CSSH is thrilled to announce that Carole McGranahan’s CSSH article, “Imperial but Not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the “Naughty” Tibetans,” won this year’s Berkshire Conference of Women Historians article prize (for an article published in 2017) in the category of an article in any field of history other than women, gender, and/or sexuality. Congratulations!
Congratulations to CSSH author Sebastian R. Prange (CSSH 53-2, Outlaw Economics: Doing Business on the Fringes of the State. A Review Essay) on the publication of his new monograph, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge UP, 2018).
Cambridge UP describes the book as follows:
Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, a distinct form of Islamic thought and practice developed among Muslim trading communities of the Indian Ocean. Sebastian R. Prange argues that this ‘Monsoon Islam’ was shaped by merchants not sultans, forged by commercial imperatives rather than in battle, and defined by the reality of Muslims living within non-Muslim societies. Focusing on India’s Malabar Coast, the much-fabled ‘land of pepper’, Prange provides a case study of how Monsoon Islam developed in response to concrete economic, socio-religious, and political challenges. Because communities of Muslim merchants across the Indian Ocean were part of shared commercial, scholarly, and political networks, developments on the Malabar Coast illustrate a broader, trans-oceanic history of the evolution of Islam across monsoon Asia. This history is told through four spaces that are examined in their physical manifestations as well as symbolic meanings: the Port, the Mosque, the Palace, and the Sea.”
