Awards, Grants, Fellowships

2025 Prize Winner: Asheesh Kapur Siddique for The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (Yale University Press)

The actions of the current administration to purge America’s archives of anything it finds noxious is a salient reminder of both the fragility and power of state papers, while its agents attempt to separate their public from their personal archives (twitter posts or Signal group chats). Asheesh Kapur Siddique‘s path-breaking book details and theorises the long history of our present moment, from the construction and circulation of public and private archives to their contestation see in, for instance, Warren Hastings’s trial for corruption. His intricate, detailed analysis of the archives of the British Empire emphasises both this fragility and power. 

This book brilliantly exposes the complex history of not just the creation of an information state, but the power of archives to shape thinking and direct actions. Siddique argues that the challenges of imperial information management were both practical and epistemological – most especially in determining how to categorize and thus treat (with) others: while Siddique’s account challenges the frequently received notion of the archive’s fixedness and insists on historicising archives to show how they shaped the conduct of both administration and political contestation. This will be a vitally important book to historians of the state, of global empire, and of the circulation (and definition) of information in the long eighteenth century and today.

Honorable Mention: Matthew Kadane, The Enlightenment and Original Sin (University of Chicago Press)

Matthew Kadane’s book opens our eyes to the impact on the Enlightenment of a foundational concept, original sin, the importance of which has become obscured not only by our modern disenchantment but also by the influential twentieth-century critique of the Enlightenment’s instrumentalist rationality. Kadane’s book is both a micro-history of the changing thought of a single, ordinary man, and a wide-ranging intellectual history. Having unearthed the diary of a middle-aged man, Pentecost Barker, struggling to overcome an addiction to drink by grappling with his own sinful nature in the idioms and ideas of his moment, Kadane then finds a remarkable evolution in his thought: he has renounced the doctrine of original sin, embraced Enlightenment thinking about human agency and optimism, and found thereby a way to stop hating himself for his own weakness and to gain some measure of control over his actions and peace in his own mind.

Kadane notes that original sin is a leveling concept and thus it has the potential to undermine the Eurocentric arrogance of the Enlightenment, yet it also scorns democracy since such depraved humans cannot be trusted to govern themselves. The essential debate about human nature and whether or not it was innately sinful fell out of view for most scholars in the 20^th century. Yet this debate has startling echoes in the way many political leaders today set themselves against modernity and democracy, and we continue to disregard it at our peril.

Shelby Johnson’s provocative essay, “’Bone of My Bone’: Samson Occom and Cosubstantial Kinship,” offers a meditation on “two forms of subjectivity that coordinated difference in the long eighteenth century: indigeneity and queerness.” Johnson centers this discussion on Occam’s Sermon on the Execution of Moses Paul (1772), which reveals “what it means to desire under colonial occupation.” In this work, Occam gestures toward “consubstantial kinship”: or what Daniel Heath Justice calls “an embodied practice of sovereign belonging.” This “indigenous erotic” “reflects dense sensory intimacies, including touch, sight, sound, habituatedin healing routines and condolence rites.” Occam’s Sermon, Johnson argues, “embraces this intimacy with such intensity that it exceeds the bounds of colonial masculinity.” “By calling Occam’s accounts of cosubstantial life queer,” Johnson argues, “I hope that we can . . . explore how his sensation-based intimacies indicate a refusal to think within colonial hierarchies of desire, where dominion over flesh is frequently the governing idiom of being and belonging.” Johnson has opened the field to “Native expressions of relationality,” which can help revise our understanding of queer desire in the eighteenth century.

Shoory’s paper provides a clear introduction to the topic of women collectors, and despite its necessary brevity, it conveys the significance of this topic to art history, to intellectual history, and to eighteenth-century studies broadly.