Beth Lew-Williams Wins the 2026 Cundill History Prize

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 prize announced the result on the evening of October 23 at an awards ceremony during the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal. McGill University administers the prize.

Lew-Williams is Professor of History and Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at Princeton University. Her book is published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. She is also the author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

What the book does

According to the prize, John Doe Chinaman is a history of the laws that constrained the lives of Chinese immigrants in the 19th-century American West, and of the Chinese Americans who negotiated, circumvented and resisted that discrimination. Lew-Williams used extensive quantitative research and big-data methods, the announcement says, examining court records, immigration files and personal accounts to trace decades of anti-Chinese legislation.

Emily Greenwood, the 2026 jury chair and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Classics at Harvard, announced the winner. She said the book "unravels the paradoxes of anti-Chinese racial laws in the American West from the 1850s to the 1920s," and called it "a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work."

Others quoted in the announcement include Ned Blackhawk of Yale, who called it "a remarkable achievement"; the BBC journalist and author Fergal Keane, who called it "a landmark work"; and Barbara Weinstein of New York University, a past president of the American Historical Association.

The other finalists

The prize named its three finalists on September 30, choosing them from a shortlist of eight, according to its finalists announcement. The two runners-up each receive US$10,000:

• Jonathan Cheng, Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's Personality Cult (Knopf)
• Alexander Lee, The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews (Picador)

That shortlist of eight also included Jill Lepore's We the People, winner of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for History, and Sam Dalrymple's Shattered Lands, the prize noted.

A big purse for history

The Cundill is open to works of history written in or translated into English, and the prize describes its US$75,000 award as one of the largest sums given to a single author by any prize. Lew-Williams joins a list of past winners that includes Lyndal Roper (2025), Kathleen DuVal (2024), Tania Branigan (2023) and Tiya Miles (2022).

Why it matters for writers and publishers

This is a university-press book winning one of the richest prizes in nonfiction, ahead of finalists from Knopf and Picador. The jury's praise put as much weight on how the history was written as on the research behind it, and that is useful for any author thinking about how to bring archival or data-heavy work to general readers.

Sources

• Cundill History Prize, October 23, 2026: Beth Lew-Williams wins 2026 Cundill History Prize for 'John Doe Chinaman'
• Cundill History Prize, September 30, 2026: The 2026 Cundill History Prize Finalists