A question on good books/histories to read on this subject. Much of the world built on the French/Spanish model of civil law, much of it built on the English case/common law model. Interested in a story I can tell on the subject. I was intrigued by Easterly's presentation on the subject: civil is very "planner" oriented, common/case is very "searcher" oriented. You can guess which suits frontier integration better. Suggestions welcome. My first cut, after consulting god Wikipedia, is that you can talk about the Old Continental World and its civil law, which has its historic center of gravity in Western Europe and had a troublesome integration process vis-a-vis the East, where it got mixed up with socialist law to very ill effect (way too top down). Then you have the Anglosphere extension, based on England. Looking to the New World, you have the successful integration (via the Anglosphere) of North America and the unsuccessful integration of South America based on the civil code model (Portuguese, French and esp the Spanish). Africa is a mish-mash bad integration based on the colonial model of economic integration pushed by Europe in competition with itself (the major empires). When that fails, we're left with the bottom billion concentrated there. Continuing with my theme of Gap shrinking and extending my argument from the USN&WR: it makes sense for a West to focus on politics and governance and security (Leviathan + common law), while the New Core East leads the way on economics (more natural searchers, in Easterly's parlance). Instead, we keep proposing the opposite in our "big push" and our desire not to "militarize" the Gap (would that we were so reticent to do the same in space). Hmmmm (gears turning) . . .