Cundill History Prize 2024 longlist announced

The 13 historians longlisted for the 2024 Cundill History Prize have been announced following a record number of submissions for the $75,000 accolade awarded annually to a book "that embodies historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal".

The stories on this year’s longlist span the early Mughal Empire to Native North America, from the secret history of the CIA to the origins of opium. Chaired by Rana Mitter, the 2024 judging panel includes Nicole Eustace, Stephanie Nolen, Moses Ochonu and Rebecca L Spang. 

Mitter said: "This is a longlist which showcases the very best that’s being written in history, with topics from around the globe and stretching over immense lengths of time. We move from Indonesia to Central America to the liberation struggles of Congo; from a long-range history of Indigenous peoples in North America to court life in Mughal India to the legacy of wartime France. Issues in the headlines gain depth through reading our longlist: the intertwining of enslavement and capitalism, the power of firearms to shape society, and the legal aftermath of war. All of these books combine superb research with compelling prose—we congratulate all 13 of the longlisted authors.” 

Administered by McGill University, the winner will be announced at the Cundill History Prize gala held in Montreal on Wednesday 30th October. 

Lisa Shapiro, dean of the faculty of arts at McGill, said: "The jury for the 2024 Cundill History Prize have done outstanding work in arriving at a longlist of thirteen titles from a very competitive field, representing the very best in historical writing and scholarship. These books also highlight the range of new perspectives on both past events and our present context afforded by high-quality history."

Last year, Tania Branigan (pictured), foreign leader writer at the Guardian, was named the winner for her book Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution (Faber), for her "haunting" excavation. 

The 2024 Cundill History Prize longlist in full  

Gary J Bass, Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Picador, Pan Macmillan) 

Lauren Benton, They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press) 

Joya Chatterji, Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (The Bodley Head, VINTAGE / Yale University Press) 

Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Penguin Random House) 

Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories (John Murray, Hachette) 

Catherine Hall, Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (Cambridge University Press) 

Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (Belknap Press) 

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Scribner) 

Ruby Lal, Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan (Yale University Press) 

Andrew C McKevitt, Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America (University of North Carolina Press) 

Dylan C Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (Liveright Publishing) 

Stuart A Reid, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (Alfred A Knopf) 

David Van Reybrouck, Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (The Bodley Head, VINTAGE / W W Norton), translated David Colmer and David McKay.