2012 Recipient

The W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, established in 2004 and sponsored by Mary Lincoln, is awarded annually for an author’s first published monograph or scholarly synthesis that is of exceptional merit and lasting significance for the understanding of Russia’s past, published in the previous year.

Winner: Tracy Dennison
Title: The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge University Press)

In The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom, Tracy Dennison offers a compelling new interpretation of Russian serfdom that makes us rethink Russian rural history and the history of Russian economic development. Based on painstaking research and rigorous analysis, the book paints a richly textured and often surprising portrait of serfs’ lives and economic relations on the Voshchaznikovo estate, a Sheremetyevo family holding in the Yaroslavl region. Deftly moving between the micro history of a single estate and the master narratives that have shaped Russian rural and economic history, Dennison skillfully challenges the “peasant myth” that has long presented Russian rural society as dominated by communal landholding and collectivist behavior. In its stead, she reveals a rural world in which serfs participated in markets in land, labour, and credit, all enabled by the institutions of serfdom. The result is an ambitious, nuanced, and thought-provoking treatment of serfdom, Russian society, and the vagaries of Russian economic development in the century preceding emancipation. It is a model of empirical historical scholarship.

Honorable Mention: Kristin Roth-Ey