The lessons learned from private colonization experiments in the 1830s drove Brazilian lawmakers back to the drawing board to devise policies that could both promote private colonization schemes and keep them under the government’s purview. A reinstated executive seized the reins of colonization as the royal household enthusiastically founded model colonies spearheaded by the young emperor and his sister. A small group of palatial figures, or áulicos, close to the emperor made this possible from key appointments including in the reactivated Council of State, which oversaw ad hoc colonization petitions. In parliament, the slow but steady evolution of land law bills further contributed to the Brazilian government’s resolve to exercise regulatory muscle. This process came to a head with the debacle of the Delrue contract – a colono-provisioning deal with a French firm that went sour when the Brazilian government discovered numerous irregularities in the payments claimed by Delrue. Ironically, the Delrue scandal empowered Vergueiro & Co., a São Paulo-based firm that would become a leading colono distributor within a decade, demonstrating that the colonization irradiated from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, and not the other way around.

Brazil accompanied global mid-century changes with its own great transformation in 1850: three landmark laws on the slave trade, land, and commerce that in theory aligned state-building with market forces. Yet, if premised on colonization as a substitute for slavery, the country’s transformation was in fact a circuitous one, as abolitionists’, planters’ and the government’s own efforts pointed in different directions. As the illegal slave trade endured after 1850, Brazilian abolitionists organized a new association to promote model colonies built from the ground up, but their efforts paled in comparison to the private colonization undertaken by wealthy Paraíba Valley planters. Historians assume that this coffee-growing elite held sway over the Brazilian state, but their colonization approaches suggest otherwise. The imperial government was more interested in promoting myriad new colonization endeavors across the Empire, including in the northeastern provinces, and using colonization for its own geopolitical needs. Conflicting uses of colonization laid bare not only the failure of government-directed initiatives to appease divergent regional interests, but also the ways in which colonization complicated rather than facilitated a purported transition toward free labor and an alignment of state and market interests.

As the main resource of a large population, land has been the subject of intense debate and dispute in Tanzania. This chapter analyses the existing system of land occupancy rights and its effectiveness in allocating land use rights and avoiding conflicts. The quasi-collectivised Ujamaa system imposed during the socialist era was short lived. The Land Act (1999) presently regulates land allocation. It distinguishes ‘village land’, consisting mostly of smallholders and governed by statutory laws, from ‘general land’, leased to officially agreed users and governed by statutory law. The key challenge is to regulate transfers from village to general land. The present system turns out to be complex, inefficient and conflictive because of the limited surveying of land, the lack of (computerised) recording of land operations, and the intricacy of the law, which generates numerous rent-seeking opportunities. According to Klaus Deininger’s discussion, faster progress can be achieved in surveying and recording because of low-cost technology. As for the law, several reports have been commissioned to evaluate it and to suggest possible reforms, but no changes have been forthcoming so far.

‘[O]ur whole constitutional law seems at times to be but an appendix to the law of real property.’1 At no time in English history was this aphorism truer than in the aftermath of 1066; indeed, it became uniquely so as a consequence of the kingdom’s conquest. England’s legal tradition was already distinctive prior to that point. The circumstances of the Conquest, and the rapid substitution of a new aristocracy of foreign settlers, rendered it doubly so. The importance of the Conquest and its implementation in the development of English law, and especially the law of real property, can scarcely be overstated.

Our penultimate chapter explores the extent to which the Tudor period saw a legal renaissance. It examines developments in the common law courts but also explores the development of new conciliar courts outside the common law, most notably star chamber and the court of equity, which were to prove influential. It also examines the further rise in the use and importance of statute law in this period, demonstrating that the Reformation statutes that split England from the Roman Catholic Church underscored the power of Parliamentary statute. Attention is also given to some developments in the common law courts during this period concerning the law of obligations (the development of the principle of consideration in contract law), property law (the development of the writ of ejectment that replaced the older land law writs and the origins of the law of trusts) and criminal law (the development of the distinction between murder and manslaughter).

It was during the reign of Henry II (1154–89) that royal justice was available to anyone could bring their case within a certain formula, known as a writ. This is discussed in Chapter 5, ‘The Father of the Common Law (c.1154–1215)’, the title of which refers to the title often bestowed upon Henry II, the first monarch from the House of Plantagenet. The chapter focuses on the development of the writ system during and in the aftermath of Henry’s reign in relation to what we now call land law and whether this marked a move to centralisation that replaced the feudal system. The chapter begins by examining the Becket controversy but will then move on to argue that it is for other developments that Henry Plantagenet’s reign should be remembered. The second part of this chapter explored the developments to the legal system that occurred during this reign and that allowed for a common law to develop and be regularised. The final section will explore in detail the origins of the writ system, following Maitland’s legendary account of The Forms of Action as well as the revisions and criticisms put forward by Milsom.

This chapter covers issues of land and housing in peri-urban areas, which have experienced fast-paced industrial and infrastructure development. It examines the precariousness of urban dwellers, most of whom are migrants from other provinces to the city, who seek to build their own house to settle down and achieve a sense of stability in the city. There is an ongoing tension between these people’s sense of autonomy and their right to housing, and their sense of economic and political disadvantage in the land and housing markets, which are fraught with brokerage and corruption. The chapter investigates how these people engage in illegal construction activities, by building their houses on cheap, low-priced agricultural land that is not legally designated for residential purposes, to achieve stability. Yet as a result of their actions, these urban dwellers became trapped in precarious situations. Their settlement was subject to surveillance by the local authority and some people even lost their houses following government measures to crackdown on illegal construction.

Having documented the uneven and combined developmental trajectories of Britain and France, in this chapter I will begin to explore the significance of Jacobinism for our understanding of the rise of multiple modernities outside Western Europe. To this end, I seek to identify the precise nature and concrete outcome of the "combined" character of Ottoman modernization. It shows that the late Ottoman Empire can neither be understood as a "patrimonial state" nor can it be conceptualized as a "peripheral capitalism." Instead, the end result of the Ottoman experiment with modernity was a historically specific Jacobinism that combined and bypassed capitalism (and socialism) based on an alternative form of property and sociality.