Lorenzo Bondioli is a Research Fellow at Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge, and an Associate in the Department of History, Harvard University. He is a former postdoctoral researcher, and current collaborator, of the Princeton Geniza Lab; he previously held a postdoc at the Italian Academy at Columbia University. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University, Department of History, where his research was supported by an ACLS Dissertation Completion grant and the Dean's Completion Fellowship.

Research

Lorenzo Bondioli works on the interplay of labor, capital, and fiscal structures in medieval Islamic Egypt. His research focuses on the Fatimid era (tenth to twelfth centuries CE), when Egypt simultaneously presided over an Afro-Asian empire and functioned as a key engine of Mediterranean and Western Indian Ocean trade. Cairo Geniza and Arabic papyrus and paper documents form the bedrock of his research. His PhD dissertation, winner of the Middle East Medievalists Dissertation Prize (2022), explored the mounting commercialization of Egyptian society between the ninth and twelfth centuries CE, describing changing patterns of taxation, capital investment, land tenure, rural indebtedness, and protoindustrial manufacturing. He is currently collaborating on multiple projects to edit, translate, and study new Egyptian fiscal documents; at the same time, he is working on different articles on the role of medieval Islam in a longue durée history of capitalism and on the role of capital in non-capitalist societies.

Publications

"The Sicilian Tithe Business: State and Merchants in the Eleventh-Century Islamic Mediterranean," Medieval Worlds 14 (2021). 

"Late Antiquity and Capitalism, between Theory and History: Reflections on Jairus Banaji's A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism" (in Italian: "Tardoantico e capitalismo, tra teoria e storia. Riflessioni su A Brief History di Jairus Banaji"), Oriente/Occidente. Rivista internazionale di studi tardoantichi 2 (2021).

"Islamic Legal Attitudes to Trade with the Dār al-Ḥarb (2nd-6th centuries AH/8th-12th centuries CE)," in Aly Ahmed Elsayed, Abdallah Abdel-Ati Al-Naggar, and Ahmed Mohamed Sheir (eds.), Studies in Peace-Building History between East and West through the Middle Ages and Modern Era (Sanābil lil-kuttāb: Cairo, 2019), pp. 31–54.

"Islamic Bari between the Aghlabids and the Two Empires," in Glaire D. Anderson, Corisande Fenwick, and Mariam Rosser-Owen (eds.), The Aghlabids and their Neighbors: Art and Material Culture in Ninth-Century North Africa (Brill: Leiden & Boston, 2018), pp. 470–90.
Interviews

Flax, tax and trade hacks, with Lorenzo Bondioli, Genizah Fragments 

The Lost Archive: An Interview with Marina Rustow, Borderlines