Occupation
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Contact
University of Cambridge, Peterhouse College
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
Cambridshire
CB2 1RD
United Kingdom
ABOUT
I am a social and economic historian specializing in the premodern Mediterranean and Middle East. My dissertation, “Peasants, Merchants, and Caliphs: Capital and Empire in Fatimid Egypt, 900-1200 CE,” is the first to employ Geniza documents to attempt a holistic reconstruction of the political economy of Egypt at a time when the country was the pivot of the Afro-Eurasian world system.
Drawing from the extensive documentary evidence afforded by the Cairo Geniza and the Egyptian papyrological record, as well as from frustratingly arcane early Ayyubid fiscal manuals, I paint a new picture of the political economy of Fatimid Egypt. Through an analysis of agrarian production, manufacture, fiscality, and trade networks, my work uncovers the antagonistic symbiosis of two different value circulation circuits: commercial capital and monetized taxation. By describing a distinctive form of capital formation predicated on a distinctive form of state domination, my dissertation recasts the longue durée history of capital accumulation in non-capitalist, extra-European societies.
My next project, which I will pursue as a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, will advance this agenda by moving from the local to the global scale. Provisionally entitled “Trading Empires: Imperial State and Capitalist Merchants in the Eastern Mediterranean, 950-1350 CE,” the project will investigate the link between capitalist expansion and empire in a key area and period of world history.
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
7th-13th Centuries
Islamic Studies
Mamluk Studies
Medieval
Mediterranean Studies
State Formation
Trade/Investment
World History
Geographic Areas of Interest
Egypt
Mediterranean Countries
Maghreb
Mashreq
Specialties
History Of Capitalism
Geniza Studies
Economic History
Languages
Italian (native)
English (fluent)
French (intermediate)
Spanish (intermediate)
Latin (advanced)
Greek (advanced)
Arabic (advanced)
Education
PhD
| 2021
| History
| Princeton University
MPhil
| 2014
| History
| University of Oxford
BA
| 2011
| Humanities
| Sapienza Univeristy of Rome
Abstracts
The Fiscal-Commercial Complex: Taxation and Capital in Fatimid Egypt
Commercial Capitalism in the Pre-Modern Middle East?
