Let me state from the outset that Trade and Institutions is a landmark achievement for the economic and social history of the medieval Mediterranean and should be widely read. The book successfully combines an economic and geographical approach to medieval Mediterranean trade without sacrificing its human dimension. It also integrates discussion of law and institutions pertinent to the world of commerce.
Goldberg's book is divided into an introduction and two parts, the first titled “Institutions” and the second, “Geographies.” The first part consists of four chapters that discuss the Genizah merchants within the wider communal context, dealing with their commercial activity and the legal and institutional aspects involved in the world of commerce. The second part, also consisting of four chapters, illuminates the geographical facets of trade by examining eleventh-century commercial networks. Given the limits of this review, I would like to focus on the final chapter (chapter 11) and Goldberg's overall conclusions.
In her introduction, Goldberg discusses significant methodological issues—among them, how S. D. Goitein's seminal work, A Mediterranean Society, should be read. (The reader of Goldberg's book should also read her article in Mediterranean Historical Review, 26 [2011], 171–86, on the same topic). She advises the reader to be cautious with Goitein's statements that “the impact of the European trade on the local market was overwhelming,” and that “to sell to Europeans was the dream of local merchants” (19). As she writes in subsection 11.1 of the concluding chapter, titled “Putting the Islamic world back into the Mediterranean economy”:
The Geniza records do most illuminate the market structures and the economic geography of the Islamic eastern Mediterranean. These structures were distinctive, but in many ways they were highly defined by the Mediterranean. (337)
She continues:
In light of previous writing on this economy, the findings of this book are surprising. First, agricultural primary production, not transit goods or elite luxuries, played the dominant role in shaping patterns of long-distance trade. More remarkably still, it turns out that primary production, manufacturing, and the transit trade were completely intertwined with long-distance trade, both in the person of the merchant and in the structure of the regional economy. (338)
Yet it should be stressed that the importance of European and Italian traders for the commerce of Egypt during the tenth to twelfth centuries and beyond cannot be studied from Genizah documents alone. Arabic sources, especially those discussed by Claude Cahen in an article from 1954, as well as the works of earlier historians of Amalfi such as Armand O. Citarella and Barbara Kreutz, and new studies published in 2013 and 2014 by P. Skinner and David Jacoby, must be consulted. Goldberg is aware of the need to integrate the study of Genizah documents into the wider framework of Fatimid history, and she acknowledges the significance of Marina Rustow's book on the Jews in the Fatimid state. Equally important are Miriam Frenkel's book on the Jewish community of Alexandria, mentioned in the bibliography, and that of Roxani Eleni Margariti on Aden; neither is fully integrated into Goldberg's discussion. On the question of Arabic sources, one must also mention Makhzûmî's twelfth-century administrative manual (partial edition by Claude Cahen and Yusuf Ragib [1986]). Goldberg is aware of Cahen's studies of this text, but again the question of integration arises. One cannot ask a scholar of the Genizah to master the relevant Arabic texts as well, but some overview of the broader field should be provided or, at least, alluded to.
Going beyond the Mediterranean world, one should also take note of the study of the Indian Ocean trade—a dynamic field revolutionized by the publication of India Traders of the Middle Ages by S. D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman in 2008 (Brill), and the publication of subsequent volumes of documents pertaining to India trade by Friedman. What Friedman wrote in India Traders has direct bearing on Goldberg's findings:
The India trade was the backbone of the international economy in the Middle Ages in general and within the Islamic world in particular. More than anything else, it stimulated inter-territorial traffic, furthered the rise of a flourishing merchant class and created close and fruitful links between the countries of Islam and the Far East on the one hand and Europe on the other. In later medieval times, it was the search for the direct sea route to India that led to the discovery of America and other hitherto unknown parts of the globe and thus inaugurated the age of the unification of all mankind. (p. 3)
Future studies will hopefully integrate Arabic sources and Indian Ocean trade into the discussion of medieval Mediterranean commerce.
But to return to the thrust of Goldberg's findings: In the book's final chapter, titled “The Mediterranean through the Eyes of Geniza Merchants,” Goldberg concludes that “[t]he men whose stories I have told in this book were an identifiable circle, a numerically minuscule and utterly unrepresentative slice of the medieval Mediterranean population.” Yet these men's stories reflect activity at other levels of society. They were “the famous middlemen of the Islamic world, the people who traded in pepper and pearls, gold and spices.” In the eleventh century, “[a]griculture production determined business cycles, movements of credit and specie, and even how merchants valued each other's service.” Goldberg continues, “These activities created strong and intimate bonds between international merchants and local agriculturalists in the Islamic Mediterranean and injected coins directly into the countryside every year….” (338). More specifically, Goldberg discusses “an eleventh-century trinity of necessary consumption” that consisted of olives, wheat, and flax (342–3). To these one should add sugarcane and the various types of sugar. The importance of flax in the trade of Genizah merchants has been noted and dealt with by S. D. Goitein, M. Gil, and A. L. Udovitch, but Goldberg's treatment of the topic, scattered throughout the book, adds a whole new dimension to this discussion. The entry “flax” in the index is divided into no less than nine subentries, hinting at the wide socioeconomic significance of this product for the agricultural and commercial life of medieval Egypt. Any discussion of Mediterranean trade must take into account these observations.
Let me add that Goldberg's long and complex book is nicely produced and almost flawless, with only a few trivial misprints.
