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.
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)
2020 Bentley Prize
Toby Green, King's College, London
A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Univ. of Chicago Press)
Toby Green’s magisterial account puts West and Central Africa at the center of the history of the modern world. The breadth of sources, multidisciplinary approach, and serious attention to oral history allow Green to address the tensions between regional and global history and history and economic theory. Spanning the 14th to the 19th centuries, the book puts Atlantic trade at its core to examine global divergence in the emergence of inequalities, racial hierarchies, and underdevelopment.