News & Announcements

November 15, 2026

ASLH Book Prize Winners – 2026

The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award

Omar Cheta, How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press).

Omar Cheta has marked out a remarkable terrain at the intersection of law and economic life in nineteenth-century Egypt. In How Commerce Became Legal, Cheta draws on a rich set of local records—court records, mercantile correspondence, and private materials—to bring to life a mid-nineteenth-century moment in which merchants were able to enter the arena of commerce on a new scale, following the state’s relaxation of its monopolies on the sale of cotton. These merchants became increasingly invested in developing a legal infrastructure to guide their new commercial activities, and the merchant courts served that purpose admirably. Rather than focusing on the courts themselves, however, Cheta tells this story through the colorful cast of characters who moved through and around them. Readers meet the Alexandrian merchant Butrus Tawil, who was active in the cotton trade during the mid-nineteenth-century boom; the father-and-son duo Musa and Hassan Al-ʿAqqad, both merchants and landowners with close ties to the Khedival state, whose activities in Sudan generated wealth for them in Cairo; and the advocate Tito Figaro, a Damascus-born Italian who studied law in Paris on a scholarship from the Egyptian government before returning to establish a private practice at a time when few did so. Through these figures, Cheta makes new claims about the relationship between law and commerce at a decidedly global moment in Egyptian history: a moment in which Egypt’s cotton fields became deeply integrated into global markets amid the shifting tides of industrial textile production and the vicissitudes of the American Civil War. How Commerce Became Legal is about commerce, of course—but it is also about the place of law in mediating the process by which global capitalism articulated with Alexandria, Cairo, and the Egyptian countryside.

Honorable Mention:
Daniel Lord Smail, Magdelena Coline: A Life Beyond Slavery in Mediterranean Europe (Princeton University Press).

The John Phillip Reid Book Award

Lew-Williams, John Doe, Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Belknap/Harvard University Press).

Lew-Williams offers a revelatory, kaleidoscopic, and engrossing analysis of how Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans on the West Coast endured, challenged, and maneuvered around thousands of anti-Chinese laws from the 1850s to the 1920s. Contesting the dominant historiographical frame of exclusion, she focuses on the changing legal modes of “conditional inclusion.” While their labor was in demand, and while they held basic civil rights from 1870 on, the Chinese faced discrimination in myriad ways in economic, residential, cultural, and political terrains. From the outset, they launched lawsuits, submitted petitions, and organized resistance to racialized enforcement. Their efforts rewrote the most damaging terms of their inclusion and put limits on the metastasizing form of white supremacy “tailored just for them.”

The book models how to do legal history that integrates all manner of court records, state and federal legislation, city ordinances, police records, business ledgers, media accounts, memoirs, and more. Much of the extensive research rests on difficult-to-access archives across three states—California, Oregon, and Washington. The book is brilliantly organized and hard-to-put-down, with each chapter anchored by vivid and often-unfamiliar stories and voices from Chinese Westerners of all ages. Perhaps most haunting are the inescapable instances of white record-keepers who disregarded individuals’ true names in favor of demeaning placeholders such as ‘John Doe Chinaman’ and ‘China Mary’.

The William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize

Emilie Connolly, Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States (Princeton University Press, 2025).

Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States carefully and critically explains the trust and fiduciary processes that the U.S. federal government developed, haphazardly at first, from the early American period into the early twentieth century to finance Native dispossession but also to secure tribal dependence on federal trusteeship. With nuance and clarity, Connolly defines this process as “fiduciary colonialism,” a theoretical concept that will undoubtedly prove useful to historians seeking to explain the financial conditions that are integral to federal Indian policy and U.S.-tribal relations to this day. In addition to outlining the incremental developments of fiduciary colonialism, Connolly draws on close archival reading to incorporate the perspectives and influences of individual tribal leaders from the colonial era to the twentieth century. Helpful to readers outside the field of federal Indian policy and Native history, Connolly’s analysis features familiar state actors from George Washington and Alexander Hamilton to Harry Truman. The committee was especially impressed with the range and detail of historical coverage Connolly achieved in her study, which included multiple complex tribal histories linked to key moments of American history including the evolution of U.S. banking law and policy, the Civil War, the expansion of railroads and industrial infrastructure, and the expansion of U.S. empire. Connolly presented these intersecting and interdependent histories with remarkable narrative style and quality, inviting readers to fully grasp the painful ironies that Indigenous people encountered across the long nineteenth century while also documenting tribal leaders’ persistent challenges to dispossession and fraud.