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2025 American Society of Papyrologists Book Prize Winner

Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm is the first environmental history of Egypt’s Fayyūm depression. The volume studies human relationships with flowing water, from the third century BCE to the thirteenth century CE. Until the arrival of modern perennial irrigation in the nineteenth century, the Fayyūm was the only region of premodern Egypt to be irrigated by a network of artificial canals. By linking large numbers of rural communities together in shared dependence on this public irrigation infrastructure, canalization introduced to Egypt a radically new way of interacting both with the water of the Nile and with fellow farmers. Drawing upon ancient Greek papyri, medieval Arabic literature, and modern comparative evidence, this book explores the ways in which the Nile’s water, local farmers, and state power together continually reshaped this irrigated landscape over more than thirteen centuries. Following human/water relationships through both space and time further helps to erode disciplinary boundaries and bring multiple periods of Egyptian history into contact with one another.

"Gender is an absolute ground zero for most human societies," writes David William Foster, "an absolute horizon of social subjectivity." In this book, he examines gender issues in thirteen Brazilian films made (with one exception) after the 1985 return to constitutional democracy and elimination of censorship to show how these issues arise from and comment on the sociohistorical reality of contemporary Brazilian society.

Foster organizes his study around three broad themes: construction of masculinity, constructions of feminine and feminist identities, and same-sex positionings and social power. Within his discussions of individual films ranging from Jorge um brasileiro to A hora da estrela to Beijo no asfalto, he offers new ways of understanding national ideals and stereotypes, sexual dissidence (homoeroticism and transgenderism), heroic models, U.S./Brazilian relations, revolutionary struggle, and human rights violations. As the first study of Brazilian cinematic representations of gender ideology in English or Portuguese, this book will be important reading in film and cultural studies.

Cities are active policy innovators of global importance, whether responding to climate change, migration, poverty, or health disparities, or aiming to generate growth. Since cities adapt to the needs and interests of global capital, they may implement policies that slight the well-being of everyday residents and the most vulnerable. How cities choose to contribute to a democratic and sustainable future reveals dimensions of political life playing out in society at large.

Global Urban Policy suggests that to understand contemporary societal transformation—and political and policy processes more generally—we need to study the policies that cities create and implement. Going beyond thinking of “urban” as a physical site, the authors show that an urban mode of life is one marked by diversity, complexity, chaos, flexibility, and ongoing change. With eleven empirical case studies, the authors examine issues including housing and urban development, migration, climate change, and crime in cities as varied as Berlin, Medellín, Chicago, Accra, Guangzhou, São Paulo, Mumbai, and Saint Etienne. The studies show how contemporary confrontations between public and private property, power and justice, participation and exclusion, wealth and poverty, and emerging technology and existing economic, social, and political structures take physical form in cities. Global Urban Policy engages with theoretical developments in public policy, urban politics, and urban studies to develop and demonstrate a framework for urban policy analysis.

Drawing on a deep knowledge of history and human affairs, the essays pinpoint the key issues facing Christians and non-believers in determining the future of modern democratic life

This is an authoritative study of the administrative, social, and economic structure of Afghanistan during a decisive stage in its history. The period covered—the reign of the "Iron" Amir Rahman Khan—was in many ways the beginning of modern Afghanistan as a cohesive nation. Although Afghanistan had emerged as an entity in 1747, it was actually under the Amir that its borders were established, its internal unification completed, and the modern concept of nationhood implanted.

Kakar approaches this complex process by taking into consideration both the internal and the external forces that influenced its development. Thus, modernization, centralization, and nationalization are seen as both defensive reactions to European imperialism and necessary preconditions to capital formation and, consequently, industrialization.

The first part of the book covers the government of the Amir, from the personality of the ruler down to the operation of his new bureaucrats at the local level. Here Kakar presents a comprehensive treatment of the Afghan system of taxation and local government. The second part views these economic and social institutions from the perspective of the major segments of the populace—nomads, townsmen, tribes, women, slaves, landowners, mullahs, merchants, and so forth.

In 1947, Arabs made up two-thirds of the population of Palestine, and they owned most of its cultivable land. Why then, did they "lose" their homes and land to a relatively small Jewish community just emerging from the shocks of World War II? Did the Palestinians "lose" their homeland because they were backward, primitive, and reactionary? Or was Israel the product of persistent victimization of Palestinian Arabs by an imperialist power which supported Zionist colonization? Did the Palestinians sell each other out? Or were they helpless sufferers in the face of a sophisticated enemy with endless resources?

Too often discussions of Palestine are couched in such rhetorical language, based on the assumption that either Jews or Arabs are morally to blame for historical realities. This study seeks to go beyond attributions of responsibility to investigate the concrete conditions which determined and limited Palestinian Arab actions between 1920 and 1948. It was during that period, while Great Britain governed the area under a League of Nations mandate, that Palestine both emerged and disappeared as a modern political entity.

Many studies of Palestinian Arab nationalism have looked to Zionism as the primary agent of change in the region. Miller assumes the impact of Jewish settlement but goes beyond these earlier studies to explore the way in which policies of the Palestine government affected the daily lives of villagers—the majority of the population—and their understanding of the changes occurring around them. In this way, what emerges is a detailed analysis of the influence, for good or ill, that government policy had on village community life.

Based largely on archival sources never before used, this work allows the reader to gain a deeper appreciation of the internal life of the rural community, which had previously received relatively little attention. Understanding the experiences of Palestinians before 1948 helps us to comprehend immeasurably better the continuity of movements for Palestinian statehood as well as the continuing tensions and problems on the West Bank today.