ABSTRACT
The trust is peculiar to systems of law that are based on English law; therefore, the trust is found in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India and other Commonwealth countries, but it is not indigenous to the civil code jurisdictions of Europe and elsewhere based, for example, on the Napoleonic Code Civil or the German civil code. The modern form of trust considered in this book is unique to Anglo-centric legal systems because it is a product of English history. We should be careful with this idea, however, because there is reason to suppose that the idea of the trust was fi rst developed in the Middle East to provide for quasi-charitable purposes within families in the form of the ‘ waq f ’ (Lim, 2001) or in monastic orders where the monks were required to live in poverty. Therefore, the trust idea may not have been English originally.
