Introduction -- Part One: The postwar years -- Becoming an attractive colony -- Triangulating colonial modernization -- Part Two: The decade of development -- (Re)framing postcolonial development -- Energizing the economic miracle -- Tapping the riches of a "backward" region -- Part Three: The...

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...