Friedrich Katz Prize Recipients
The Friedrich Katz Prize is awarded annually to the best book published in English focusing on Latin America, including the Caribbean. Awarded for the first time in 2014, the prize honors honors Friedrich Katz, an Austrian-born specialist in Latin American history, whose nearly 50-year career inspired dozens of students and colleagues in the field.
2023
Brian P. Owensby, New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy (Stanford Univ. Press)
2022
Heather Flynn Roller, Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil (Stanford Univ. Press)
2021
Larissa Brewer-García, Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2020
Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Harvard Univ. Press)
2019
Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Harvard Univ. Press)
2018
Lisa Sousa, The Woman Who Turned Into a Jaguar, and Other Narratives of Native Women in Archives of Colonial Mexico (Stanford Univ. Press)
2017
Jane Mangan, Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain (Oxford Univ. Press)
2016
Edward Beatty, Technology and the Search for Progress in Modern Mexico (Univ. of California Press)
2015
Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2014
Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2023 Katz Prize
Brian P. Owensby, University of Virginia
New World of Gain: Europeans, Guaraní, and the Global Origins of Modern Economy (Stanford Univ. Press)
New World of Gain retells the history of colonial encounter between Europeans and Guaraní as a dialectic of gain and mutuality. Brian P. Owensby uncovers how contrasting notions of the moral significance of economic exchanges shaped local negotiations about labor and goods and prompted important changes in imperial institutions and in global philosophical debates. This ambitious, deeply researched, precisely written, and innovative book promises to deeply impact the historiography of multiple regions and periods.