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.
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)
2018 Bentley Prize
Erika Rappaport, University of California, Santa Barbara
A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton Univ. Press)
This magisterial study goes far beyond standard commodity histories, integrating tea into the major global story of the modern world: empire and its demise. Erika Rappaport investigates the intertwined natures of empire and capitalism, exploring mass consumer behavior enabled first by governments and then by international businesses and advertising agencies. The book’s source base, chronology, and geographical coverage are breathtaking in scope and richly demonstrate how tea, its growers, and its consumers have shaped the world.