This year the prize is split between two very different, yet equally impressive and important books: Mei Mei Rado, The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale, 2025) and Dan Edelstein, The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin (Princeton, 2025). Together, these two books represent the best of our field.
Mei-Mei Rado’s The Empire’s New Cloth dazzles with its deep research into textiles and their cross-cultural uses in both Asia and Europe, demonstrating mastery of different languages, cultures, and archives in both China and France, as well as the technical aspects of silk manufacture and tapestry weaving. She rewrites the received understanding of Orientalism, arguing instead that chinoiserie is a shared, fluid, global style “floating back and forth between China and Europe, evoking in each place something foreign and exotic while also adapting to local cultural desires and expectations.” Rado synthesizes impressive archival research with close readings of visual and literary sources, situating material practices within broader debates about race, labor, and sovereignty. The book’s argument reframes familiar narratives of empire by foregrounding material practices that linked plantation economies, powerful empires, artisanal production, and elite display. The result is a study that speaks across disciplines while remaining focused on such a diverse and unique corpus.
Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come is a tour de force across time and space. Its central insight is that revolutions are conceptual, not sociological, events—thus, it is also a potent defense of the history of ideas. By mapping the circulation of ideas about sovereignty, rights, and regeneration, he shows how Enlightenment thinkers created a horizon of anticipation that reoriented political time. The book situates canonical figures alongside lesser-known writers to reveal the broader discursive field in which revolutionary futures were articulated. The book is a timely reminder of the limits of political moderation as well as a caution against jumping at every revolutionary call. It is breathtaking in its temporal and geographic scope while all the while grounding the fundamental traits of modern revolution in the eighteenth century. Most important are his powerful concluding observations about how a regime shifts seamlessly from democracy to dictatorship. He ends the book with a prescient warning: “Our biggest fear should be that no one even notices the revolution to come.”
Together, these two books stand up for the importance of ideas and proclaim the eighteenth century’s enduring centrality in our understanding of modernity, even as they remind us of the globally interconnected nature of our period. They also represent research excellence of two very different types: archival understanding and close study of material objects on the one hand; and synthetic mastery of a vast corpus of texts and ideas on the other. Between them, they truly represent the best of our field.