The outpour of new histories and theories of capitalism signals that the time is ripe to reopen the debate on indigenous capitalist development in the pre-colonial Middle East. Heralded in the ‘50s and ‘60s by scholars such as Maxime Rodinson, Subhi Labib, and Halil İnalcık, the debate largely subsided in the wake of the post-structural turn, in spite of isolated attempts to revive it such as Peter Gran’s. Its core question appears today once more historiographically and politically urgent: was capitalism unknown to the Middle East before European colonial aggression? As already clarified by Rodinson, the answer depends on one’s definition of capitalism. The lifelong work of Jairus Banaji and his recent reframing of the category of pre-industrial, commercial capitalism offers new, flexible heuristic tools to capture the nature of capital accumulation in the Middle East “before European hegemony," to reference to the seminal work of Janet Abu-Lughod on the key role of the late ‘medieval’ Middle East in the formation of the modern world system. Fatimid Egypt, with its unique position within the premodern Afro-Eurasian complex and its unparalleled wealth of thousands of urban and rural documents, offers by far the best case study for the investigation of commercial capital’s operation in the pre-Ottoman Middle East. Egypt was not only one of the most fertile, densely populated, and urbanized regions of the pre-industrial world; under the Fatimids, it also became the chief emporium mediating trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. The lives of both its subaltern and elite classes are documented in unparalleled detail in the so-called Arabic ‘papyri’ and in the documents of the Cairo Geniza, allowing for a granular reconstruction of socio-economic transformations. Combining these two sets of evidence, this paper will highlight the novel insertion of merchant capitalists in the agrarian economy of Egypt through the instrument of credit, and the unprecedented intertwining between commercial capital circulation and the taxation machinery of the state - two features that were to remain typical of the operation of commercial capitalism in the region thereafter. Lastly, the paper will reflect on the discursive representation of these dynamics by contemporary and later writers such al-qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, al-Dimashqī, and al-Maqrīzī. In the conclusions, the paper will reflect on both the transformative effects and structural limits of commercial capital(ism) in the period.