Lorenzo Bondioli's work investigates the political economy of medieval Islamic empires, aiming to lay bare the antagonistic symbiosis between the merchant and ruling classes, and the ever-embattled entanglement of subaltern and elite groups. His research focuses in particular on the interplay of labor, capital, and fiscal structures in Egypt in the Fatimid era (tenth to twelfth centuries CE), when the country simultaneously presided over an Afro-Asian empire and functioned as a key engine of Mediterranean and Western Indian Ocean trade. Cairo Geniza and Arabic papyrus and paper documents form the bedrock of this research. His 2021 PhD dissertation, winner of the Middle East Medievalists Dissertation Prize (2022), explored the mounting commercialization of Egyptian society between the ninth and twelfth centuries CE, describing changing patterns of taxation, capital investment, land tenure, rural indebtedness, and protoindustrial manufacturing. He is currently collaborating on multiple projects to edit, translate, and study new Egyptian fiscal documents; at the same time, he is working on different articles on the place of medieval Islam in a longue durée history of capitalism and on the role of capital in non-capitalist societies at large.