News & Announcements
October 31, 2023
Congratulations to the 2023 Book and Article Prize Winners!
Please join the ASLH in offering our congratulations to this year’s prize winners, in thanking the prize committees for their work, and in appreciating the generosity of the people and organizations who have generously funded them.
Cromwell Article Prize
Emilie Connolly, “Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in Early America,” American Historical Review 127:1 (2022): 223-253.
Citation:
Emilie Connolly’s “Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in Early America” examines an oft-forgotten aspect of dispossession of Native lands: compensation. Connolly explores the consequences of payments for Native lands, focusing not on violent force, but “subtler coercions and negotiations afforded by economic relationships (226).” Central to these economic relationships between sovereign Native nations and the U.S. federal government were annuities: yearly payments made to Native peoples in specie or goods in exchange for their land. Yet such funds “evolved,” Connolly deftly shows, into longstanding economic and fiscal relationships between “sovereignties of sharply unequal power.” Annuities served to increase federal control over Native lands by holding back payments to pry land out of Native hands and compel migration. In an innovative and compelling argument, Connolly shows that such polices amounted to a “fiduciary colonialism: a mode of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Native peoples’ wealth.” Importantly, therefore, fiduciary colonialism highlights the often forgotten two prong method of U.S. imperialism: indeed, Connolly demonstrates that the early United States operated not simply as a “settler colonial formation” (characterized by its deliberate attempts to erase and replace Native peoples and societies) but also as a “colonial formation” (characterized by the administration of Native people and federal trusteeship over their wealth, as well as grabbing their land). This article, the committee agreed, is a tour de force: lucid, well-sourced, and subtly argued. Her contribution to the scholarship on United States/Native relations is nothing short of remarkable. While scholars have most often focused on force and violence to explain dispossession, Connolly shows that, ultimately, annuities (and their manipulation, as money could both be promised and withheld) bolstered U.S. federal power. As such, controlling annuities became instead the preferred method of engineering legal/extralegal dispossessions, forcing removal treaties, and compelling expulsions.
Sutherland Prize
Jake Stattel “Legal culture in the Danelaw: a study of III Aethelred,” Anglo/Saxon England, 48 (2022):163-203
Citation: In 997 AD King Aethelred announced two law codes: one for his English kingdoms (the Woodstock code) and one for the area known as the Danelaw (the Wantage Code). While broadly similar, the two codes also contain important differences. These differences are the subject of Stattel’s erudite and impressive essay. Historians have usually understood these provisions as markers of the uneasy integration of Danish lands into the English kingdoms. Some see the differences as Athelred’s attempt to confirm English dominion over Danelaw territories; some see it as a necessary concession to the authority of Anglo-Scandinavian elites within the kingdom. Stattel provides a fresh approach. Reframing the question to explore what these codes reveal about legal culture rather than about the political reach of the Anglo-Saxons, Stattel sketches out some of the distinctive legal assumptions of society within the Danelaw regions. These differences, he shows us, were not minor matters of procedure but rather divergent ideas about best practice.
Focusing on collective liability, access to legal recourse, and methods of proof, Stattel makes visible the distinctiveness of Anglo-Scandinavian communities long after their submission to Anglo-Saxon monarchs. He uses an array of tools, textual and material, to trace a system in which the Danelaw was both a part of and apart from the dominant society. His sources range from language to archeology to scientific insights, from charters and chronicles to bones and isotopes. Stattel persuasively argues that the Danelaw is best understood within the context of Scandinavian traditions. In the Danelaw regions, smaller communities allowed for higher standards of mutual responsibility, more stringent requirements for invoking formal law, and a preference for fact-finding over oath-taking. These practices suggest the continued influence of the Anglo-Scandinavian elites upon the broader legal structures and in some cases, they offer early examples of what would become standard English processes. Stattel’s arguments are clearly presented and thoughtfully constructed. Moreover, he shows us that for law as for other aspects of society, balancing written and material evidence rather than favoring one over the other pays off. This essay goes far beyond a close reading of one early law code; it has important implications for how we understand law’s ability both to reinforce power and to coopt diversity.
