Includes bibliographical references and index

Guiding themes and content of this book -- Methodology -- The law of contracts in a pre-commercial or agricultural survival society -- Roman law -- Medieval law -- Guilds and the capitalist system and Marxist legal systems -- The Latin notariat and contemporary contracts -- The French code civil : key politics and drafting method -- The birth of a continental European commercial law ; fair and commercial courts -- The code de commerce of 1807 -- Socio-economic context of Germany's civil and commercial codes -- The codification of the German civil and commercial codes -- Customs and usages as sources of law in representative codes -- Latin American codification and its all-important colonial background -- Soviet commercial contract law -- The peculiar meaning of Soviet and post-Soviet commercial contracts : an invertebrate legal system -- Chinese imperial, mostly living, law of contracts -- Contracts and litigation in imperial and Mao's China -- Contemporary land and moveable property transactions in the PRC -- Socio-economic and legal contexts and English commercial contracts -- The socio-economic and legal contexts of U.S. commercial contracts -- Formation of contracts ceremony or conduct? -- Good faith and reasonableness in the interpretation of commercial contracts -- Drafting commercial practices and the growth of commercial contract law -- Brief overview of commercial trial procedure -- Pre-contractual liability: culpa in contrahendo -- Excuses for non-performance of contracts --Extrajudicial remedies and the remedy of specific performance -- Judicial and extrajudicial termination -- Damages for breach of warranty in U.S. law and economic analysis

"This work offers a contextual comparative analysis of commercial contracts from their origin until the present time. It studies their positive and living law in countries and regions representative of major legal systems and business cultures: Classical Rome, Medieval Europe and the Middle East, Codification Europe (especially France and Germany), Post-Colonial Latin America, the Soviet Union, the Peoples' Republic of China, England (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and Post-Colonial United States. It identifies contractual concepts, principles, rules, doctrines, methods of reasoning and commercial practices that have contributed most to mankind's economic development. Finally, it explains how certain selfish and altruistic components of standard and fiduciary commercial and financial practices combine to cause the necessary trust and cooperation that makes possible both economic growth and legal institutional longevity"--Provided by the publisher