The Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize 2023
The 2023 prize for the best book covered scholarly and trade publications published from 2020 to 2022 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 2026 and will include books published from 2023 to 2025, inclusive.
The committee for the 2023 Best Book Prize was:
• Brian A. Catlos: Relgious Studies, University of Colorado Boulder
• Sharon Kinoshita: Literature, University of California Santa Cruz
• Joshua White: History, University of Virginia
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 two winning books with two cited for honorable mention.
Winner
Carolina López-Ruiz, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (Harvard University Press: 2021)
Prize Committee Statement:
“[A] remarkable interconnectedness among distant communities…a pan-Mediterranean ‘class’ of urban, literate, and sophisticated elites, whose affinities were articulated through common visual, cultural, and economic modes.” Such a characterization would not be out of place in any number of recent works in Mediterranean studies; in Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean, however, Carolina López-Ruiz boldly makes this claim about the hinge between the so-called Dark Ages and the start of the archaic period (c. 700 BC). Explicitly taking on the “Phoenicoskepticism” that is the pendant to the Hellenocentrism of modern historiography, she places the Phoenicians at the very center of this development, treating them not as mere “vectors” or role players in other people’s stories but as formidable historical subjects in their own right. Masterfully suturing and synthesizing evidence from the many fields (archaeology, economic history, epigraphy, art history, etc.) across which studies of the Phoenicians have been fragmented, López-Ruiz identifies the Phoenicians as a Canaanite people from the Levantine city-states of Arwad, Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre. Their original westward expansion was driven by a quest for metals (silver, gold, copper, tin) that took them as far as the Atlantic, leading to the foundation of a coherent network of settlements (the best-known being Carthage), each adapted to local environments and conditions while maintaining common institutions and practices that add up to a recognizable pan-Mediterranean culture. These include distinctive forms and techniques of pottery, metalwork, masonry, stone carving; and of course alphabetic writing, mythological themes, and symbolic and decorative motifs. Written with verve and theoretical sophistication, this book makes a convincing case for recognizing this Phoenician world, a predecessor and perhaps a template for subsequent Greek colonial expansion, as a precocious and impressive Mediterranean society. It is our pleasure to announce Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean as a winner of the Mediterranean Seminar’s Best Book Prize for 2023.
Winner
Jessica M. Marglin, The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton University Press: 2022)
Prize Committee Statement:
Jessica Marglin’s The Shamama Case. Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean offers an extended case study of the life and financial entanglements of the Tunisian Jew, Nissam Shamama, who rose to the heights of wealth and power as a highly-powerful financial functionary in the court of Ottoman-ruled Tunisia in the nineteenth century, and the Dickensian international legal battle which pitted various members of his family against each other in a years-long battle over the deceased Nissam’s estate. Although a meticulously-researched and engagingly-written family history, this is no mere historical biography. Rather, in tracing the travels and travails of Nissam and his clan, Marglin mines a wide array of primary and secondary source material originating in Tunisia, Italy and France, to illuminate questions of identity and citizenship in a multi-religious Mediterranean world teetering on the brink of modernity. We see how in the course of the legal maneuverings and court battles connected with the family’s finances, debts and estates, family members (including siblings, offspring and wives), along with the functionaries of the various governments involved, probed, used and abused established legal custom of the Islamic world and Christian-dominated Europe as well as emerging but as-yet-inchoate ideas of citizenship, religious identity and sovereignty. Prosperous and influential Jews like the Shamama family, vulnerable and structurally disadvantaged by virtue of their faith, engaged in forum shopping and sought to manipulate the institutions related to law and identity established by the hegemonic powers to their own ends. As the book concludes, Marglin not only traces the family’s story across time and continents, through the tragedies of the mid-twentieth century and up to the present, but proposes the paradigm of “legal belonging” as a more appropriate analytical paradigm for this era than citizenship or nationality. This is a model study which will have wide readership, not only among scholars of history, identity, law and politics in modern Europe and the Islamicate Mediterranean, but also, among a broader, educated reading public. It is our pleasure to announce The Shamama Case as a winner of the Mediterranean Seminar’s Best Book Prize for 2023.
Honorable Mention
Andrew Devereux, The Other Side of Empire. Just War in the Mediterranean and the Rise of Early Modern Spain (Cornell University Press: 2020)
Prize Committee Statement:
With impressive scholarship, Andrew Devereux’s The Other Side of Empire shows how strategies and rationales developed by the Iberian kingdoms in the course of their contests in the Mediterranean and Europe shaped Spain’s trans-Atlantic colonial enterprises. Not simply drawing a line from the Spanish kingdom’s crusades in North Africa to the conquest and colonization of New Spain, Devereux explains that the ideas and rationales for Spanish Christian dominion took shape also in the context of contests with rival Christian powers in Europe. After showing how colonial wars in the Mediterranean were characterized as “defensive” campaigns in the name of recovering parts of Christendom that had been conquered by infidels, he analyzes Christian universalism as a response to the crisis within the papal Church and the rivalries of Christian European powers. Next, he studies in turn the wars between European powers, notably France and Spain, and the “reconquest” of North Africa and the Canaries. Fernando the Catholic’s claim to the empty title of King of Jerusalem as a consequence of his conquest of Naples provided the justification for a series of eastern Crusades. While these ultimately remained unrealized they contributed to the emerging paradigm of a “universal (Christian) empire,” which became the conceptual framework not only for Spanish expansion in the “New World” but also its conflict with rival European powers. Based on a range of published and unpublished archival texts, status and chronicles, Devereux’s The Other Side of Empire gives an erudite, clearly-written, and original perspective on the evolution of the Spanish empire; as such, we are pleased to award it honorary mention in the Mediterranean Seminar’s 2023 Best Book Prize competition.
Honorable Mention
Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV's France (Getty Research Institute: 2022)
Prize Committee Statement:
The product of an original and unusual scholarly collaboration between an historian and art historian, Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss’ The Sun King at Sea is a lavishly illustrated volume, simultaneously beautiful and grotesque as it surveys and reproduces in numerous full-color plates the seventeenth- through early eighteenth-century French multimedia image-making project proclaiming the glory of King Louis XIV. This comprehensive program, highly visible but largely forgotten and “hiding in plain sight,” portrayed and celebrated the French ruler’s subjugation, enslavement, and exploitation of “Turks” (i.e. Muslims of varied origins), particularly as oarsmen on his increasingly obsolete but symbolically powerful galley fleet, representing to audiences foreign and domestic the supremacy of French seapower and the triumph of French Catholicism and French commerce in the Mediterranean. Over four beautifully written and accessible chapters, Martin and Weiss detail the representations and realities of French galley slavery and finally put to rest the tired myth that that there were “no slaves in France.”
An impressive range of visual arts are considered here, from paintings, prints, murals and medals to maritime manuals, cannons, and carved ship’s decorations, all read alongside extensive research in French archival sources and multiple overlapping historiographies. An important contribution that serves to draw attention to both the lived experiences and propagandistic portrayals of thousands of Muslims enslaved on French soil, this book is a model for what collaborative interdisciplinary research can accomplish, for which reasons we are pleased to award it honorable mention in the Mediterranean Seminar’s 2023 Best Book Prize competition.