James A. Rawley Prize Recipients
The James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History was created in 1998 in accordance with the terms of a gift from James A. Rawley, Carl Adolph Happold Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. It is offered annually to recognize outstanding historical writing that explores aspects of integration of Atlantic worlds before the 20th century. The prize was established in accordance with the terms of a gift from James A. Rawley, Carl Adolph Happold Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
2023
Adriana Chira, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2022
Tessa Murphy, The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press)
2021
Allison Margaret Bigelow, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Omohundro Inst. of Early American History and Culture and Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2020
Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Omohundro Inst. of Early American History and Culture and the Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2019
Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2018
Padraic Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution (Yale Univ. Press)
2017
David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2016
Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Harvard Univ. Press)
2015
Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press)
Gregory O'Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (Univ. of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Inst. of Early American History and Culture)
2014
Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple's Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2013
W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Harvard Univ. Press)
2012
Rebecca Scott and Jean Hebrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard Univ. Press)
2011
David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale Univ. Press)
James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2010
Michael Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680-1683 (Univ. of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Inst. of Early American History and Culture)
2009
Maria-Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford Univ. Press)
2008
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking Press)
2007
Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton Univ. Press)
2006
Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Univ. of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Inst. of Early American History and Culture)
2005
Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard Univ. Press)
2004
Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Univ. of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Inst. of Early American History and Culture)
2003
John Pagan, Anne Othwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (Oxford Univ. Press)
2002
Patricia Seed, American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches (Univ. of Minnesota Press)
2001
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford Univ. Press)
2000
Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Cornell Univ. Press)
1999
Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of Atlantic World (Stanford Univ. Press)
2023 Rawley Prize
Adriana Chira, Emory University
Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge Univ. Press)
In 19th-century Santiago de Cuba, Afro-descended peasant communities used colonial-era legal custom to negotiate land access and freedom, bit by bit. This beautifully written and methodically researched book elegantly demonstrates how local ideas about race, manumission, and freedom were shaped in relationship to Atlantic processes. Patchwork Freedoms offers a new methodological framework for scholars of slavery and freedom studying spaces beyond plantation economies and large urban centers of the Atlantic world.