Paolo Tedesco is an Italian-born historian, who teaches History at the University of Tübingen.[1] His research focuses on the social and economic history of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, the fates of the peasantry across different types of society, and the long history of capitalism.
Tedesco was born in 1974. He was educated at a public school in Frascati (Rome). From 1994 to 2002 he studied Law in Rome and Urbino and worked for the Financial Administration for several years. He graduated from the University of Rome La Sapienza with a Bachelor’s Degree (BA) in History in 2006 and a Master’s Degree (MA) in Medieval History in 2009. He then undertook postgraduate research in History at the University of Vienna where completed his PhD in 2015 with a thesis entitled Late Roman Italy: Taxation, Settlement and Economy, AD 300-700.
Before joining the Department of History at the University of Tübingen, he was fellow and visiting professor in numerous academic institutions, such as Princeton, Dumbarton Oaks, Notre Dame, and Cambridge.[1]
Tedesco works under a modified Marxist framework on how Mediterranean society changed from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The thrust of his argument is to reaffirm the presence of economic complexity in the pre-industrial world. His recent publications include Writings on the Tributary State and Commercial Capitalism (2024) and Living at the margins: African peasants in an age of extreme, 300-900 CE (2025).[2] Tedesco writes for Jacobin and other outlets in the US, UK, Italy, Germany, France and elsewhere.[3]