Exploring Empire and Resistance: MacMillan Center Awards Yale Faculty Benton and Mukhopadhyay with 2025 International Book Prizes
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies has awarded its distinguished International Book Prizes to two Yale faculty members, recognizing their outstanding writing on the topics of global history and empire. Among Yale’s most prestigious honors for scholarly publishing, the prizes highlight the MacMillan Center’s role in advancing research that examines the forces shaping our world.
Established in 2004 to honor two former directors of the MacMillan Center, the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize celebrates the most outstanding book by a Yale ladder faculty member, and the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize honors the best first book by a Yale ladder faculty member. Recipients receive a research appointment at the MacMillan Center along with $5,000 in funding to support their continued scholarship.
Lauren Benton, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History and Professor of Law, received the 2025 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024). Benton reveals how European empires from the 15th through the 20th centuries relied on routine and often unacknowledged violence to sustain global power. Challenging conventional distinctions between war and peace, she shows how empires framed ongoing brutality as “small” or necessary, shaping a legacy of conflict that still resonates in today’s international order. The committee praised They Called It Peace for “offering a compelling historical account of small-scale conflicts” and noted that the work’s “many themes not only establish the author’s remarkable scholarship but make the book a very engaging read.”
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Assistant Professor of English, received the 2025 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for her book Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024). In Required Reading, Mukhopadhyay offers a fresh perspective on the history of reading by examining how everyday texts such as manuals, government documents, and almanacs shaped the imaginative and political lives of readers in colonial South Asia. Through compelling case studies, she shows how even partial, resisted, or utilitarian reading practices became central to the ways individuals navigated and responded to imperial rule. The prize committee praised the book as “deeply researched, deft in its style, innovative in its analysis, and a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.”
Last year marked the 20th anniversary of the International Book Prizes, and the MacMillan Center honored Stephanie Newell, George M. Bodman Professor of English, with the 2024 Gustav Ranis International Book Prize for her book Newsprint Literature and Local Literary Creativity in West Africa, 1900s–1960s (Boydell & Brewer). Egor Lazarev, Assistant Professor of Political Science, received the 2024 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize for State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya (Cambridge University Press).