The Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize 2020

The 2020 Best Book Prize covered scholarly and trade publications published from 2016 to 2019 inclusive. The committee was most interested in books that broke new ground conceptually or methodologically, were comparative and/or interdisciplinary, that emphasized the intercultural/interregional/inter-religious contact, and that were “of” rather than merely “in” the Mediterranean. Although we focussed on the pre- and Early Modern, books ranging from any period were considered. Books from any of the relevant Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines were welcome, including but not limited to all fields of history, art and material culture, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. The Mediterranean is broadly construed as the region centered on the sea, but including connected hinterlands in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the western Indian Ocean, the Near East and Central Asia.

The next round of the Best Book Prize will be held in 2022 and will include books published from 2020 to 2022, inclusive.

The committee for the 2020 Best Book Prize was:
• Brian A. Catlos: Relgious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
• Sharon Kinoshita: Literature, University of California Santa Cruz
• Oumelbanine Zhiri: Literature: University of California San Diego

The committee received entries ranging from Antiquity to the contemporary in disciplines including social, economic and political history, art and architecture, language, literature and culture. After considerable deliberation of the excellent entries received, the committee unanimously agreed on the winning book and one cited for honorable mention.

Winner
Konstantina Zanou, Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation (Oxford: 2018) 
This book charts a neglected but crucial process in Mediterranean history: the confusing and complex ways in which the premodern, multi-ethnic empires came to be replaced in the Eastern part of the sea by the modern nation-states of Italy and Greece. These momentous historical changes are examined through the prism of individual lives of intellectuals and politicians, thanks to an elegant combination of microhistory and microhistory in an era that served as a juncture between the Modern and Pre-Modern. Guiding the reader through the strategies these writers adopted to reinvent their lives, their languages, and their identities, and that of the nations they helped bring to life, Zanou maps a fascinating transnational, trans-imperial Mediterranean geography during an era of turbulent change, in a beautifully researched and written intervention in intellectual global history.

Honorable Mention
Joshua White,  Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford: 2018) 
Focusing on the period beginning with the battle of Lepanto and extending through the so-called “Northern Invasion” of the English and the Dutch into the Mediterranean, this book examines the central role piracy played in the emergence of an “Ottoman Mediterranean” as a legal space shaped by multiple, ever-shifting factors. In this wide-ranging and beautifully written study, archival sources spanning both religious and imperial spheres of law become windows onto the astonishing complexity of an early modern Mediterranean in which there were “no hard and fast lines separating Christian and Muslim spheres, but rather a culture of legal pluralism in which merchants, travelers, and seamen took advantage of multiple overlapping jurisdictions.”