This magnificent book sets out to explore “the development and deployment of physical space and institutions for the sake of transoceanic trade” in medieval Aden, “emphasizing the urban stage and its actors, who looked constantly seaward” (p. 2). To this end, the author has labored with both force and sensitivity on an overwhelming array of primary, and mostly fragmentary, sources, taking full advantage of the recent scholarship on Yemeni historiography, architectural history, and archaeology. The result is one of the most comprehensive and erudite contributions seen in the past three decades to the ever-expanding literature on Indian Ocean trade.

The book consists of an extensive Introduction, two major parts consisting of three chapters each, and a Conclusion. The Introduction lays out the scope and the overarching theme of the book, as well as historiography, methods and sources, periodization and chronology, and a brief history of the Yemeni harbor of Aden to 626/1228. The author gives special attention to primary sources, which she arranges under the rubrics of 1) “Cairo Geniza and S. D. Goitein's India Book”; 2) “Travel and History Writing” (mainly the Ta'rīkh al-mustabṣir by Ibn al-Mujāwir [fl. c. 626/1228] and the Ta'rīkh thaghr ‘Adan by Abū Makhrama [d. 947/1540]); and 3) “Rasulid documents”, chiefly the administrative and fiscal archives known as al-Daftar al-Muẓaffarī (a yearbook or an almanac) and an early fifteenth-century short administrative document entitled Malakhkhaṣ al-fiṭan. While some of these sources have been explored, masterfully, by S. D. Goitein, R. B. Serjeant, G. Rex Smith, and Dan Varisco (to name a few), many others are less known and little studied. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that all of these texts have been brought together, and the author's reading and synthesis of them is new and refreshing. In this regard, she has taken pains to discuss why the Cairo Geniza documents – mostly in Judeo-Arabic, namely Arabic in Hebrew script, written by Jewish merchants – are relevant to the present inquiry, a story about predominantly Arab-Muslim merchants’ activities in and around Aden (pp. 18–22).

Part I, “The Physical Entrepôt”, treats Aden's physical world. In three chapters, “The Environment”, “Topography of the Harbor”, and “Topography of the Port City”, we witness Margariti's innovative method at work, brilliantly. This is not your typical social economic history of the Islamic Near East: the historical survey, informed by medieval Arabic narrative sources and the British colonial archives, is juxtaposed with modern-day Google Earth satellite images, resulting in a historical and visual panorama of an ever-evolving, living process of Aden, from medieval times to the present day. In Chapter 1, I found the comparative reading of the thirteenth-century travelers' itineraries, placed alongside British colonial maps of Aden and its vicinity with regard to roads and routes, to be insightful (pp. 54–55), and the region-by-region delineation of the Hinterland of Aden, including al-Mabāh, Rubāk, Lakhaba, Laḥj, and Abyan, compelling (pp. 56–67). In Chapters 2 and 3 the author's approach to the topography of Aden, both as a harbor and a port city, is truly interdisciplinary in nature. It yields an informative synthesis from a vantage point rarely seen in traditional text-based scholarship.

Speaking of the text-oriented domain, Part 2, “The Commercial Entrepôt”, is a tour de force of social economic history of Aden and Indian Ocean trade at large, based on solid analyses of historical and documentary sources. In this regard, G. Rex Smith's pioneering work on medieval Aden, based on the Arabic narrative sources, laid the groundwork for the present investigation, and to this Margariti adds the testimony of the Cairo Geniza. Hers is by far one of the most satisfying syntheses of the Geniza materials I have seen in a long time. Unlike some of the recent Geniza studies that tend to reduce research to a merely philological exercise, ignoring the contexts under which these documents were written, Margariti addresses the “structure, mechanisms, procedures, and ultimate role” (p. 111) of trade in the life of medieval Aden with a social historian's eye on the big picture and an economic historian's keen sense of statistical minutia. What distinguishes the present work is its meticulous, critical use of the rich Geniza documents, in careful comparison with what the literary sources have to offer (Ibn al-Mujāwir, and others).

Chapter 4, “The Customshouse”, takes up the issues of clearing customs (al-furḍa and the officers in charge) and taxation (import and export, exemptions, extra charges, and the galley tax). Although some technical details still remain unclear, Margariti guides us to solid quantitative ground, thanks to a painstaking comparative analysis strengthened by detailed tabulations (pp. 127–31). Likewise, Chapter 5, “Ships and Shipping”, and Chapter 6, “Mercantile and Legal Services”, both build upon previous scholarship but with refreshing insight and, at times, revisionist verve. By the latter, I am referring in particular to Margariti's new take on the long-debated issue of the origins and workings of the kārim group (pp. 152–54) in Chapter 5, and, in Chapter 6, her revisionist synthesis of the argument between Goitein and Smith concerning official and non-official positions of merchants' representative(s), the so-called wakīl al-tujjār (pp. 178–88).

Another important methodological question the author raises pertains to the so-called geniza phenomenon of the pre-modern Islamic Near East (pp. 198–99) in light of recent discoveries and studies of other Arabic documents outside the Cairo Geniza, such as the Quseir (al-Quṣayr al-qadīm) documents from the Red Sea trade routes. Margariti makes it clear that for the present investigation the Cairo Geniza documents are of pivotal importance as primary sources only because of the circumstances and contexts in which they were situated. The Geniza documents most frequently cited herein are the ones from the prominent Jewish merchants operating in Aden, Cairo, and India who were directly involved in the India Ocean trade: the Maḍmūns, the Ben Yijūs, and the al-Lebdīs. In this regard, this book is judicious in its assessment and cautious about concluding over-hastily the existence of a widespread, almost universal geniza system of documentation before more groundwork in this area has been conducted. As a student of medieval Arabic documents, I cannot agree more. (As a matter of fact, a 2007 University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation by Katherine Burke argues that, in archaeological terms, the Quseir texts in no way could be categorized as a geniza.)

The book is beautifully produced, and includes illustrations and maps. The maps are excellent, but the quality of the illustrations varies, partly due to their small size. This is understandable. The author and the publisher are to be commended for supplying in transliteration profuse quotes from the original Arabic texts, mostly from the Geniza documents. For a work of such scope, some minor slips are perhaps inevitable: there are a few obvious errors (pp. 207, 208: 696/1154, for 569/1154?). In the transliterations, one discovers here and there some missing or misplaced dots and macrons, as well as occasional inconsistencies in proper names (which appear mostly among lowercase letters, but sometimes in capital letters as well – the name Ṭughtekīn [p. 93], for example, is spelled Ṭughtakīn elsewhere throughout). There are also a few terms and phrases I would have transcribed differently: p. 251, n. 43, lamman > lammā, yudūrū > yudīrū or yadūrū; p. 256, n. 20: ihtudama > ihtadama or uhtudima; p. 264, n. 80, binā'hu > binā'ihi; p. 280, n. 50, inna > in; n. 51, an > anna.