Surrency Prize
Will Smiley, “Rebellion, Sovereignty, and Islamic Law in the Ottoman Age of Revolutions,” Law and History Review 40:2 (2022): 229-259
Citation: Will Smiley’s “Rebellion, Sovereignty, and Islamic Law in the Ottoman Age of Revolutions” features deep research in multi-lingual, multi-national archives, erudite analysis, and compelling story-telling. This article connects the histories of the Ottoman Empire, Islamic law, and the global Age of Revolutions. Smiley examines how the Ottoman Sublime Porte in Istanbul used the Islamic law tradition to craft a law of rebellion that was useful to fighting foreign enemies and suppressing domestic dissenters. Islamic law both facilitated military power and constrained the actions of political administrators who were beholden to clerics, a Muslim public, and their own religious beliefs. Ultimately, the Porte forged a law of rebellion that justified retribution against those who resisted the Sultan’s authority, while simultaneously denying these rebels’ sovereignty. Smiley shows how this legal duality, positioning rebels as at once subject to a political power’s jurisdiction and belligerent outsiders, echoed across the Atlantic. Similar legal moves shaped Britain’s treatment of Greece, the Lieber Code, and the United States’ response to the confederacy. Smiley’s exploration of how the rule of law shaped empire, war, and rebellion holds both historical and contemporary insight.
Honorable Mention: Alexandre Pelegrino, “From Slaves to Índios: Empire, Slavery, and Race (Maranhão, Brazil, c.1740–90),” Law and History Review 40:4 (2022): 789-815.
Jane Burbank Global Legal History Prize
Will Smiley, “Rebellion, Sovereignty, and Islamic Law in the Ottoman Age of Revolutions,” Law and History Review 40:2 (2022): 229-259
Citation:
Smiley’s elegant article assesses the global significance of the Ottoman government’s treatment of rebellious subjects as enemies at the turn of the nineteenth century. Although they lived within imperial territories and were claimed as subjects of the sultan, the Ottoman Porte began to define non-Muslim rebels as enemies under Islamic law. The move subjected rebels to extreme violence, including legal enslavement. Smiley assesses how this policy came about and places it in a global and comparative context. The result is a powerful argument about the imperial roots of an emerging international legal doctrine recognizing rebels as enemies but not bona fide belligerents.
Smiley recounts how Islamic jurisprudence informed the Ottoman Porte’s reactions to rebellions in Moldavid and Serbia. He labels the new classification of rebels as “dual sovereignty,” that is, placement outside the empire under Islamic law but inside it under international law. In Greece, the article shows, rebellious subjects were enslaved as enemies while the Ottomans also sought to block other empires from intervening inside Ottoman imperial territory. Other iterations of dual sovereignty, meanwhile, found adherents in Europe and the United States, also in connection with the legal status of rebels. During the US Civil War, the Lieber Code established the possibility of treating rebels as enemies without recognizing them as bona fide belligerents. Smiley pushes still further to reflect on the unexpected consequences of this legal approach. In the Ottoman empire, he suggests, the turn to Islamic law to justify enslavement of rebels placed unintended limits on state action.
As this summary shows, Smiley’s article contributes to the legal history of the Ottoman Empire, the history of Islamic law, and the history of international law. Committee members were impressed by the quality and range of the research, the subtleties of the analysis, and the clarity of the writing. The article models how to move artfully between local and global contexts.
Honorable Mention: Alexandre Pelegrino, “From Slaves to Índios: Empire, Slavery, and Race (Maranhão, Brazil, c.1740–90),” Law and History Review 40:4 (2022): 789-815.
Honorable Mention: Juandrea Bates, “Unaccompanied Minors and Fraudulent Fathers: Civil Law in the Unmaking of Immigrant Family in Buenos Aires, 1869–1920,” Hispanic American Historical Review 102:1 (2022): 95-126
Mary L. Dudziak Digital Legal History Prize
Justin Simard, The Citing Slavery Project
Citation: The Citing Slavery Project (https://www.citingslavery.org/), created by Justin Simard, Assistant Professor of Law at Michigan State University, and his team is a curated database of published civil case decisions from the nineteenth century involving slavery—either with enslaved people as parties or participants in the litigation or slave property as the subject of the suit. By documenting the past and continued influence of the American law of slavery via contemporary citations to slavery cases, it forces the legal profession to confront its role in American slavery. In 2021, the Bluebook added a rule in response to the project to encourage the use of a parenthetical such as (slavery case) or (enslaved party) in citations to slave cases. Seventy works of scholarship have already implemented this rule. The Citing Slavery Project achieved two major milestones during the award year. First, Professor Simard and his team completed the initial compilation of 9,000 slave cases from 42 states and territories. Second, they linked their database to Harvard’s open source Caselaw Access Project. The link is especially significant because it facilitates the project’s analytical arm (tracking primary and secondary citations to slave cases) and its publicity arm (allowing everyday users direct access to the text and original scans of the slavery opinions). The committee applauds Dr. Simard and his team for the scholarly importance and intellectual generosity of this enlightening digital legal history project.
