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.
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)
2019 Bentley Prize
Priya Satia, Stanford Univ.
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin and Stanford Univ. Press)
In analyzing the place of gun manufacturing in industrialization, Priya Satia’s Empire of Guns makes an expansive, multi-layered argument with far-reaching contemporary implications. Starting with an English Quaker gun-manufacturing family, Satia uses an ever-broadening circle of archival sites to show the important role of the state and its imperial aims in the violent beginning of industrialization. She compels us to see world history’s unique ability to reckon with the moral and social implications of global economic change.