One of the world's foremost legal historians attempts to explain what produced the private law of the western world as we know it today. Professor van Caenegem pays particular attention to the origin of the Common Law civil law dichotomy, and how it arose that England and the continent of Europe, although sharing the same civilization and values, live under two different legal systems.

1. The origins of contemporary private law 1789-1807; 2. Antecedents: the early Middle Ages c. 500-c.1100; 3. Europe and Romano-Germanic law c. 1100-c. 1750; 4. Enlightenment, natural law and the modern Codes: from the mid-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century; 5. The nineteenth century: the interpretation of the Code and the struggle for law; 6. Statute, case law and scholarship; 7. Factors; General bibliography.