John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law by Beth Lew-Williams (Belknap/Harvard University Press) has won the 2026 Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University. Lew-Williams receives $75,000.
Organizers said the winning author "presents a new and unexpected history of American racial law and argues that recovering the history of Chinese exclusion is essential to understanding the history of race, racial reconstruction, and immigration in the United States, and more broadly, the western world."
Chair of the jury Emily Greenwood commented that Lew-Williams "unravels the paradoxes of anti-Chinese racial laws in the American West from the 1850s to the 1920s, analyzing the intentions of these laws, their effects, and how Chinese migrants responded to them. These laws were part of a larger racial regime, one of whose consequences was to contain and suppress the lives of Chinese migrants, reducing them to anonymous stereotypes--the 'John Doe Chinaman' of the title. Using a supple combination of data algorithms to process legal and bureaucratic records and trenchant storytelling, Lew-Williams documents the ghosting of these lives in the historical record, retrieving Chinese voices that show us some of what we are missing. This is a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work."