SHAFR Awards

Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States

Emilie Connolly masterfully shows how it was not just Native American land that Americans used to build their continental empire; it was also Native wealth - in particular, money held in trust by the United States government. Beginning with the Senecas in the late 1790s, the burgeoning United States used Native trust capital to finance banks, canals, and other infrastructures of continental expansion. Drawn into this system of “fiduciary colonialism” to provide for their people across time, Connolly skillfully highlights how Native leaders envisioned what trusts could be, and how they used their annuities as long term investments in the public good. Innovative, exhaustive, and revelatory, Vested Interests reshapes how we must think of U.S. foreign relations and economic imperialism.

Dream the Size of Freedom: How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism

Parrott brings the neglected story of Lusophone Africa’s decolonization to life through his focus on leaders such as Amílcar Cabral and Eduardo Mondlane, as well as organizations such as the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC). Parrott offers an important historiographical contribution that complements existing studies of how anticolonial movements appropriated the ideologies of the rival superpowers in the Global Cold War. His book also provides an important example of “bottom-up” international history that combines grassroots activism with high politics and diplomacy.

Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade

The committee was deeply impressed by Ingleson’s novel approach to a crucially important topic: how China moved from being an imagined market for U.S. goods to the unrivaled factory of the world. To the usual story of top-level decision-makers, Nixon and Deng, Ingleson adds a network of businessmen, fashion moguls, textiles workers, and longshoremen, who navigated America’s deindustrialization and China’s Cultural Revolution and forged connections that would reshape the global supply chain. Drawing upon Chinese- and English-language sources, this book is a careful, multidirectional study of the decade that ensured the ubiquity of the label “Made in China” in modern life.

Fritz Bartel is a strikingly original historian of foreign relations whose research centers international political economy and significantly reshapes our understanding of the late 20th century. His first monograph, the award-winning The Triumph of Broken Promises, offered a pathbreaking reinterpretation of the last half of the Cold War. With remarkable analytical clarity, the book demonstrated how the conflict’s outcome was ultimately decided by global economic transformations of the 1970s, the neoliberal turn, and mounting financial constraints (and dependencies) among the members of the Socialist Camp. Bartel’s current project, focused on the 1990s and the post-Cold War era, is arguably even more ambitious and promising. Distinguished by empirical rigor and methodological sophistication, it combines multi-archival research with a keen sensitivity to the consequences of broader structural dynamics.