fifths of mankind -- and explains the solution. 'A revolutionary book . . . may not be in the class of Das Kapital, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or Keynes's General Theory. But if the criteria for joining that exclusive club is a capacity not only to change permanently the way we look at the world, but also to change the world itself, then there are good grounds for thinking that this book is surely a contender.' Donald Macintyre, The Independent 'Few people in Britain have heard of Hernando de Soto . . . but The Mystery of Capital has already led the cognoscenti to put him in the pantheon of great progressive intellectuals of our age.' Mark Leonard, New Statesman 'A crucial contribution. A new proposal for change that is valid for the whole world' - Javier Perez de Cuellar (Former Secretary United Nations)