2019 Recipient

The Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, established in 1995 and sponsored by the Jelavich estate, is awarded annually for a distinguished monograph published on any aspect of Southeast European or Habsburg Studies since 1600, or nineteenth and twentieth- century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history in the previous calendar year.

Winner: Will Smiley
Title: From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia and International Law (Oxford University Press)

This splendidly detailed and skillfully argued monograph offers original perspectives on the histories of the Ottoman and Russian empires, the Black Sea region, and the international law. The Ottoman-Russian wars of the eighteenth century reshaped the map of Eurasia and the Middle East, and they also gave birth to a novel concept – the prisoner of war. Will Smiley most notably argues that a specifically Eurasian “international law” developed under Ottoman auspices, which was not influenced by the West but originating from the specific geopolitical context of the region. From a rule-book on military captivity that was based on slavery and ransom in the early eighteenth century, the Ottomans evolved, in a matter of decades, laws on prisoner release that effectively turned captives into prisoners of war. For a time even European empires played by these rules, before the codified global law of war emerged in the late nineteenth century. Based on an impressive array of sources from Russian, Ottoman, British and Austrian archives, and in a multitude of languages, this book sheds new light on the Russo-Ottoman confrontation. More broadly, it breaks new ground for an emerging field of international legal histories of Eurasia.

Honorable Mention: William D. Godsey