Cundill History Prize 2026: Beth Lew-Williams Wins for Chinese Exclusion History
Princeton historian Beth Lew-Williams has won the 2026 Cundill History Prize, worth US$75,000, for John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law. The winner was announced on the evening of Friday, 23 October 2026, at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal, where the prize is administered by McGill University.
The two other finalists, Jonathan Cheng and Alexander Lee, will each receive US$10,000. Jury chair Emily Greenwood, the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Classics at Harvard University, called the winning book “a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work”.
Who Is Beth Lew-Williams?
Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. She is also the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, a study of anti-Chinese violence and exclusion in the American West.
Her new book continues that work, but shifts the focus from the violence itself to the legal system that shaped Chinese lives and to the people who lived under it.
What Is John Doe Chinaman About?
According to the prize announcement, the book is a history of the laws that constrained the lives of Chinese immigrants in the 19th-century American West, from the 1850s to the 1920s. It also recovers the stories of Chinese Americans who negotiated, circumvented and resisted discrimination, “refusing to accept a conditional place in American life”.
The title refers to the way these laws reduced Chinese migrants to anonymous stereotypes. Lew-Williams used extensive quantitative research and “big data” methods to examine court records, immigration files and personal accounts, uncovering decades of anti-Chinese legislation and, in the prize’s words, restoring “individuality and humanity to lives once obscured by prejudice”.
Greenwood said the author combined “data algorithms to process legal and bureaucratic records and trenchant storytelling” to document “the ghosting of these lives in the historical record, retrieving Chinese voices that show us some of what we are missing”.
What Did the Other Judges Say?
The 2026 jury also included Ned Blackhawk of Yale University, the journalist and author Fergal Keane, and Barbara Weinstein of New York University, a past president of the American Historical Association.
Blackhawk linked the book directly to current politics: “At a time when debates about citizenship and deportation are roiling the United States, Beth Lew-Williams reaches back into long-standing histories of race and exclusion.” Keane called it “a landmark work”, adding that it was “not only a compelling read, but an essential one”. Weinstein said it showed how a historian “can illuminate the experiences of people who, at first glance, seem to be nearly invisible in the historical archives”.
- Winner: Beth Lew-Williams, John Doe Chinaman (US$75,000).
- Finalists: Jonathan Cheng and Alexander Lee (US$10,000 each).
- Jury chair: Emily Greenwood, Harvard University.
- Announced: 23 October 2026, Montreal.
- Administered by: McGill University.
Who Has Won the Cundill Prize Before?
Lew-Williams joins a list of recent winners that includes Lyndal Roper (2025), Kathleen DuVal (2024) and Tania Branigan (2023). The Cundill is one of the most valuable international prizes for a single work of history in English, and a win typically brings a book wider international attention.
Why Does This Win Matter?
The prize rewards a book about immigration and racial law at a moment when citizenship, deportation and migration are once again at the centre of political debate in the United States. It also highlights how data-driven methods are changing historical research, allowing scholars to recover patterns, and people, that are hard to see in individual archive files.
For more books news, read our reports on Pip Adam’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize win, France’s new Prix Pascal for books co-written with AI and the authors suing Meta over AI training.
Featured image: “Street in Chinatown, San Francisco, California”, by Arnold Genthe / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Historical photo for illustration; not taken from the book.
Sources
- Cundill History Prize — Beth Lew-Williams wins 2026 Cundill History Prize for ‘John Doe Chinaman’ (23 October 2026).
- Cundill History Prize — Past winners.
