News & Announcements

November 15, 2026

ASLH Article Prize Winners 2026

The William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize

Joe Borsato, “‘To Rule by Customes’: Powhatan Assertions of Territorial Possessions against the Virginia Company, 1607–1624,” Ethnohistory 72, no. 3 (2025): 277-312.

Joe Borsato’s “‘To Rule by Customes’” traces the assertion and recognition of Powhatan territorial possession claims against seventeenth century English colonists in the Chesapeake watershed. This important article challenges conventional understandings of early American history as well as the development of legal history in British North America. By reading Virginia Company records alongside Powhatan archeology and oral tradition, Borsato reveals that Powhatans claimed territorial rights and applied their legal conventions to negotiations with the Virginia Company. As a result, the English colonizers were forced to recognize Indigenous legal land claims. Borsato’s findings upend prior scholarship, which has argued that Native Americans struggled to fight European colonization because they lacked a sense of property or territory. Instead, Borsato establishes that Indigenous legal traditions existed, were intelligible to the English, and were what allowed the Powhatans to demand both recognition of their claims of territorial possession and political sovereignty. Moreover, Borsato’s impressively researched article has implications that extend beyond early American history. At its heart, it addresses a significant philosophical question dating back to Rousseau, namely whether private property and borders are universal concepts.

The Sutherland Prize

Jan C. Jansen, “Alien Acts in the Age of Emancipation: Mobility Control and Executive Power in the British Caribbean, 1820s–1830s,” Law and History Review 43, no. 4 (2025): 821-845.

Archivally grounded and imaginative in its reach, Jan Jansen’s “Alien Acts in the Age of Emancipation” makes important contributions to legal and imperial history, advancing our understanding of the relationships among law, empire, race, and governance. Based upon an impressive body of archival sources from Britain and the Caribbean, the article demonstrates how alien laws—largely passed as emergency measures during the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century—proved exceptionally adaptable as instruments of imperial governance and racial exclusion during the age of emancipation. Subtle in its account, the article allows the contemporary relevance of its subject matter to percolate as the reader grapples with the contradictions inherent in, for example, Britain’s proclaimed commitment to abolition and its reliance on the alien acts to target free people of color and to expel escaped enslaved people seeking freedom within the empire. Jansen also reveals how the alien acts’ ambiguity and versatility created opportunities for subaltern actors to manipulate them “from below,” initiating debates over the very boundaries of British subjecthood. In this innovative and compelling work of legal history, law is not a fixed normative framework but a repertoire of legal and administrative tools whose meaning emerged through implementation as colonial administrators, metropolitan officials, colonial subjects, and those aspiring to become colonial subjects negotiated authority, racial hierarchy, executive power, and imperial subjecthood.

The Surrency Prize

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, “‘Distressing the Distressed’: Rent Distraint in Early Republic New York,” Law and History Review (2025), 43, 771–794.

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan’s multifaceted study of the practice of rent distraint excavates and elaborates an intricate world of landlord-tenant relations in early national New York. A model of social-legal historical research, this article transforms a vast body of fragmentary evidence—most notably a collection of over 4,000 landlord affidavits unearthed by the author—into a compelling portrait of social class and reform efforts structured by law and what O’Brassill-Kulfan calls “the Sisyphean task of remaining solvent and sheltered.” This portrait is no reductive image. Decades before New York’s climatic rural “rent wars,” rent distraint touched the lives of a strikingly high share of inhabitants of a growing city of renters in a time of economic instability. Punctuating broad observations with individual stories, O’Brassill-Kulfan shows readers archetypical figures of the ruthless landlord and beleaguered renter alongside a range of persons whose resources, vulnerabilities and stories placed them in neither or both categories. So too does O’Brassill-Kulfan introduce the perspective of constables, prisoners, editors, municipal officials and reformers who approached rent distraint as a cause of concern and subject of contestation. Gracefully integrating descriptions of legal process and social experience, “Distressing the Distressed” impresses the reader with subtle and significant insight into the long history of urban housing’s complex class politics.

Jane Burbank Global Legal History Prize

Anke Wang, “Abolitionist Parallels: International Law and Domestic Servitude in South China (1900-1940),” Modern Asian Studies 59:1 (2025): 122-142. 

This article examines the interplay between international and domestic law in responding to, and shaping, domestic servitude in late Qing and Republican China. Drawing on British, Chinese, and League of Nations archives and judicial records, Wang reconstructs how Chinese officials over several decades incorporated international prohibitions on slavery into Qing and Republican law, thus demonstrating the country’s humanitarian bona fides and legitimizing it in the international arena (some of these rules, Wang notes, remain in force in Taiwan, and are now applied to migrant manufacturing workers from Southeast Asia). At the same time, Wang shows how the actual interpretation and enforcement of these rules carved out space for household servitude, especially that of girls, to continue in practice. And yet, despite this tension between rules and practice, the new laws did open up some space for some girls, and institutions seeking to protect them, to improve their treatment and even gain freedom. This strongly argued and empirically grounded essay breaks new ground by combining a diverse array of sources with a wide reading of the literature on Chinese law and society and on international law and institutions, offering a valuable resource for both research and teaching.

Honorable Mention:
Tommaso Stefini, “Ottoman Justice and Political Economy of Empires: Venetian Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Courts,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 68:2 (2025): 346-371.

Anne Fleming Article Prize

Jake Dyble, “The Twentieth-Century Origins of the Medieval Lex Mercatoria Thesis,” Law and History Review 43.3 (2025): 363-85.

Dr. Dyble describes a new history of “lex mercatoria,” explaining how contemporary analysis of the legal phenomenon’s cultural origins, which supposedly emerged from nineteenth-century German scholarship, were themselves manufactured and circulated through anglophone legal culture in the twentieth century.  Dyble carefully documents academic citations and intellectual conferences to describe the astonishing influence of a twenty-year-old Cambridge undergraduate on Anglo-American law professors sixty years later.  Semi-autonomous, a second strand of argument came from a mid-century scholar who, after fleeing Nazi Germany, proposed a broad mixture of historical claims about lex mercatoria’s “romance” in order to aspirationally transcend Cold War economic schisms.  Dyble uses these complex intellectual dynamics to identify different theories of what lex mercatoria meant for historical actors, which in turn resemble enduring controversies among lawyers and advocates today.  Dyble’s research also indicates the unexpectedly immense power that emerged from arguably sidelong academic arguments about the distant past, when those intellectual ideas were eventually repurposed to meet a perceptibly global future.

Honorable Mention:
Aiden Collins, “The Interconnected Nature of Family Indebtedness: The Halliday Family of Frome, Somerset (1733–1752),” Enterprise and Society 25.3 (2024): 813-39.