James Pritchard. In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730. (Cambridge University Press, 2004)Between 1670 and 1730 the French developed at least fourteen colonies in the Americas–Grenada, Martinique, Marie Galante, Guadeloupe, Saint-Christophe, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin, Saint-Croix, Saint-Domingue, Louisiana-Illinois, Canada, Acadia, Placentia-Île Royale, and Cayenne (Guiana). Spread over thousands of miles, with vastly different climates and populations,

John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-1900. McGill-Queens University Press, 2003.For vastness of scale and breadth of significance, it would be difficult to match this book by John C. Weaver. It is a study of the history of the appropriation and distribution of land by European settlers in the

Bryan D. Palmer.  James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890-1928. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2007.Bryan D. Palmer revisits the origins of the American revolutionary left from the experience of James P. Cannon, a Kansas native who militated alongside his socialist and wobbly comrades before the start of his life as a

Natalie Zemon Davis.  Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds, New York, Hill and Wang, 2006.In Trickster Travels, Natalie Zemon Davis has produced an absorbing account of the life of an obscure Muslim diplomat, captive, and scholar. His names were 2009-06-13he was given at birth in Granada in the late 1480s; Giovanni Leone, the Christian name honouring

Brian Cowan. The Social Life of Coffee. The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2005.The historiography of the past twenty years has strongly emphasized, at times to excess, the very close links between public opinion and the more discriminating criticism of power in the Europe of the Enlightenment. In particular,

Luke Clossey. Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit MissionsThe committee was most impressed with three aspects of Closey’s highly readable and engaging book. The first is the boldness of his vision. He has undertaken the first global study of the early modern Jesuit missions (from the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth centuries) by combining

Timothy Brooks, Jérôme Bourgon et Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008.At its most basic level, Death by a Thousand Cuts is the history of lingchi,an infamous form of imperial Chinese capital punishment. But the bookoffers so much more than that. It situates this unique cultural phenomenon, which Chinese authorities abolished in 1905 after nearly a

Nicholas Dew. Orientalism in Louis XIV’s FranceThe jury was particularly impressed with Dew’s masterful reconstruction of more distant western intellectual traditions regarding the East. Dew looks specifically at the period between 1650 and 1715. This sets him apart from most other scholars of European Orientalism who focus primarily on the age of European colonization in Egypt, the

Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence. African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine. Cambridge University Press, 2011 The Wallace K. Ferguson Prize jury was astounded by Brent D. Shaw’s magisterial analysis of sectarian hatred. Though Shaw draws on documents from late antiquity, his methodology, analysis, and conclusions have broad reaching consequences for the history

Tomaz Jardim, The Mauthausen Trial : American Military Justice in Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.The Mauthausen Trial is a masterful study of one of the many Dachau trials organized by the American military after the Second World War to address Nazi war crimes arising from the incarceration and murder of civilians. Thoroughly documented, systematically presented, and

Yanni Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. In States of Obligation, Yanni Kotsonis examines the transformation of state fiscal power in Russia and the Soviet Union between 1855 and 1928. This book is about much more than taxation, however — it is

Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. On Historical Distance is at once an intellectual history and a contribution to historical theory. Its subtle exploration of a major, understudied historiographical theme ranges with consummate skill from Renaissance Italy through Britain in the Enlightenment and Romantic eras to late 20th-century North America. For

Alexia M. Yates, Selling Paris: Property and Commercial Culture in the Fin-de-siècle Capital.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. Alexia Yates’ Selling Paris is an empirically rich, highly persuasive contribution to the new historiography of capitalism that has emerged since the 1990s and especially since the financial crises of 2008-09. In giving centre-stage to the real estate market of

Padraic X. Scanlan, Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Padraic X. Scanlan’s Freedom’s Debtors: British Antislavery in Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution explores British abolitionism within the context of Sierra Leone but more than that he argues that abolitionism was connected

Nora E. Jaffary, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.  Nora Jaffary’s Reproduction and Its Discontents explores all aspects of women’s reproductive lives from virginity through contraception and conception, pregnancy, birth and obstetrics in Mexico from 1750 to 1905. Mexicans usually sought to keep these elements

Wilson Chacko Jacob, For God or Empire: Sayyid Fadl and the Indian Ocean World Tracking the life of Sayyid Fadl (1825-1900) from India’s Malabar Coast to an imperial cemetery in Istanbul, Wilson Chacko Jacob’s book ventures far beyond political or spiritual biography. Indeed, the book upends conventional approaches to historical life-writing: For God or Empire is an

Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire ImperialismBritain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 In this ambitious, compelling, and profoundly important book, Aidan Forth traces “the origins of civilian concentration” in camps established across the British empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moving in particular between South Asia and southern Africa, Forth meticulously and persuasively demonstrates how the premises, techniques, and

Rachel Hope Cleves’ Unspeakable : A Life Beyond Sexual Morality has stunned this jury. In its exposition of Norman Douglas’s lifelong, self-consciously shameless pursuit of sex with children, this book accomplishes several significant feats, even amid a bumper crop of impressive scholarship. For its archival work spanning many types of documents and places, its pioneering use of

Royden Loewen, Mennonite Farmers. A Global History of Place and Sustainability Royden Loewen’s Mennonite Farmers is a landmark scholarly achievement of comparative history, drawing upon the efforts of the “Seven Points on Earth” research team to study agricultural communities scattered across five continents, including four in the global north and three in the global south. Examining how ‘belief influences