The laws and economics of confucianism: kinship and property in preindustrial China and England

The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England is a book written by Taisu Zhang, who specialises in comparative legal history at Yale Law School. His research focus is on how China and the West diverged, both normative culturally and legally, and took different and independent routes of development. The book before us was first published in 2017, by Cambridge University Press; it soon went on to win several awards, such as the Presidents Award from the Social Science History Association, the Gaddis Smith Book Prize from the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and in an earlier incarnation as a dissertation, it was the recipient of Yale University’s Arthur and Mary Wright Dissertation Prize and the American Society for Legal History’s Kathryn T. Preyer Award. The book itself is 308 pages in length, with effectively eight chapters. It also contains several very useful appendices; the archives list alone might be valuable enough to justify its purchase for some scholars.