Mention of the American West usually evokes images of cowboys, ranchers and outlaws. Here the authors argue that everyday people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West, applying the lessons learned to modern "frontiers" - the environment, developing countries and space exploration.

"Hollywood will never be able to top this portrayal of the history of the West in the U.S. The history that Anderson and Hill depict is the current situation of the majority of entrepreneurs in developing and former Soviet countries. It is not only an extraordinary insight into the genesis of America, but also the key to understanding better the Middle East, Central Asia, and all the Third World today."--Hernando de Soto, President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy
"Emergent, self-ordering institutional arrangements and property right norms are commonplace. But they are invisible to all those who rely upon them to create wealth, and who may believe falsely that all such rules come from legislated law. Anderson and Hill have made visible an impressive array of examples from US frontier history."--Vernon L. Smith, George Mason University, 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics