Image: Cundill History Prize
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Rana Mitter Heads the 2024 Jury
Based in Montreal, the US$75,000 Cundill History Prize is one of the leading nonfiction programs, as Publishing Perspectives readers know, putting heavy and valuable emphasis on public affairs and writing relevant to today’s international cultures and work that’s accessible to a world readership far beyond the halls of academia.
The program’s 13-title longlist is to be followed on September 5 by a shortlist, on October 3 by three finalists—a device that some see as providing a third wave of press coverage for the program—and a winner’s announcement on October 30, the second day of a “Cundill History Prize Festival” the program has staged for several years.
The chair of this year’s jury is Rana Mitter, who our readers know from his jury membership in 2017 and 2019. Holder of the Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Mitter is a gifted presenter of arts and ideas programming on BBC Radio 3. Raised in Cambridge and having taught for more than two decades at Oxford, he was director of the University China Centre at Oxford, and a professor of the history and politics in modern China until 2023 when he made the jump to Harvard.
A standout among his own books is China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2020). His documentary on Chinese politics, Meanwhile in Beijing, was heard on BBC Radio 4.
On the arrival of the 2024 longlist, Mitter is quoted, saying, “This is a longlist which showcases the very best that’s being written in history, with topics from around the globe and stretching over immense lengths of time.
“We move from Indonesia to Central America to the liberation struggles of Congo; from a long-range history of Indigenous peoples in North America to court life in Mughal India to the legacy of wartime France. Issues in the headlines gain depth through reading our longlist: the intertwining of enslavement and capitalism, the power of firearms to shape society, and the legal aftermath of war.
“All of these books combine superb research with compelling prose. We congratulate all 13 of the longlisted authors.”
Rana Mitter
Joining Mitter on the Cundill jury panel this year are:
- Nicole Eustace
- Stephanie Nolan
- Moses Ochonu
- Rebecca L. Spang
The cash award for a winner of the Cundill History Prize is US$75,000 (American, rather than Canadian, dollars). The two finalists not named the winner each receive an additional US$10,000.
The winner of the Cundill History Prize for 2023, Tania Branigan, was recognized for Tania Branigan, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution, from Faber & Faber. In the United States, the book is published by WW Norton with a different subtitle: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution.
The UK cover, Faber & Faber
Not without irony, the news of Branigan’s win arrived on a day in 2023, when “panda diplomacy” between China and the West essentially collapsed.
What’s more, just as we recall Branigan’s focus on China, California Gov. Gavin Newsom today (August 7) has named Thursday (August 8) “California Panda Day” for the San Diego Zoo’s display of Yun Chuan and Xin Bao, the first two giant pandas to enter the United States in 21 years. In addition, despite panda diplomacy having gone south last year, it’s been announced that a new pair of pandas, Bao Li and Qing Bao, are to return to Washington’s National Zoo by the end of this year.
Just as Chinese issues are frequently found in the Cundill’s lists, so are other topics of immediately pertinent issues. In the longlist we publish here today, for example, you’ll find Andrew C. McKevitt’s Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America, from the University of North Carolina Press.
Not nearly as upbeat a corresponding issue as panda diplomacy, we note this book’s longlisting from the Cundill as the United States reaches another grim set of statistics in its firearm culture: By July 31, a total of 473 people had been killed in the States in gun violence, and 1,528 had been wounded. These deaths and injuries occurred in a total 371 shootings tracked by the Gun Violence Archive so far this year.
The Cundill History Prize 2024 Longlist
| Author | Title | Publisher / Imprint |
| Gary J. Bass | Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia | Pan Macmillan / Picador |
| Lauren Benton | They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence | Princeton University Press |
| Joya Chatterji | Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century | Penguin Random House / TheBodley Head and Yale University Press |
| Kathleen DuVal | Native Nations: A Millennium in North America | Penguin Random House |
| Amitav Ghosh | Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories | Hachette / John Murray |
| Catherine Hall | Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism | Cambridge University Press |
| Julian Jackson | France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain | Belknap Press |
| Patrick Joyce | Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World | Simon & Schuster / Scribner |
| Ruby Lal |
Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan |
Yale University Press |
| Andrew C. McKevitt |
Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America |
University of North Carolina Press |
| Dylan C. Penningroth | Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights | WW Norton / Liveright |
| Stuart A. Reid |
The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination |
Penguin Random House / Alfred A. Knopf |
| David Van Reybrouck |
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World |
Penguin Random House / The Bodley Head and WW Norton |
Previous Winners of the Cundill History Prize
- Tania Branigan (2023)
- Tiya Miles (2022)
- Marjoleine Kars (2021)
- Camilla Townsend (2020)
- Julia Lovell (2019)
- Maya Jasanoff (2018)
- Daniel Beer (2017)
- Thomas W. Laqueur (2016)
- Susan Pedersen (2015)
- Gary Bass (2014)
- Anne Applebaum (2013)
- Stephen Platt (2012)
- Sergio Luzzatto (2011)
- Diarmaid MacCulloch (2010)
- Lisa Jardine (2009)
- Stuart B. Schwartz (2008)
Peter Cundill
The Cundill History Prize was founded by Peter Cundill (1938-2011), who was the founder of the Cundill Value Fund. He established the Cundill History Prize in 2008, two years after being diagnosed with Fragile X Tremor/Ataxia Syndrome, with which he died in London.
In a comment on the longlist’s release this year, Lisa Shapiro, dean of the faculty of arts at Montreal’s McGill University—the seat of the Cundill program—is quoted, saying, “The jury for the 2024 Cundill History Prize has done outstanding work in arriving at a longlist of 13 titles from a very competitive field, representing the very best in historical writing and scholarship.
“These books also highlight the range of new perspectives on both past events and our present context afforded by high-quality history.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Cundill History Prize is here. More on the international industry’s publishing and book awards is here, more on the Canadian book market is here, and more on nonfiction is here.