Economic History

As the densest single corpus of documents pertaining to everyday life in the medieval Middle East and Islamic world before the 1250s, the Cairo Geniza material has been mined to investigate not only the economic roles of Jews in the Islamicate world they inhabited but also the relationship between merchants and the state, the structure of business ties, the nature, market share, and circulation of specific commodities, monetization, and geographies of trade connecting the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Building on more than half a century of Geniza scholarship on the medieval economy, recent work has highlighted the role of legal institutions in economic transactions, has elaborated on the question of the typicality of Jewish economic actors in the Islamicate marketplace, and has deepened the inquiry into regional and transregional economies.