Jewish History © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-018-9312-6 Economic History PHILLIP I. LIEBERMAN Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA E-mail: phil.lieberman@Vanderbilt.edu ROXANI ELENI MARGARITI Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA E-mail: rmargar@Emory.edu Abstract As the densest single corpus of documents pertaining to everyday life in the me- dieval 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. Keywords Mediterranean · India trade · Commerce · Economy · Institutions The Cairo Geniza offers the densest single corpus of everyday documents pertaining to the economy of the medieval Middle East and Islamic world before the 1250s. The nonarchival nature of the corpus and the fragmentary state of its contents, the uneven spread of these contents over some two and a half centuries of accumulation (from the very end of the tenth century to the early thirteenth), and the very fact that the documents portray overwhelm- ingly relationships between Jews have been cited as reasons for caution in us- ing this material to write economic history. In this essay, we examine some of the ways in which students of the medieval economy, starting in earnest with S. D. Goitein, have nonetheless mined Geniza letters, legal texts, and com- mercial ephemera to shed new light on economic history. They have looked not only at the role in this economy of these texts’ mostly Jewish authors but also at the relationship of economic actors with ruling elites and increas- ingly with the state, the structure of business relationships, the nature, market share, and circulation of specific commodities, the monetization of local and international economies, and geographies of trade within the extended eco- nomic continuum connecting the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds.