2026 Shortlisted Titles
The Science of Music: Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond by Mohammad Sadegh Ansari,
published by Cambridge University Press
The Science of Music focuses on the following questions: How did the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition conceptualize and produce scientific knowledge? What can we learn about medieval Islamic civilizations from the way they examined and studied the universe? In answering these fundamental questions, it provides a unique perspective for the study of both musicology and intellectual history. This innovative book raises fascinating questions about how designating music a ‘science’ rather than an ‘art’ impacts our understanding of truth, and reconstructs a richly holistic medieval system of knowledge in the process.
Our reviewer comments:
The Science of Music: Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond is an outstanding piece of research into scientific writings on music in the medieval Islamic world. While the title of the book suggests a relatively narrow focus, the scope is in fact hugely ambitious.
Whatever their background, readers should take away from this part of the book the fact that Islamic theorists of music engaged in a creative and often original way with the ancient Greek tradition, even while they drew on the fundamental concepts of that ancient tradition.
Overall this is a highly illuminating study that makes an important contribution not just to the history of musical theory in the Islamic world, but also to the history of Islamic science and the global history of science more broadly.
Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History
by Fahad Ahmad Bishara
published by University of California Press
Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow, the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around the Persian Gulf and Western Indian Ocean, from 1924 to 1925. Through his account of the voyage, Fahad Ahmad Bishara unpacks a much broader history of circulation and exchange across the Arabian Sea in the time of empire. From their offices in India, Arabia, and East Africa, Gulf merchants used the technologies of colonial capitalism—banks, steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and more—to remake their own regional bazaar economy. In the process, they remade the Gulf itself. Drawing on the Crooked's first-person logbooks, along with letters, notes, and business accounts from a range of port cities, Monsoon Voyagers narrates the still-untold connected histories of the Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Gulf's past, it suggests, played out across the sea as much as it did the land.
Our reviewer comments:
The most extraordinary contribution of Monsoon Voyagers is the depth of the archival research and indeed the discovery of hitherto untouched documentary sources for the history of Kuwait, the Gulf, and the Indian Ocean world. Bishara has long been without peer among Indian Ocean historians in his ability to historical records and material culture from families and communities engaged in trade. This book demonstrates just how remarkable his talents are.
Bishara’s micro-history brings a lost world to life through the richness of the empirical material but also through the drama and the visual imagery of his story telling. Bishara’s rummaging in a Malabar teak chest is almost like discovering Narnia through a wardrobe. The reader can almost hum along with the sea shanties and feel the burn of coir rope slipping through their hands.
In sum this is a beautifully crafted book, a testament to assiduous archival research, and also a historical tale with striking contemporary relevance.
Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor, Indian Ocean History at the University of Virginia
Tied up in Tehran: Women, Social Change, and the Politics of Daily Life in Postrevolutionary Iran
by Norma Claire Moruzzi,
published by Cambridge University Press
Tied Up in Tehran offers a richly interdisciplinary study of ordinary life in Iran since the 1979 revolution and a critical intervention in political theory debates on knowledge and method. Drawing from over ten years of field work in Iran since the 1990s, and originating in the author's surreal experience of being served tangerines during a home invasion in Tehran, Norma Claire Moruzzi examines the experiences of women, young people, artists, and activists: at home, at work, and in the street. These stories - of food and family, film and politics, shopping and crime-reckon with the past, demonstrate resilient democratization in the present, and provide glimpses of a plausible future while offering a refreshing model to ethically engaged modes of study. Moruzzi's lucid and engaging writing explores Iranian daily life as unexpected, contradictory, and full of political promise.
Our reviewer comments:
In this richly interdisciplinary study of post-revolutionary Iran, Moruzzi examines the politics of everyday life rather than formal political institutions or elite political actors. Through a series of finely observed chapters, she explores the deeper meanings and transformations of social practices since the 1979 Revolution.
A particular strength of the book is its style. Each chapter begins with a story, event, or anecdote that draws the reader into the analysis and grounds broader theoretical reflections in concrete experience. The prose is elegant, engaging, and accessible, making complex social and political dynamics understandable to a wide audience without sacrificing analytical depth.
Its originality, interdisciplinary reach, innovative use of source material, analytical sophistication, and accessibility make it an outstanding contribution to the field.
Norma Claire Moruzzi is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at University of Illinois, Chicago
The Invention of the Eastern Question: Sir Robert Liston and Ottoman Diplomacy in the Age of Revolutions
by Ozan Ozavci,
published by IB Tauris
The Invention of the Eastern Question recounts the gripping and dramatic history of how the Russian Empire's invasion of Ottoman Crimea reshaped global politics at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Through the lives of Scottish diplomat Sir Robert Liston and his wife Henrietta (née Marchand) Liston, the book follows the emergence of the Eastern Question- the most dangerous, enduring and complex international relations issue of the century that would claim millions of lives until the 1920s. Drawing on the Listons' official and private letters, personal diaries and a trove of Austrian, British, Dutch, French, Ottoman, and Russian archives, Ozan Ozavci reveals the importance of the art of negotiation in the age of revolutions, showing how the choices of a few people shaped empires, stirred tensions, and left a legacy that would haunt global imperial relations long after the Listons left the world stage.
