SGMH announces first book proposal prizes

BASEES is delighted to announce the winner and runners up of the Study Group for Minority History’s prize for the best first book proposal.

Winner: Andrea Gritti, The Epitome of All That is Modern: The Rise and Fall of Jewish Trading Houses in the Late Ottoman Balkans

Andrea Gritti’s proposal represents a significant contribution to both the study of European Jewish history and the economic development of the Ottoman Empire in the decades immediately prior to its political dissolution in 1922. Key to this is the author’s commitment to expanding the geographical and chronological scope of their analysis. While the Ottoman Jewish population can hardly be described as an under-researched topic, scholarship remains fixated on developments after 1912, notably the transfer of the city of Thessaloniki’s sovereignty to Greece. Through its focus on the nineteenth century, the study promises to further our understanding of this transition while also exploring how the Ottoman Jewish trading houses played a pivotal role in the economic development of the wider Balkans. This challenges much of the current historiographical consensus, which continues to largely conflate these modernisation processes with Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

From a social perspective, Gritti’s project can offer an important counterpoint to earlier scholarship’s emphasis on the elite perspectives and political developments in Thessaloniki and Istanbul. By reorienting the discussion towards the role these trading houses played in regional economic development, the study promises to give voice to those who have long existed at the margins of Ottoman history.

Honourable Mention: Anna Adorjáni, Belonging in Transition. Non-territorial autonomy in Austria-Hungary

Anna Adorjáni’s book project, entitled ‘Belonging in Transition. Non-territorial autonomy in Austria-Hungary’, is a cutting-edge study that enables us to rethink some of the big questions of nationalism, identity, minority activism, and conceptions of the state in the Habsburg Empire and beyond. Over the past decades, historians have revised the traditional narrative of the Habsburg Empire as a ‘prison of nations’. Adorjáni’s book project builds on this, showing how liberal and socialist activists tried to make the country a place for diverse communities and find a place in the multinational state. They reckoned with the fact that the lived reality of people of multiple languages, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, etc. had never lived in homogenous areas and thereby challenged nationalists’ claims and concepts with proposals for national rights in a multinational society – non-territorial autonomy. While centred on the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Empire, these questions were discussed by countless people throughout the continent and beyond, from the Baltic to the Adriatic and everywhere in between.

Today, in times of surging exclusionary ethnic nationalism and nationalist conflicts, people may turn to these debates and strategies of the late Habsburg state and its successors, and consider them as highly relevant for the questions of today. Anna Adorjáni’s book project is a vitally important contribution to this.

Honourable Mention: Agata Blaszczyk, The Golden Generation? Polish Refugees, Social Democracy and the Power of State Generosity

Refugee history has seen impressive growth in the past few years, with scholarship targeting causes of displacement, legal, political, or humanitarian responses, local and international reactions, experiences of refugeedom, or, indeed, meanings of spaces of refugeedom. Agata Blaszczyk’s book project, ‘the Golden Generation? Polish Refugees, Social Democracy and the Power of State Generosity’, promises a significant contribution to this burgeoning historiography in a study of how the post-war British state responded to displacement of suffering Poles in the era of the Second World War. By investigating the 1947 Polish Resettlement Scheme, this study proposes a rethinking of the ambitions, promises, and limitations of British social democracy and its long-celebrated post-war welfare when faced with Polish refugees. By originally intertwining political history, social history, history of experience, as well as digital history, Blaszczyk’s study adds new layers to understanding Great Britain as a space of refuge for eastern Europeans in the twentieth century.

This study is eerily relevant in the era of an ever-growing illegalisation of forced displacement in relationship to citizen-centric welfare. Ultimately, this book project contributes to understanding the historical realities of refugees as legal and social minorities in so-called social democratic systems.