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November 15, 2026

ASLH Dissertation Prize Winners 2026

William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize

Sarah Rose Meiners, “Asylum Archipelago: Migration in the Borders of Empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean,” (Cornell).

Meiners’ “Asylum Archipelago” analyzes how the United States government used extraterritorial U.S. jurisdictions to develop, implement, and enforce migration laws and policies from the 1970s to the 2000s. Ranging from Caribbean islands to the South Pacific, the dissertation draws together multiple jurisdictions with varying legal statuses and degrees of sovereignty to trace how U.S. officials, indigenous and other local actors, and migrants themselves—often at cross-purposes—constructed the U.S. refugee migration system. In many of these jurisdictions, Meiners notes, elements of U.S. immigration law did not apply, thus highlighting the disjuncture between land and law.

Meiners deftly weaves together histories of empire, colonialism, migration, and decolonization to tell the story of what they call “an empire of migrants.” By tracing how policy was created, enforced, and contested at every level and by every entity—from international diplomacy and federal policymaking to territorial and foreign governments, local residents, and refugees—they offer a deeply textured account of how migrant law has developed over the past several decades. In their account, anticolonial and indigenous activists often simultaneously opposed U.S. refugee policies and accepted refugee settlement if conducted on their own terms. Drawing on their ambitious archival research, Meiners narrates the experiences of Vietnamese, Haitian, Cuban, Afghan, and other migrants as they encountered and influenced U.S. migration policies.

While Meiners foregrounds the interests and agency of migrants and residents of extraterritorial regimes in this process, they also emphasize the imbalance between the power of locals and of the U.S. as global hegemon. The dissertation describes how the federal government used its economic, diplomatic, and military power to leverage sites as disparate as Guantanamo and Guam in crafting its refugee migrant policies. And as Meiners emphasizes, the U.S. is still doing so in apprehending, detaining, and deporting refugees and asylum seekers. “Asylum Archipelago” provides a deeply researched, original, and compelling framework from which to assess current policies in this “empire of migrants.”

ASLH Global Dissertation Prize

Salmaan Mirza, “Regulating Commerce: Law and Economic Life in the Late Ottoman Empire,” (Harvard).

Salmaan Mirza’s outstanding dissertation, “Regulating Commerce: Law and Economic Life in the Late Ottoman Empire,” is a lucid and lively history of the operations of a commercial court in nineteenth-century Damascus, a period of economic and legal transition during which shari’a courts lost their jurisdiction over commercial litigation. Thoroughly and extensively researched, the dissertation tells the story of this busy court through the bureaucrats, scribes, notaries, merchants and other litigants who passed through its doors. The work showcases the flexibility and customary quality of law as it was practiced – a counterpoint to the rigid proceduralism with which Ottoman law is often identified. Mirza nimbly integrates social, institutional, and legal history, balancing technical rigour and narrative verve. This is a model study that is groundbreaking in its discoveries, elegant in its articulation, and well-calibrated in its scope. It sheds new light on a previously known but largely unstudied institution. In the process, it invites a re-thinking of Ottoman legal innovations not as a result primarily of European influence, but rather as an aspect of endogenous bureaucratic reorganization in response to evolving commercial practices.

Honorable Mention:

Victoria Bergbauer, “Fragments of Freedom: Incarcerated Adolescents and their Afterlives in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” (Princeton).

ASLH Max Planck Dissertation Prize for European Legal History in a Global Perspective

Jake Stattel, “Scandinavian Influence on English Law, c. 870-1215,” (University of Cambridge).

Jake Stattel’s “Scandinavian Influence on English Law, c. 870-1215” manages to redefine the study of early English common law. It does so with considerable elegance, erudition, and modesty. Scholars commonly note the influence of Scandinavian law on English law in the first centuries of the last millennium, but the subject is, as Stattel writes, “almost never studied in its own right.” Aided by the availability of English and Nordic sources on crime and punishment, Stattel’s analysis ranges across methods of accusation, oaths and ordeals, cash guarantees and communal punishment, and the movement of conflicts beyond the purview of the law. The dissertation draws on a rich array of sources, combining evidence from multiple languages, regions, and populations. Stattel argues persuasively, and without overstatement, for the “Scandinavianisation” of English law in this period, and he reveals a deeper and wider influence of Scandinavian law than scholars of early English law have appreciated. The prize committee commends Stattel for his careful, thoughtful, and comprehensive approach, and congratulates him for writing a highly readable text that is relevant to broader questions about legal influence in the wake of conquest and the complexities of English common law in the British empire.