Princeton University Press extends our congratulations to author Lauren Benton, whose book They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence has been longlisted for the 2024 Cundill History Prize.
A panoramic account of how small wars shaped the global order in the age of empires, They Called It Peace spans the globe from Asia to the Americas, showing how routines of violence reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. Throughout the book Lauren Benton, a professor of history and law at Yale University, illustrates how imperial violence redefined the nature of war and peace, such that fragile truces fostered perpetual conflict, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. Benton brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined “small” violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Since publishing in February 2024, the book has been hailed as “radical and important” (Irish Times) and “nimble and provocative” (Jacobin). In July, it was included in the New Yorker’s Best Books We Read This Week list.
Following a record-breaking number of submissions for the 2024 prize, according to the Cundill Prize website, They Called It Peace was among 13 books selected for the longlist, a selection made by a jury of historians Nicole Eustace, Moses Ochonu, and Rebecca L. Spang and journalist Stephanie Nolen, chaired by Rana Mitter.
The Cundill Prize is administered annually by McGill University in Montreal and honors, “the abiding passion for history of its founder, F. Peter Cundill, by encouraging informed public debate through the wider dissemination of history writing to new audiences around the world.”
A number of Princeton University Press books have been recognized by the prestigious prize in years past. These include Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of the Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD; Henrietta Harrison’s The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire; Judith Herrin’s Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe; Tyler Stovall’s White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea; Emma Rothschild’s An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries; Stuart B. Schwarz’s Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina; James E Lewis Jr.’s The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis; Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains won the prize in 2016.
The 2024 Cundill shortlist will be announced in September, with finalists named in October, and a winner announced over the course of a two-day ceremony in Montreal, at the end of October.