"Entangled Exchanges: The Futa Textile in Trade, Law, and Obligations between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean c. 1000-1150"
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis explores what an ordinary textile—the futa—can reveal about the interwoven worlds of commerce, law, and social obligation in the medieval Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Rather than seeking to prove the presence or absence of capitalism in the Islamic Middle Ages, I trace the futa’s multiple lives—as commodity, gift, and charitable item—across Geniza letters, legal records, and business documents from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Such material, I argue, offers a more textured and socially embedded understanding of economic life than frameworks grounded in Western capitalist historiography allow. While scholars have often turned to the Cairo Geniza to search for evidence of either coalition-based commerce or profit-maximizing exchange, such binary models tend to flatten the varied economic realities captured in Geniza fragments. The futa—a dynamic, everyday textile possibly of Indian origin—circulated widely across Egypt, Tunis, and beyond. Its very ordinariness makes it a powerful lens for examining how trade worked not merely as an economic mechanism but as a form of social practice. Drawing on Karl Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness, I propose that the Geniza reveals a vibrant, plural, and entangled economic life. Through the futa, this thesis reimagines the medieval Islamic marketplace not as a precursor to modern capitalism, but as a socially situated and materially grounded system of exchange.
Source: Libra
DOI: 10.18130/gvwr-z855
Author: Madhumita Chatterjee
Institution: University of Virginia
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6906649651
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