Since the 1970s, we have – mainly, but not exclusively, under the impact of the lawand-economics movement – reverted to the noble curiosity to know more about how economics, both as regards its facts and assumptions, is related to the interpretation and making of the law. Not surprisingly, in most countries it has been the comparativists and internationalists who have taken the lead in asking pertinent questions and suggesting answers. However, their research has focused primarily on national law – from tort law to contracts and from antitrust law to banking or labour law. The work in the international private-law-formulating agencies has rarely been analysed from an economic point of view – neither its objectives, nor its methods, nor its costs, nor its results. There have been two noteworthy exceptions where the content of transactional law against the background of regulated markets in multijurisdictional systems has become the subject of systematic and sustained scholarly interest. The first concerns a federal system, the United States of America; the second a supranational entity sui generis, the European Economic Community in its various incarnations over time, most recently the European Union. Yet it seems reasonably obvious that the harmonisation of private law, in particular commercial law, occurred against radically different backgrounds in 1926, on the one hand, and in 2001, on the other hand. The 1926 scenario was one where one region (Europe) consisted of independent, culturally homogenous countries, all of which aspired to participate in international trade. The second region was divided into two sub-regions (the Americas), each of which had cultural roots in and legal commonalities with European countries. The third region was colonised Africa. The remaining “regions” (Asia and the Pacific) were – and still are – not very meaningful geographical concepts identifying the largest parts of the globe where there were colonies and rather isolated independent States, only two of which participated in international trade and law making.