Princeton University Press, January 2026.
From the publisher: “In this book, Craig Perry mines a remarkable cache of fragmentary documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue to write a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East. These documents—which range from the everyday correspondence of traveling merchants to legal queries sent to Jewish jurists—provide the richest surviving archive for the social history of slavery during the centuries when Cairo was an imperial and commercial capital at the intersection of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Perry draws on this archive, known as the Cairo Geniza, to shed new light on such crucial topics as the slave trade in state diplomacy, the entanglements of gender and household slavery, and the lives of the enslaved.”

