Continuing our tradition of posting the prize winners from this year's ASLH meeting, we now celebrate Nandini Chatterjee (University of Exeter). Her book Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords Across Three Indian Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2020) won the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. The Stein Book Award recognizes "the best book in non-US legal history written in English" and "is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history" The citation:
Negotiating Mughal Law is a wonderful combination of philology, imagination, archive sleuthing, and sharp intelligence. Based on a painstakingly collected set of documents in a few languages from a society that lacked a centralized legal archive, it is a micro-history of a family of landlords in central India over several centuries. Chatterjee provides a rich narrative of law as put into practice in the daily lives of a wide range of people. Her attention to methodology is a model of the care and self-criticism that underlies the very best historical research, and for this reason the book is of great value beyond its specific geographical and temporal context.
An Honorable Mention went to recent guest blogger Samuel Fury Childs Daly for A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Congratulations to both authors!
-- Karen Tani
