The Political Economy of the American Frontier.

Print version record.

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.

Corporate Welfare and the Allocation of Western Land.

Demonstrates why claim clubs are perhaps the most important explanation for the origins of and change in property institutions during an important period in American history.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

English.

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