I begin in the early Middle Ages with a publication which is genuinely fieldchanging: Chris Wickham’s The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180 (OUP). Wickham puts together a dizzying array of archaeological and documentary sources from the Byzantine empire, Latin Europe and the Islamic world, and demonstrates the economic importance of Egypt in particular in this period. Internal production and demand (the ‘donkeys’ of his title) are explored in relation to long-distance trade (the ‘boats’). This book recentres our understanding of early medieval economies.