Beth Lew-Williams wins the Cundill by restoring identity to erased lives
John Doe Chinaman, a study of anti-Chinese law in the American West, receives the US$75,000 award in Montreal.
Beth Lew-Williams has won the 2026 Cundill History Prize for John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law. The US$75,000 award was announced on 23 October during the prize festival in Montreal, administered by McGill University. A Princeton professor, Lew-Williams reconstructs the laws that constrained Chinese immigrants in the American West from the 19th into the early 20th century. Combining quantitative methods, court records, immigration files and personal testimony, the book also shows how Chinese communities negotiated, circumvented and resisted those rules. The jury recognised a study that goes beyond the machinery of discrimination: it restores names, strategies and individuality obscured in the archive, connecting racial exclusion with citizenship and the history of immigration.