Established in 1968 through the generosity of the late Dr. Sidney Edelstein, the Edelstein Prize is awarded by SHOT to the author of an outstanding scholarly book in the history of technology published during any of the three years preceding the award.
Taking “cropscapes” (the assemblages of crops, places, technologies, and cultures) as a lens to explore and redefine the writing of history, this collective book is both refreshing and erudite. The authors embrace the Annales longue durée and the more recent local histories, and they use and display a broad variety of sources and secondary literature, opting for either less known historians, or for classics (like Bloch and Braudel). Despite the book’s title, they pay as much attention to movement and travels, as to “roots”, places, and settling. By including plants as diverse as dates, tobacco, rice, oranges, tulips, and many others, they offer ways to decenter the history of technology from Western modernizing narratives (temporally and geographically) and to expand the methods and categories used by historians of technology.
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.