Kuran also writes on the law and economics of Islamic legal system, including property law, family law and commercial law
“Big books” are tricky things in social sciences. Everyone wants to write one, about some major issue of history, society, polity or the economy. Few try. And fewer yet actually succeed. Those who do succeed end up not only changing the research programmes of major universities, but also shaping how the educated layperson thinks about the subject.
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societieswas perhapsthe big book of the 1990s, at least in the liberal humanities disciplines I was shuffling in and out of as an undergrad. That explained why geography played a huge role in determining the course of history.
Now, no social scientist anywhere ever would claim that any single book explains everything — that’s the stuff of religion. Diamond’s thesis didn’t seem particularly convincing about the relative performance of Western Europe and other regions of Eurasia (West Asia, India, China) over the past 500 years.
In the…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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