Since quantitative data is quite rare for early times, studies of premodern trade have focused mostly on the organization of trade. In contrast to an earlier generation of scholarship, which viewed premodern trade as largely a function of political interests, recent studies have emphasized merchants' orientation to the market by showing that they paid close attention to prices and the availability of commodities. In contrast to earlier assumptions that premodern merchants were basically small-scale peddlers, recent studies have shown that they devised an array of financial instruments to facilitate their ventures and a variety of partnerships to minimize risks to their investments. They maintained large expatriate colonies (“trade diasporas”) in foreign lands, and they frequently organized convoys of ships to discourage the attention of pirates.A rich cache of documents discovered in the old synagogue in Cairo has enabled scholars to reconstruct the organization and activities of trading firms, mostly composed of family members and friends, that operated throughout the Mediterranean region, southwest Asia, and the Indian Ocean basin during the period from about 1000 to 1250 ce. Studies based on these documents have confirmed the sophistication of premodern merchants engaged in cross-cultural trade.