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.
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)
2017 Bentley Prize
Jeffrey James Byrne, Univ. of British Columbia
Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford Univ. Press)
This study of the Algerian National Liberation Front’s role in promoting anticolonial revolutionary movements and South–South alliances reconceptualizes newly independent Algeria, not as a proxy site of superpower rivalry, but rather as an important political actor fomenting decolonization, shaping Cold War competition, and generating an increasingly state-centric global order. Byrne’s account of Algeria’s centrality to international networks of anticolonial nationalism is built out of meticulous archival work in Africa, Europe, and North America.