AHA Awards & Grants Awards & Prizes Jerry Bentley Prize
The 2020 submission deadline has passed. Awardees will be announced this fall.
In 2014 the American Historical Association established the Jerry Bentley Prize in World History, which 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. The Bentley prize is awarded annually to the best book in each calendar year in the field of world history. See the list of past recipients.
The general rules for submission are:
Any book published in English dealing with global or world-scale history, with connections or comparisons across continents, in any period will be eligible.
Books bearing a copyright of 2020 are eligible for the 2021 prize.
Nomination submissions may be made by an author or by a publisher. Publishers may submit as many entries as they wish. Authors or publishers may submit the same book for multiple AHA prizes.
Nominators must complete an online prize submission form for each book submitted.
One copy of each entry must be sent to each committee member and clearly labeled "Bentley Prize Entry." Print copies preferred unless otherwise indicated. If only e-copy is available, please contact review committee members beforehand to arrange submission format.
Please Note: Entries must be received by May 15, 2021, to be eligible for the 2021 competition. Entries will not be returned. Recipients will be announced on the AHA website in October 2021 and recognized during a ceremony at the January 2022 AHA annual meeting in New Orleans.
For questions, please contact the Prize Administrator.
Photo of Jerry Bentley, courtesy of University of Hawai'i history department.
This year's submission deadline has passed.
The review committee contact information and prize submission form for the next competition will be posted by March 1 for submissions due May 15.
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.
Bentley Prize Recipients