The World History Association Book Prize was created in 1999 to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of world history. In 2012, it was renamed in memory of Jerry H. Bentley and his significant contributions to the field of world history and the World History Association.

Authors, publishers, WHA members, or other interested parties may nominate books published during a calendar year. Please note that only books published in the immediately preceding calendar year are eligible (e.g., only books published in 2022 are eligible for the 2023 prize.).

The winner of the Book Prize will receive an award of $500. Formal bestowal of the prize is made at the WHA annual meeting, normally held in June or July. A one-year membership in the WHA and a certificate will also be included with each prize.

For a book to be considered for the prize, one copy of the book must be provided to each of the Bentley Book Prize Committee’s three members. Entries must be received by 1 February. Late entries and submissions which do not adhere to these guidelines will be disqualified.

Click here to submit for the Bentley Book Prize.

In the event that the Book Prize Committee considers the quality of the entries does not warrant the awarding of any prize, the Committee shall have the right to make no award available. A copy of nominated books for the WHA Bentley Book Prize should be sent each member of the Committee.

 

WHA Bentley Book Prize Committee

• Anand A. Yang, Chair
  Box 353650
  Jackson School of International Studies
  University of Washington
  Seattle, WA 98195-3650
• Kris Alexanderson
  History Department
  University of the Pacific
  3601 Pacific Ave.Stockton, CA 95211
• John K. Thornton
  891 Belmont Street
  Watertown, MA 02472

WHA Bentley Book Prize Recipients

2024 (co-winners)

• Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy and Tiago Saraiva, Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press)

• Gunja Sengupta and Awam Amkpa, Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire (University of California Press)

2023

• Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale University Press)

2022 (co-winners)

• Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier (Princeton University Press)
• Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (University of Chicago Press)

2021 (co-winners)

• Gijs Mom, Globalizing Automobilism: Exuberance and the Emergence of Layered Mobility, 1900 – 1980 (Berghahn Books)
• Mira Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press)

2020

• Alan Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (Cambridge University Press)

2019

• Edward Rugemer, Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World (Harvard University Press)

2018 (co-winners)

• Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press)
• Lorelle Semley, To be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge University Press)

2017 (co-winners)

• Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press)
• Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton University Press)

2016

• Robert DuPlessis, Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge University Press)

2015

• Alfred J. Rieber, Struggle for The Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge University Press)

2014

• Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press)

2013 (co-winners)

• Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (University of Chicago Press)
• John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge University Press)

2012

• Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press)

2011

• Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press)

2010

• John R. Chavez, Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World, 1400–2000 (Cambridge University Press)

2009 (co-winners)

• Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders, 1834–1929 (Columbia University Press)
• Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Cambridge University Press)

2008

• Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Harvard University Press)

2007

• Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (Oxford University Press [United Kingdom] and W. W. Norton [North America])

2006

No prize awarded.

2005

• David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (University of California Press)

2004

• Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, vol. 1, Integration on the Mainland (Cambridge University Press)

2003

• Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University Press)

2002

• Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso)

2001 (co-winners)

• John R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World (W. W. Norton)
• Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press)

2000

• James McClellan III and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press)

1999

• Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (University of California Press)