New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

HANIEH: Praising Empire 183
visible property title. Many people living in slums, for example, do not
hold rental contracts or have any proof of ownership for their living
space. This property, therefore, cannot be used as collateral when
applying for loans or to create securities that can then be bought and sold
on secondary markets. 43 Property, formally recognized by title, not only
leverages debt but also provides a link in the owner’s credit history, a
place to collect debts and taxes, and acts as a distribution point for
utilities. 44
Consequently for De Soto, the poor are poor because they lack the
means of leveraging their property into capital due to a lack of a formal
property system. What distinguishes the affluence of the Nile Hilton
Hotel from the poverty found in the rest of Cairo is simply the fact that
the world outside the hotel is without “legally enforceable property
rights.” 45 While Haiti might be the poorest country in the western
hemisphere, with a history dominated by a rapacious colonialism and
slavery, the value of untitled rural and urban real estate in that country
is $5.2 billion according to De Soto. 46 If the “extra-legal” apartments,
businesses, and other property present throughout the slums of Haiti
entered the market in a system that gave property titles to their owners,
then Haiti would presumably require no foreign aid.
Reaffirming the pioneer myth, De Soto praises the determination of
early North American settlers who marked out their new farmlands by
simply squatting on them. He naturally avoids any mention of the devastation
of the indigenous population of North America and the theft of
most of the continent as the fruits of this genocide. Instead he chooses to
marvel at the “superabundance of land in British North America [that]
presented the first settlers with opportunities unimaginable in the
Europe they had left.” 47 To De Soto, the secret of U.S. global supremacy
lies in a legal system that gradually incorporated, recognized, and integrated
these “extra-legal” property rights, establishing a unified property
system that recognized squatter rights and created “the expanded
markets and capital needed to fuel explosive economic growth.” 48
Plainly speaking, the implication of establishing the system of
property rights advocated by De Soto is to make accessible to global
capital the large swathes of Third World property that are currently
“extra-legal” or outside the sphere of capitalist property relations. Given
the unequal levels of power that exist in the marketplace, the result of