Cundill History Prize 2020 Finalists Announced

The jury of the prestigious Cundill History Prize has announced the finalists for 2020. In the official tweet, the international prize team said that they will declare the winner on December 03. The three finalists include Vincent Brown (Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War), William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company), and Camilla Townsend (Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs).

William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy deals with the rise of the British East India Company, which went on to dominate and colonize the Indian sub-continent for nearly 200 years. William is an authority on the history of the sub-continent, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Muslim World.

Vincent Brown is a Charles Warren Professor of History at the University of Harvard. His book, Tacky’s Revolt, details the history of the Atlantic Slave trade, and the subsequent revolts.  Like his previous works, Prof Brown provides vivid details and articulation on the diasporic and commercial history of slavery.

Fifth Sun, by Camilla Townsend, is a fresh historical treatise on the Aztec Empire and the Spanish Conquests. Like her previous books, this one, too, deals with Mexican and Native American history in great detail. Camilla is also a Professor of History at Rutgers University.

The longlist for the award was revealed in the first week of September and included 16 titles. The shortlist revealed in the last week of September included 10 titles. The Anarchy is published by Bloomsbury, Tacky’s Revolt by the Harvard University Press, and Fifth Sun by Oxford University Press.

What is the Cundill History Prize?

The Cundill History Prize is an elite international award that recognizes top historic books written in the English language every year. The award, administered by the McGill University, honors its founder Peter Cundill’s passion for history. Founded in 2008, the Cundill History Prize also awards $75,000 to the winner, and $10,000 to the two runners-up.

The jury of Cundill History Prize 2020 includes Peter Frankopan (Professor of Global History, Oxford University), Anne Applebaum (Senior Fellow, Johns Hopkins University), Lyse Doucet (Cheif International Correspondent, BBC), Eliga Gould (Professor of History, University of New Hampshire), and Sujit Sivasundaram (Professor of World History, University of Cambridge). Frankopan will chair the Jury.

Cundill History Prize Winners:

Stuart Schwartz – All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (2008)

Lisa Jardine – Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (2009)

Diarmaid MacCulloch – A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2010)

Sergio Luzzatto – Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age (2011)

Stephen Platt – Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, The West, and The Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (2012)

Anne Applebaum – Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (2013)

Gary Bass – The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (2014)

Susan Pedersen – The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (2015)

Thomas Laqueur – The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2016)

Daniel Beer – The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (2017)

Maya Jasanoff – The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2018)

Julia Lovell – Maoism: A Global History (2019)