MESA Book Awards
Helen Pfeifer
University of Cambridge
2022 Albert Hourani Book Award Honorable Mention
Helen Pfeifer
Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands
Princeton University Press
Helen Pfeifer’s Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands is a bold and innovative account of the salon, the majlis, as a crucial site for building and sustaining Empire. Pfeifer carefully crafts a trans-national account of elite encounters across languages and literary visions and reveals the role of informal gatherings and conversation in the making of culture, society, politics. The salon, as Pfeifer masterfully shows us, is a particular site of cultural, social, and ethnic encounter, with its own conventions and rules. The relationships and connections formed in the salon had direct consequences on the status, cultural prestige, influence of its participants as politicians and men of power. This beautifully written and engaging work is a significant contribution to the study of early Ottoman history, cosmopolitanism, urbanism, and the interplay between imperial centers and their peripheries.