While premodern economic history remains a thriving field in the United Kingdom and Europe, with many dedicated conferences and working groups, it has gradually been relegated to the margins of medieval studies in North America. The last decade, however, has seen a resurgence of interest in the field among graduate students and early career scholars, in keeping with broader scholarly trends (especially post-2008) in the history of capitalism and the political economy of past societies. This three-part session is therefore an effort to bring together—for the first time in recent memory—a broad cross-section of scholars working in this field, in the hope of catalyzing conversations and future intellectual and institutional collaborations.

Each of the three sessions in this multi-session strand addresses a major theme in medieval European and Mediterranean economic history. Moving from late Roman and Carolingian textile workshops to Fatimid Egypt’s agrarian commercialization, from Norman estate administration to late medieval English villages, the papers in this first session on ‘Land and Labor’ highlight the interplay of fiscal regimes, documentary cultures, gendered anxieties, and honor-based identities in structuring inequality. Across diverse contexts (300–1500 CE), they examine how labor pooling generated moral stigma; how taxation and commercial capital enmeshed peasants in debt dependency; how documentary practices reshaped seigneurial authority; and how “yeoman” identity reconfigured class relations within the peasantry. Together, these papers argue for an economic history attentive not only to production and exchange, but also to status, morality, and power as constitutive elements of medieval land and labor regimes.