Outside de Soto’s Bell Jar: Colonial/Postcolonial Land Law and the Exclusion of the Peri-Urban Poor

Introduction Hernando de Soto, in one of those vivid images which bring a potentially rather dry topic alive, compared capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world to a bell jar, sealed off from the rest of society:

Inside the bell jar are elites who hold property using codified law borrowed from the West. Outside the bell jar, where most people live, property is used and protected by all sorts of extralegal arrangements firmly rooted in informal consensus dispersed through large areas ... The bell jar makes capitalism a private club, open only to a privileged few, and enrages the billions standing outside looking in ... This capitalist apartheid will inevitably continue until we all come to terms with the critical flaw in many countries’ legal and political systems that prevents the majority from entering the formal property system (de Soto 2000: 66-80 and 164).