ACH Announces the 2013-14 Elsa Goveia Book Prize in Caribbean History

Michelle McDonald Discussion

Every two years, the Association of Caribbean Historians awards the Elsa Goveia Book Prize to recognize excellence in the field of Caribbean History.  Publications can be in English, French, Spanish or Dutch, and are evaluated based on their scholarly contribution, original argument, felicity of prose, and clarity of expression.  This year's prize committee received a total of 40 books for consideration, making for a remarkably strong competition.  At the end of the deliberations, the committee is pleased to announce that the the 2013-14 recipient is Gregory O'Malley's Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807, published in 2014 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History (together with the University of North Carolina Press). Focusing on the re-shipments of enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage, and using the Slave Trade Database as a starting point, O'Malley transforms our understanding of the dynamics of the slave trade in the Americas and redraws the map of the final destinations of forced African immigrants during the slave trade era.

This book uses an impressive and innovative array of primary sources, imaginatively examined, to investigate the hows and whys of the slave trade after the Middle Passage--legal and illegal trading between the Caribbean islands and North and South America. It is a major contribution to the history of slavery, the African diaspora, and trans-Atlantic and inter-Caribbean commerce during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.  

 

The committee would also like to give a special mention to two other works on our short list: Lara Putnam's Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age, a wide-ranging examination of the mass migrations from the British Caribbean in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the immigrants' role in constructing discourses of "black internationalism;" and Kathleen Lopez's Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History, which, while more narrow in scope, is a beautifully written investigation of the Chinese immigrant community in Cuba.  

 

Dr. O'Malley received his Elsa Goveia prize in person at this year's ACH conference in Nassau, Bahamas, and has generously donated the proceeds to the Gould-Saunders Memorial Travel Fund Award, which provides much-needed support for graduate students from the West Indies presenting at the ACH conference.  The ACH Executive Committee wishes to thank Dr. O'Malley for this contribution, and congratulate him on his accomplishment.