Lorenzo Bondioli (History and NELC): Weaving Capital and Labor: The Medieval Egyptian Textile Boom. Co-sponsored with the Medieval History Graduate Workshop.

Between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, Egypt experienced an impressive boom of textile manufacturing and trade, marked by the skyrocketing production and circulation of cheap linen made from domestically grown flax and of luxury silk woven from imported Sicilian and Iberian fibers. This talk looks at the two protagonists of the textile boom: the clothier merchants who invested their capital, and the textile workers who contributed their labor. While in absolute terms this was a moment of economic expansion, the picture becomes more complicated once we analyse its differential impact on these two groups, for the windfall of the boom did not benefit all sections of society equally, but rather heightened preexisting social stratification.