Nora Barakat

Stanford University

2025 Roger Owen Book Award Honorable Mention

In Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, Nora Barakat demonstrates that a careful view from the margins can upend the established knowledge of a field that takes the experience of a few privileged sites as a stand-in for the region as a whole. Written from years of meticulous archival research in Turkey, Jordan, and the United Kingdom, Bedouin Bureaucrats is an elegant and lucid testament to the power of rigorous, closely-situated social history to transform our understandings of large-scale historical transformations. By tracing across more than two centuries the complex engagements of mobile, pastoralist communities in the arid regions of southern Syria with the Ottoman state, Barakat is able to reframe the era of the Tanzimat not as a uniform unfolding of sedentarization and dispossession but rather as a negotiated process of producing state space in which the book’s eponymous “Bedouin bureaucrats” played a crucial and enduring role.

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