2025 Recipient

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State

The W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize, established in 2004 and sponsored by Mary Lincoln in memory of W. Bruce 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 calendar year.  

Winner: Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State (Stanford University Press, 2024)  

Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky’s Empire of Refugees masterfully explores intersections between the Russian and Ottoman empires through the lens of migration and political economy. North Caucasian Muslims play a central role in this story. Both empires used control over this population as a tool of governance and power. Hamed-Troyansky unpacks a complex experience with the violence of displacement but also with refugeedom, post-conquest reforms and policies, and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. This book covers wide ground: the author brings together archival records from across the North and South Caucasus, Turkey, Jordan, Romania, Bulgaria, and elsewhere as well as private letters and petitions written by muhajirs and oral histories with their descendants. These sources allow him to explore the intimate thoughts and ways of life that lay beneath official policy as well as tease out the long lives of displacement, clandestine return, and diasporic nationalism. Empire of Refugees is a groundbreaking contribution to Ottoman history, Russian imperial and North Caucasus history, the history of unfree labor, the history of migration, and the history of refugees and refugee regimes. 

Winner: Polly Zavadivker

Honorable Mention: Masha Kirasirova

Prize Committee: Krista Goff (chair), David Hoffmann, and Kristin Roth-Ey