Cromwell Dissertation Prize
Alexander M. Cors, “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Settlement, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820,” Emory University, 2022
Citation: This dissertation represents a sparkling contribution to what Cors terms “the legal geography of settler colonialism in the Mississippi River Valley” during a pivotal time of contact between Indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Africans. Utilizing sources in three languages from Spain, France, and four states, Cors seamlessly weaves together narratives of bottom-up experiences of individuals making claims to land under Spanish law with the expansion of state power and control over the Mississippi River territory prior to and after the Louisiana Purchase. Instead of focusing on one or two large tribal nations, Cors takes the land as his analytical frame, beautifully telling the story of how parts of four tribes moved to lands west of the river and then used Spanish land grants to protect their claims against those later made by European-Americans. The tribal claimants were surprisingly adept at achieving their goals, at least for a time, helped by Spanish legal regimes that were much friendlier to first-comers than Anglo-American law later proved to be. By focusing on the river as geography and ecosystem, Cors is able to reveal dimensions of the slave economy that relied on the mobility the river enabled. Instead of cordoning off Louisiana as a civil law territory that had little influence on surrounding states and national legal development, Cors makes Louisiana’s physical position at the mouth of the river central to the movement and migration that undergirded the expansion of slavery in the South. Settlement patterns conferred social structure, he notes, and they also conveyed legal knowledge that proved essential to maintaining property ownership during periods of transition in governance. Indeed, Cors reveals that many non-European settlers along the river resisted the imposition of colonial state power and non-native legal systems, persuading the committee of his broader argument that local land claims drove territorial law and legal practice more than treaty negotiations and national sovereignties. What makes this new history possible are the Spanish-language sources that Cors deftly mines, both for the revealing family narratives he pieces together and for new cartographic data. Cors’s maps are things of beauty, wholly original to this project, that show how indigenous communities spread along the river for decades prior to the Louisiana Purchase. The committee marveled at the way Cors advanced a deeply complex argument with beautifully crafted prose. This novel and original thesis was a joy to read and will, the committee believes, make an important and influential book.
Peter Gonville Stein Book Award
Adriana Chira, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race Beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Citation: Adriana Chira’s Patchwork Freedoms is a compelling account of the ways in which the free and semi-free black residents of eastern Cuba used law and custom to eke out their freedom over the course of the nineteenth century. Chira demonstrates how “day in and day out, enslaved people chipped away at enslavers’ authority locally, by negotiating the terms of their manumission and land access. They pulled one another out of plantation slavery gradually, yet consistently.” The committee was especially impressed by how Patchwork Freedoms integrates legal and social history by seamlessly weaving together legal and nonlegal sources to tell a story that is complex, nuanced, and locally grounded.
Cromwell Book Prize
R. Isabela Morales, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Citation:
This book is a dazzling achievement, especially as a first book. Happy Dreams of Liberty is a family saga, a tale of a father who set free his enslaved children upon his death and then sought to endow them with his considerable fortune — an act that shocked his white relatives. Morales renders the story of the Townsend family with the deft touch of a novelist, drawing the reader into a narrative that is cinematic in its execution. By reading deeply and creatively into the archival record left by an extensive battle over the execution of Samuel Townsend’s will, Morales is able to construct vivid and intimate portraits of the lives of numerous members of the family who lived both in freedom and in slavery.
Law is an integral part of Morales’s story, both circumscribing the possibilities for the Townsend children and allowing them to claim their freedom and some degree of financial stability. Morales is highly attentive to the local, showing how the practical consequences of freedom expanded and contracted depending on the residence of the various members of the Townsend family. At the center of Morales’s story is a lawyer, S.D. Cabaniss, who used his specialized knowledge to defend the Townsend will against legal attacks but also wielded his elevated status as a lawyer to intimidate the will’s beneficiaries. Morales demonstrates how, in ways both big and small, Cabaniss held sway over the lives of the Townsends. We found the book to be a model of legal microhistory, both well-argued and a pleasure to read.
John Philip Reid Book Prize
Laura F. Edwards, Only the Clothes on Her Back: Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Citation: Laura Edwards’ Only the Clothes on Her Back accomplishes the rare feat of making visible a world that has largely escaped the attention of historians. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book shows that in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War, marginalized people lacking formal, civil rights to property—including married women, free Blacks, and enslaved persons—were able to turn to courts to secure their ability to deploy textiles as an important form of currency, credit, and capital. Conceptually innovative and beautifully written, this is a pathbreaking study that challenges conventional understandings of rights, ownership, and power.