Martin A. Klein Prize Recipients
First awarded at the 2011 annual meeting, the Martin A. Klein Prize recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous year. Focusing primarily on continental Africa (including those islands usually treated as countries of Africa), books on any period of African history and from any disciplinary field that incorporates a historical perspective are eligible. The prize committee pays particular attention to methodological innovation, conceptual originality, literary excellence, and reinterpretation of old themes or development of new theoretical perspectives.
2019
Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton Univ. Press)
2018
Kenda Mutongi, Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (Univ. of Chicago Press)
2017
Mustafah Dhada, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-2013 (Bloomsbury)
2016
Nancy Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Duke Univ. Press)
2015
Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-60 (Princeton Univ. Press)
2014
Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965-2007 (Ohio Univ. Press)
2013
Derek Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East Africa Revival: A History of Dissent, c. 1935-1972 (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2012
Bruce Hall, A History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (Cambridge Univ. Press)
Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (MIT Press & Wits Univ. Press)
2011
Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Indiana Univ. Press)
2010
Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in 19th-Century Western Africa (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2019 Klein Prize
Michael A. Gomez, New York Univ.
African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton Univ. Press)
In African Dominion, Michael Gomez upends dominant narratives of empire by moving West Africa to the center of world history. This new chronology of medieval West African state-building also illuminates the categories through which individuals and groups understood themselves and others within these political, economic, and religious spaces. In so doing, Gomez’s sweeping study enriches our understanding of ethnicity, race, gender, slavery, and their intersections. Historians will wrestle with the implications of this book for years to come.