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.
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)
2021 Bentley Prize
Chris Otter, Ohio State University
Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Univ. of Chicago Press)
Erudite and compellingly told, Diet for a Large Planet offers a history of changes to Britain’s culture of food production and consumption since the late 18th century, revealing the global implications of the agro-ecological effects of industrialization. Moving beyond polemical critiques of agribusiness and unhealthy diets, Chris Otter demonstrates the pre-1945 capitalist and imperialist roots of systems of biology, agriculture, politics, economics, and popular culture that have evolved into major global environmental and health challenges in the present day.