World History Association
Jerry H. Bentley Book Prize winners
The World History Association Book Prize has been awarded since 1999. Following the untimely death of Jerry H. Bentley, the founding and longtime editor of the Journal of World History, the prize was renamed in his honor.
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Bentley Book Prize winners are listed here in chronological order. If you are interested in purchasing one of these volumes, the links provided in their titles are largely to Bookshop.com, an affiliate of the World History Association. Books purchased through Bookshop.com support their authors and publishers
as well as independent booksellers.
1999 award winner
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (University of California Press, 1998).
2000 award winner
James E. McClellan II and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)
2001 award winner
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000)
2001 award winner
J.R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Modern World: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (W.W. Norton, 2000)
2002 award winner
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso Books, 2001)
2003 award winner
Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
2004 award winner
​Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
2005 award winner
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press, 2004)
2007 award winner
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (W.W. Norton, 2006)
2008 award winner
Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Harvard University Press, 2007)
2009 award winner
Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
2009 award winner
Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (Columbia University Press, 2008)
2010 award winner
John R. Chavez, Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
2011 award winner
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010)
2012 award winner
Prasannah Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
2013 award winner
John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)​
2013 award winner
Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press, 2012)​
2014 award winner
Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
2015 award winner
​Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
2016 award winner
Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
2017 award winner
Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 2016)
2017 award winner
Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton University Press, 2016)
2018 award winner
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the West Indian Ocean 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
2018 award winner
Lorelle Semley, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
2019 award winner
Edward R. Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2018)
2020 award winner
Alan Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
2021 award winner
Mira L. Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020)
2021 award winner
Gijs Mom, Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900-1980 (Berghahn Books, 2020)
2022 award winner
Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier (Princeton University Press, 2021)
2022 award winner
Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
2023 award winner
Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale University Press, 2022)
2024 award winner
Gunja SenGupta and Awan Amkpa, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press, 2023)
2024 award winner
Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva, Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press, 2023)
2025 award winner
Marcy Norton, The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 (Harvard University Press, 2024)
