Jennifer Keating awarded prestigious Royal Historical Society Gladstone Award in 2023
Dr Jennifer Keating (UCD School of History), was named the Royal Historical Society's (RHS) 2023 winner of the prestigious Gladstone Prize for her work 'On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia'. The Gladstone Prize is awarded annually for a work of history on a topic not primarily related to British history that is the author’s first sole book publication.
The judges' citation read:
Jennifer Keating’s On Arid Ground is a path-breaking study of the way empire and environment interacted in Central Asia through the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This book innovates on a number of fronts, not least by showing the importance of ecology and environment in forcing the Russian Empire to adapt its long-term geopolitical strategy. It significantly changes the way we think of Russian Empire-building and outlines a fascinating picture of land reclamation, settlement and commodity development, while often putting to the fore actors beyond the human, from sandstorms to termites.
Inspiring and important, it will be influential for historians working on other imperial contexts, and above all for our thinking about environment and human social and political organisation today.
Jennifer's first monograph, 'On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia', is the first comprehensive study of broad-based environmental change in imperial Central Asia. Jennifer uses the frame of political ecology to uncover the social, economic, and political capital located in nature by state actors, Central Asian communities, imperial settlers, and Slavic peasant migrants and offers new perspectives on the functions and dysfunctions of Russian imperial rule. 'On Arid Ground' draws on a wide range of archival and published sources, including maps, exhibitions, state correspondence, telegrams, petitions, epic poems, scientific surveys, periodicals, newspapers, and more and emphasises the importance of scale, connection, synchronicity, and both discursive and physical action in understanding environmental change.
Jennifer was "extremely honoured to be awarded this prestigious Prize, and delighted to see the Royal Historical Society highlighting environmental history as an important way of thinking about politics and the past, both in global perspective and in Eurasian contexts in particular. We know comparatively little about the ways in which environmental change intersected with politics on local, regional and imperial scales in the region, and hopefully this book goes some way to signposting future directions for research into the relationship between the environment, empire-building, economic development and anti-colonial resistance."
Colourised version of Library of Congress LC-P87- 109x At the fifth water supply control, irrigation canal in the Murgab Estate between 1905 and 1915.
About the Gladstone Prize
The Gladstone Book Prize was launched in 1998 following a founding donation from the Gladstone Memorial Trust on the centenary of William Gladstone’s death. The prize offers an annual award of £1,000 for a work of history on a topic not primarily related to British history that is the author’s first sole book publication. In 2015, the Linbury Trust made a generous donation of £12,500 in support of the Gladstone Prize.
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