"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, highlighting the depth and scope of the winning publication during the official presentation ceremony in Montreal.
The awarded book delves deeply into a transformative era in the history of the American West, spanning the decades from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. During this turbulent period, waves of Chinese migrants arrived in the United States, drawn by economic opportunities such as the California Gold Rush and the construction of the transcontinental railroad. However, they were met with an escalating framework of discriminatory legislation, municipal ordinances, and federal statutes designed to restrict their movement, economic mobility, and legal rights.
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. This institutional erasure frequently stripped individuals of their personal identities within the court systems, bureaucratic documents, and public records of the era, transforming living, breathing people into generalized legal placeholders or targets of exclusion.
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 methodological approach bridges traditional archival historical research with modern computational tools, allowing the author to comb through vast quantities of historical documentation—such as court transcripts, immigration files, tax records, and municipal registers—to surface patterns of institutional discrimination and individual resilience that might otherwise remain buried.
By extracting these hidden narratives, Lew-Williams manages to reconstruct the lived experiences of individuals who were systematically marginalized by the legal machinery of the state. The resulting publication has been praised by the jury and literary critics alike as a dazzlingly innovative and hard-hitting work that challenges conventional understandings of American legal history and race relations.
As the winner of the 2026 Cundill History Prize, Lew-Williams will be awarded $75,000, one of the most substantial financial awards in the field of historical nonfiction. Meanwhile, the fellow finalists for this year’s prize, Jonathan Cheng and Alexander Lee, will each take home $10,000 in recognition of their own distinguished contributions to historical writing, rounding out a competitive and globally diverse shortlist that celebrated excellence in historical scholarship at the festival in Montreal.
