Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky wins Stephen White Prize

Valdimir Hamed-Troyansky’s "Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State” (Stanford University Press, 2024) has been selected as the winner of this year’s Stephen White Prize For The Best First Book In Slavonic And East European Studies!

Within a rich and diverse field of submissions, Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State stood out among all other contenders for the extensiveness of its archival research, the breadth of languages at its author’s command, and the exceptional ambition of its transnational and transimperial approach, analysing not only the politics of ethnic categorisation and population management in the Russian and Ottoman Empires’ shaping of the North Caucasus but also articulating the subjectivities of the displaced through rich cultural materials, stories and examples. Its evidence that the Ottoman Empire established a nonwestern, non-secular refugee management regime in response to Muslims fleeing Russian colonisation of the North Caucasus, predating the resettlement models of twentieth-century international institutions, and its ability to see this case within the global history of indigenous displacement during the ‘first wave’ of globalisation, would itself be a major contribution to the history of modern humanitarianism, and would supply a missing piece of the puzzle for understanding later modernisation in this area where peoples were transformed from imperial subjects into nation-state citizens. But more than that, this impressively crafted transnational history of population displacement succeeds in bringing this history of Russian colonisation of the Caucasus into unprecedented dialogue with the dislocations of the late nineteenth-century Balkans, adding new contours to our understandings of ethnonationalism and violence in the turbulent 1870s. Equally organically, it then connects both regions into the histories of Anatolia and the Levant – spaces which have conventionally been left outside the purview of Slavonic and East European studies yet demand to be brought under the same lens in order to understand how we arrived at today’s world. The depth with which it fulfils the immense task of tracing its communities through so many archives, countries and literatures, and the reframing it calls for as a result, makes Empire of Refugees a thoroughly deserving winner of the second Stephen White Prize.

Lyubomir Pozharliev, "Claire Morelon, Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920” (Cambridge University Press, 2024), has been commended with an honourable mention:

Claire Morelon’s immensely readable, intellectually creative, ambitious and original study of the transition of Prague from Habsburg ‘third city’ to Czechoslovak capital, Streetscapes of War and Revolution: Prague 1914-1920, powerfully brings to life for readers the multi-sensory experience of what it was like for Prague’s inhabitants, examining major political and social processes through a city as a political and social world and a material assembly where notions of nationalism, patriotism and empire are forged and articulated. As well as its profound revision and enrichment of established understandings of the history of Prague in this period, in ‘penetrating the night of war’, the book constitutes a model that may not only be emulated for comparable historical urban contexts, but also speak to today’s experience of residents of cities entangled in ongoing wars, directly and remotely. The judges especially appreciated the way the author had transformed a large and complex range of primary, archival material and rigorous engagement with an imposing body of existing literature into a lively, moving and absorbing narrative that in many years could have been a worthy winner of this prize.