AGAPS Annual Research Awards
2021 AGAPS Biennial Book Award Winner:
Dr. Rosie Bsheer, Harvard University
Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia
Rosie Bsheer’s Archive Wars is a forceful and inspiring reminder of what superb and unflinching scholarship and writing can do. Based on exciting fieldwork, Archive Wars examines the erasing and building of history in Saudi Arabia. It is one of those rare books that focuses our attention – without hesitation – on the broader stakes and processes of modern state formation while detailing the contingencies and tensions of power. It exposes with clarity and precision links between political-economy, state power, and the materiality of documents and the built environment. Attempts to erase and rewrite the past in Saudi Arabia will have to contend with Rosie Bsheer’s archive.
Honorable Mention:
Dr. Noora Lori, Boston University
Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf
Noora Lori’s meticulously researched book takes aim at the apparent paradoxes and uncertainties of citizenship and jurisdiction in the UAE to highlight mechanisms of modern governance. Attuned to the gradations and requirements of formal belonging, Offshore Citizens identifies both the state systems that structure inclusions and exclusions and the subtle practices of those caught within the incomplete and shifting terrain of membership. Lori’s careful attention to the vagaries of official recognition is never abstract, reminding us at every step the human toll that the requirement of modern citizenship takes.
2021 AGAPS Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award Winner
Dr. Nicholas Paul Roberts, University of Notre Dame
A Sea of Wealth: Sayyid Sa’id bin Sultan, His Omani Empire, and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace
Through an historical examination of 19th Century Oman and the empire forged by Sa’id bin Sultan, this dissertation compellingly rethinks the centrality of Oman — and, by proxy, all of the Arabian Peninsula — in the global history of the present. Roberts illuminates the integral role that the Omani empire played in stitching the ancient Indian Ocean marketplace to the nascent Atlantic oceanic marketplace. As he shows us, Sa’id bin Sultan’s empire played a much more integral role in the development of the capitalist world system than is commonly portrayed. By his well-evidenced arguments, to consign Oman, Arabia, or Zanzibar to Wallerstein’s periphery diminishes the scope of Oman’s agency and power in the 19th Century Indian Ocean world. The empirical foundations of Roberts' work instead reveal that, “in this empire Arabs, Africans, Indians, Europeans, and Americans were all cocreators of a world in the making.”
As Roberts goes about “unpacking the formation, consolidation, and workings of the empire,” he’s able to demonstrate significant differences from European empires in the relations of power by which Sa’id bin Sultan’s empire was constructed and maintained; he’s able to challenge the perceived hegemony of the British empire’s footprint in the Indian Ocean world in the first half of the 19th Century; he’s able to portray the intricacies by which the empire managed difference and established vibrant cosmopolitan spaces; and he’s able to affirm the position of strength from which Sa’id bin Sultan and the Omani empire interacted with the other empires on the seas in that century. Atop of those notable achievements and contributions, the dissertation is clearly written and communicated with minimal academic jargon, thereby ensuring the work will have broad appeal to scholars and readers beyond the discipline of history, and beyond even the academic sphere. Methodologically, the dissertation captivatingly balances micro and macro scales of analysis: readers come away even with some glint of Sa’id bin Sultan’s persona and the role it played in the empire he built. The dissertation incorporates a constellation of primary sources drawn from eight different archives in Oman, the United States, East Africa, and Europe. In addition to presenting a bevy of those primary sources, Roberts equally has significant methodological contributions that he articulates and demonstrates. All are neatly woven into the dissertation’s central narrative.
Most refreshingly, this dissertation carves out its contribution to contemporary scholarship not through the polemical deforestation of the scholarly work and theoretical paradigms that preceded it, but rather by cumulatively building on that previous work. This constructive approach makes reference to a notable array of interdisciplinary work, but more importantly also incorporates a constellation of local and regional scholars and historians whose analyses are broadcasted in this dissertation. Altogether, the foundational premise of this work is grounded in an inclusive, collaborative, impartial, and humanistic scholarly mission. In his path to these objectives, Roberts relies on the presentation and careful assessment of evidence, as well as the sustained consideration of countervailing interpretations of that evidence. In summary, the dissertation will be eminently useful to Gulf scholars in an array of different disciplinary traditions, and will equally help better connect both Gulf history and the Gulf present to understandings of the global and universal human condition.
Honorable Mention
Dr. Alex Cobb Boodrookas, New York University
The Making of a Migrant Working Class: Contesting Citizenship in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, 1925-1975
This dissertation is a detailed and spectacularly well-written assertion of the central role that imperial, colonial, and corporate entities played in the historical construction of the migrant working class that toils on the Arabian Peninsula to this day. With a swath of empirical support drawn from historical archives and other sources, Boodrookas's argument hinges on the central role that citizenship and its exclusions played in the social control implemented by local and imperial officials. The dissertation helps readers see how the designations of both citizen and non-citizen were historically co-constructed. Through this lens, Boodrookas envisions these emergent GCC states as quintessential “deportation states.” As he contends, it was against the increasingly coherent powers of the state/corporate nexus that coalitions of reformers, labor leaders, and anti-colonial nationalists first coalesced. This dissertation is, foremost, concerned with the power of these bottom-up labor movements.
Altogether, the dissertation seeks to establish a major and significant set of revisions to our historical understandings of migration, citizenship, and the historical architecture of power on the Arabian Peninsula. It does so by spotlighting the role that labor strikes, deportation policies and practices, and corporate Anglo-American forms of white supremacy played in the steady, incremental consolidation of power in the monarchical Arab states extant today. With a masterful and comprehensive command of the latest scholarly literature, and steeped in the considerations of identity, race, and power that impel much contemporary scholarship today, this dissertation will find a broad audience with Gulf scholars committed to contemporary renditions of decolonization and social justice.