Douglass North once emphasized that development takes centuries, but he did not have a theory of how and why change occurs. This groundbreaking book advances such a theory by examining in detail why England and Spain developed so slowly from 1000 to 1800. A colonial legacy must go back centuries...

The CIA intervened regularly in Latin America politics during the Cold War, in some cases going as far as bringing about regime change. We study the economic, political, and civil society effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries and find that these actions caused...