MONTREAL — Today, at the Cundill History Prize Festival in Montreal, the jurors awarded the prestigious 2026 Cundill History Prize, which celebrates outstanding history writing, to John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law by Beth Lew-Williams. The announcement marks the culmination of a rigorous evaluation process celebrating works of historical scholarship that achieve both exceptional academic depth and broad literary appeal.
The winning book, published by Harvard University Press, investigates a critical and often overlooked chapter of North American and United States history. In John Doe Chinaman, Beth Lew-Williams unravels the paradoxes of anti-Chinese racial laws in the American West from the 1850s to the 1920s, analysing the intentions of these laws, their effects, and how Chinese migrants responded to them, said jury chair Emily Greenwood during the announcement ceremony in Montreal.
The festival, held annually to honor the world’s top non-fiction historical literature, brought together historians, authors, critics, and literature enthusiasts from around the globe. This year’s deliberations focused heavily on books that successfully challenge conventional historical narratives while offering fresh perspectives on marginalized communities. Lew-Williams’s work emerged as a standout favorite among the panel of international judges, who praised its methodological innovation and its profound emotional resonance.
According to the jury, the discriminatory statutes examined in the book were not isolated regional policies, but rather integral components of a much larger systemic framework. 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.
To pierce through the veil of anonymity imposed by historical prejudice, Lew-Williams employed an inventive and rigorous methodology. 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, the jury noted in their official commendation.
By pairing modern technological tools, such as digital humanities data processing, with traditional archival research and compelling narrative craft, the author successfully resurrects individual human stories from beneath mountains of cold, bureaucratic legislation. The resulting text offers readers an intimate look at the resilience, agency, and daily struggles of Chinese migrants who navigated a hostile legal landscape in the American West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As the winner of the 2026 Cundill History Prize, Lew-Williams will be awarded $75,000, one of the most lucrative awards available for a single work of non-fiction historical writing. The recognition places her among an elite group of international historians who have previously captured the prize, cementing her study as a landmark contribution to the historiography of race, law, and migration in the United States.
Alongside the overall winner, the festival also celebrated the remarkable achievements of this year’s runners-up. Finalists Jonathan Cheng and Alexander Lee will each take home $10,000 for their respective shortlisted works, which were also lauded by the jury for their exceptional research, engaging prose, and significant contributions to their respective fields of historical study.
The Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University in Montreal, continues to cement its reputation as a global beacon for historical literature, recognizing books that have a transformative impact on public understanding of the past. With the conclusion of today’s festival events and the crowning of Beth Lew-Williams as the 2026 laureate, attention now turns to the lasting impact John Doe Chinaman will undoubtedly have on future discussions surrounding legal history, racial equality, and the methodologies historians use to recover the voices of the forgotten.
