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. This panel on ‘Trade” examines how medieval trade was structured by legal regimes, religious norms, political change, and financial organization across the Mediterranean and Europe. One paper traces the persistence of Roman status-based risk management in Byzantium and the Islamic world, and situates the later rise of written, limited partnerships in Venice and Genoa within shifting institutional landscapes. A second centers the customs-house (diwān/dugana) in North African ports, demonstrating how state officials trained in Islamic jurisprudence mediated Christian–Muslim trade and actively shaped commercial negotiation.. A third shows how state-building, taxation, and new political boundaries in the late thirteenth-century Pyrenees redirected trade routes and reshaped regional production. Finally, a study of the Violi dyehouses and their partnership with the Capponi bank reveals how merchant capital integrated manufacturing, finance, and long-distance exchange in Renaissance Florence. Together, the papers embed medieval trade within evolving systems of law, governance, and capital.