Our reviewer comments:
Using a wealth of archival sources all over Europe, Ozavci places the Eastern Question and the services of Sir Robert Liston in an historical context in great detail. The reader gets a clear view of the economic, political and cultural struggles of the Ottoman Empire internally and outside firstly with the Muscovy (Russian Empire) then with the European powers.
Ozavci’s book is the result of painstaking archival research and it is masterfully written clarifying a much used and misinterpreted term, the Eastern Question, and this is what makes this work original. It is a must read for students of history, international relations, and the interested general public.
Ozan Ozavci is Associate Professor of Transimperial History at Utrecht University
Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East
by Yossef Rapoport,
published by Princeton University Press
During the later Middle Ages, peasants in Egypt and Greater Syria came to view themselves as members of Arab clans that had originated in the Arabian Peninsula. They expressed their Arab identity by wearing Arab headgear, adopting an Arab dialect, and circulating a new genre of popular epic that told heroic tales of pre-Islamic Arabia. In Becoming Arab, Yossef Rapoport argues that this proliferation of Arab village clans did not come about through mass migration and displacement but reflected an internal transformation. Drawing on extensive documentary, literary, administrative, and material evidence, Rapoport shows that the widespread formation of Arab village clans in late medieval Egypt and Greater Syria was a gradual process, the result of mass rural conversion to Islam and a new landholding regime in which peasants shifted from being landowners to being tenants. After the eleventh century, Rapoport contends, Middle Eastern villagers were turning Arab.
These Arab village clans were not merely administrative regimes imposed from above; villagers enthusiastically embraced their new identities. New converts to Islam adopted Arab lineages to claim status and as a counter-identity to urban-based Turkish elites. Arab identity was used by clans to mobilize rural uprisings against the ruling sultans and to resolve disputes among villagers. Challenging traditional historiography of the Middle East, which views Arab clansmen as pastoralists whose identity separated them from that of the wider peasantry, Rapoport argues that the pervasive establishment of Arab village clans was the most important development in the history of the Middle Eastern countryside in the Islamic era.
Our reviewer comments:
The brilliance of Rapoport’s book lies in its explanation for the late Arabization of Egypt and greater Syria plus its novel, varied use of evidence.
The integration of documents alongside more traditional sources is especially impressive and contributes to the documentary turn in the field of medieval Middle Eastern history, which has already produced some of the most exciting and consequential research.
… the overall result is a major step forward in our understanding of where Arabs really came from, a deceptively complex topic of profound consequence for the history of the medieval Middle East as well as our own day. Rapoport is one of the leading scholars in the field, and here, he shows himself why: he is a fearless scholar with a gift for careful primary source analysis and painting broad historical vistas.
Yossef Rapoport is Professor in Islamic History at Queen Mary University of London
The Rise and Fall of Turkey’s Democrat Party: The Cold War and Illiberalism, 1945-60
by Reuben Silverman,
published by Cambridge University Press
More than sixty years after Turkey’s Democrat Party was removed from office by a military coup and three of its leaders hanged, it remains controversial. For some, it was the defender of a more democratic political order and founder of a dominant center-right political coalition; for others, it ushered in an era of corruption, religious reaction, and subordination to American influence. This study moves beyond such stark binaries. Reuben Silverman details the party’s establishment, development, rule, and removal from power, showing how its leaders transformed themselves from champions of democracy and liberal economics to advocates of illiberal policies. To understand this change, Silverman draws on periodicals and archival documents to detail the Democrat Party’s continuity with Turkey’s late Ottoman and early republican past as well as the changing nature of the American-led Cold War order in which it actively participated.
Our reviewer comments:
The story of Turkey’ s first prolonged experiment with multi-party democracy is not an untouched field … . What is different about Silverman’s account is the impressicve amount of detail which he has collected on the leading personalities and internal workings of the Democrat Party (DP), both at the local and national levels, and its relations with other parties, notably the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Silverman tells his story in an engaging and lively style. There is a wealth of fascinating detail about events and personalities in the voluminous footnotes, drawing on what must be an exhaustive list of primary and secondary sources.
Managing Religious Diversity in the Ottoman Empire
by Masayuki Ueno,
published by Edinburgh University Press
This book makes extensive use of Ottoman archival documents and Armenian sources to examine the changing arrangements between the Ottoman state and non-Muslim religious authorities from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, focusing on Armenians, the second-largest non-Muslim community in the empire. Specifically, it discusses how the ruling circles of the empire reinforced their reliance on non-Muslim religious authorities at the turn of the eighteenth century, and attempted to limit the influence of non-Muslim clergymen and restrict the scope of non-Muslim communal activity from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The book also highlights the responses of the Armenian lay and ecclesiastical elites in Istanbul, who did not sit back and watch as their rights and privileges were curtailed. Rather, they sought ways to protect and even expand their collective rights and find their place in the multireligious empire, both as individuals and as members of a religious community.
Our reviewer comments:
This is a rigorous and valuable work of institutional history.
The book’s most important historiographical achievement is its sustained demolition of the so called millet system as a coherent, centuries-old Ottoman institution.
Ueno has written an important, carefully researched institutional history that advances our understanding of how the Ottoman state managed religious difference in a period of radical political transformation. Specialists in Ottoman history, Armenian studies, and the history of religious law will find it indispensable.