Jerry Bentley Prize Recipients
The Jerry Bentley Prize is awarded annually to the best book dealing with global or world-scale history, with connections or comparisons across continents. Awarded for the first time in 2014, the prize honors Jerry Bentley’s tireless efforts to promote the field of world history, and his signal contributions to it. A professor at the University of Hawaii, Bentley was one of the leading figures in the world history movement and the founding editor of the Journal of World History.
2023
James Poskett, Horizons: A Global History of Science (Viking)
2022
Jonathan E. Robins, Oil Palm: A Global History (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2021
Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Univ. of Chicago Press)
2020
Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Univ. of Chicago Press)
2019
Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin Press and Stanford Univ. Press)
2018
Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton Univ. Press)
2017
Jeffrey Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford Univ. Press)
2016
Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2015
Adam Clulow, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (Columbia Univ. Press)
2014
Gregory Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2023 Bentley Prize
James Poskett, University of Warwick
Horizons: A Global History of Science (Viking)
James Poskett’s impressively readable Horizons is an original and capacious corrective to the Eurocentric narrative of the development of science since 1450. Euro-American prejudices, Poskett argues, created a systemic failure to acknowledge and recall non-European scientific contributions with consequences that continue to shape our world. By underlining the work of people in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe, Poskett invites further research into the dependence of both science and its history on global exchanges often fraught with physical and epistemic violence.