Taisu Zhang, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England, has recently been published by Cambridge.  The book is a study in comparative legal and economic history.  It asks why early modern property institutions in rural China and England went down distinctly different paths—and whether these institutional differences had any macro-level economic effects.  The book’s central thesis ties together cultural analysis with law and economics—two theoretical paradigms that have had virtually no interaction over the past several decades—but also engages the growing literature on global economic divergence.