2025 Recipient

Samuel J. Hirst

Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939

The Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, established in 1987 and sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe published in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Samuel J. Hirst, Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2024)  

Samuel J. Hirst’s Against the Liberal Order offers an engaging and thought-provoking study of Soviet-Turkish relations in the interwar era. Hirst contends that two political systems separated by deep ideological divides found common ground in their shared ambition to resist Western economic dominance after World War I. Bolsheviks and Kemalists both identified the state as the prime instrument in their quest to build stronger economies, and Soviet officials regarded aiding the pursuit of economic development in republican Turkey as a major step to challenge European and U.S. hegemony. Drawing on a remarkable set of archival sources from Russia and Turkey, Hirst builds an argument-driven narrative that investigates the birth and evolution of a “statist international” with the ambition to upend entrenched structures of economic domination in Eurasia and beyond. From the hallowed halls of European diplomacy to factory shop floors, and from the fig trade to aviation, Soviet and Turkish bureaucrats, diplomats, engineers, and workers engaged in the construction of a statist national economy that diverged from the Western liberal model. Combining scholarly rigor with inspired writing, Against the Liberal Order is a phenomenal piece of original research in political economy and a notable example of what historians can gain by placing the Soviet Union in its international context.  

Honorable Mentions: Maria Cristina Galmarini and Radoslav Yordanov