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Moving Crops and the Scales of History, co-written by School of Social and Political Science (SPS) academic Professor Francesca Bray, has won the 2024 Sidney M. Edelstein Prize and the 2024 Bentley Book Prize. 

Professor Bray, a professor emerita in the Social Anthropology subject area at SPS, wrote the book along with Barbara Hahn (Texas Tech University), Dr John Bosco Lourdusamy (Indian Institute of Technology Madras) and Tiago Saraiva (Drexel University). It focuses on ‘cropscapes’, the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, institutions and ideas that form around a crop. 

The book won two prestigious book prizes in 2024: 

• The Bentley Book Prize - awarded by the World History Association - which recognises outstanding contributions to the field of world history.
• The Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Sidney M. Edelstein Prize, for the year’s outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology.  

In the prize announcement, SHOT said: “The book is exceptionally well researched and also provocative. Despite being written by four authors – over a long period of more than one decade - it is a truly collaborative book, an eight-hands written experiment, that probably could not be written any other way.” 

Professor Bray said: “Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. This leaves us with an exciting profusion of materials that allows us to play fast and bold with conventional historical scales of time, space and agency. Counterposing unfamiliar stories about familiar global commodities like tobacco, tea or wheat, with less familiar histories of crops like date-palms, tulips, cashews and marigolds, Moving Crops argues for new ways to approach not only crops, but any of the other material artefacts or commodities that are the stuff of global history. 

“Moving Crops was enormous fun to write. As four agricultural historians from India, Portugal, the United States and Scotland, we pursued the project as an experiment in collective writing, organised in the structure of improvisational jazz with chapters as sets and cases as riffs -- and intense discussions over various intoxicating beverages. I cannot recommend a better way to write a book!” 

Read the announcement on the World History Association website.

Read the announcement on the Society for the History of Technology website.

Social Anthropology at SPS.