“All human societies face about the same problems,” claim David Friedman, Peter Leeson, and David Skarbek in their fascinating and peculiar book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. “They deal with them in an interesting variety of different ways. All of them are grownups—there is little reason to believe that the people who created the legal systems of Imperial China, Periclean Athens, or saga-period Iceland were any less intelligent than the creators of the US legal system. All of the systems should be taken seriously, each as one way in which a human society dealt with its legal problems.” So also, we could add, their economic problems. In particular, those interested in Christian social and economic thought today might have more to learn than they would expect from Christian Rome and Byzantium.
Dylan Pahman, "Editorial: The Law We Lost," Journal of Markets & Morality 24, no. 2 (2021): 241-243.