Snow Prize Shortlist 2026

The committee has selected the following four books for the 2026 John Ben Snow Prize shortlist for the best book in British Studies dealing with the period prior to 1800.

• Travis Glasson, Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (Yale University Press)

• Casey Schmitt, The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press)

• Lindsay O’Neill, The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press)

• Justin Roberts, Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645-1720 (Cambridge University Press)

Brief descriptions of the books and links to the publishers’ websites appear below.

The winner of the Snow Prize will be announced at the NACBS awards ceremony, which will take place virtually on November 4 at 12:00pm ET. We hope you will join us to celebrate. You can rsvp to attend the award ceremony here.

Travis Glasson, Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (Yale University Press)

"At least one‑third of the colonial population were neutrals during the American Revolution, yet they have rarely featured in narratives that shape our ideas about the conflict. By following a single transatlantic family, the Crugers, historian Travis Glasson puts neutrals—the “nobody men”—at the center of this tumultuous period’s history.  

Like most neutrals, the Crugers prioritized peace above any specific constitutional arrangement and sought ways out of the military struggle. The Crugers were prominent among prewar defenders of colonial rights, and their experiences once the shooting started, in places including New York, the island of St. Croix, and London, reveal the complex dilemmas that confronted those in the middle during the violent upheaval. The Crugers’ dealings with each other—and with a cast of boldfaced names including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, Lord North, and George Washington—illuminate how some people looked to chart alternate courses through perilous waters. Based on extensive research in the United States and Britain, Nobody Men humanizes what it meant to live through revolutionary civil war and recovers little‑known but essential histories of how new nations formed as an older empire broke apart."

Casey Schmitt, The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press)

"A century before the height of the Atlantic slave trade, early modern racialized slavery emerged through practices of captive-taking and human trafficking in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean. The Predatory Sea offers the first full-length study of this deeply entangled history of captivity and colonialism.

Between 1570 and 1670, a multinational assortment of privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers engaged in widespread practices of captive-taking and human trafficking. Raids against coastal communities and regional shipping in the Caribbean ensnared multitudes, including free and previously enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent, who found themselves trafficked into slavery away from their communities of belonging. Beginning in the 1570s, their captors established maritime bases on small, strategically located islands throughout the region. Those anchorages served as temporary settlements for northern European traffickers decades before their respective monarchs sanctioned official colonies. Colonization thus started with practices of captive-taking and human trafficking, which remained central to the development of the first English and French colonies in the Caribbean.

Through extensive research in Spanish, French, and English archives in Europe and the Caribbean, Casey Schmitt offers a fresh perspective on how captivity and maritime violence shaped early English, French, and Dutch settlement. Reading across imperial archives, she also reveals the experiences of those ensnared in this trade. Many captives escaped to Spanish population centers, where they testified to officials about what they witnessed in early English, French, and Dutch colonies. Those testimonies informed a series of Spanish attacks on foreign settlements in the Caribbean over the decades leading up to the 1650s. As Schmitt argues, captives were cause and consequence of inter-imperial competition and warfare during this violent century of Caribbean history. This captive economy, as explicated in The Predatory Sea, shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors."

Lindsay O’Neill, The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press)

"In 1716 two princes from Mpfumo—what is today Maputo, the capital of Mozambique—boarded a ship licensed by the East India Company bound for England. Instead, their perfidious captain sold them into slavery in Jamaica. After two years of pleading their case, the princes—known in the historical record as Prince James and Prince John—convinced a lawyer to purchase them, free them, and travel with them to London. The lawyer perished when a hurricane wrecked their ship, but the princes survived and arrived in England in 1720. Even though the East India Company had initially thought that the princes might assist in their aspirations to develop a trade for gold in East Africa and for enslaved labor in Madagascar, its interest waned. The princes would need to look elsewhere to return home. It was at this point that members of the Royal African Company and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge took up their cause, in the hope that profit and perhaps Christian souls would follow. John would make it home, but tragically, James would end his own life just before the ship sailed for Africa.

In The Two Princes of Mpfumo, Lindsay O’Neill brings to life individuals caught up in the eighteenth-century slave trade. O’Neill also shows how the princes’ experiences reflect the fragmented, chaotic, and often deadly realities of the early British empire. A fascinating and deeply researched historical narrative, The Two Princes of Mpfumo blurs the boundaries between the Atlantic and Indian ocean worlds; reveals the intertwined networks, powerful individuals, and unstable knowledge that guided British attempts at imperial expansion; and illuminates the power of African polities, which decided who lived and who died on their coasts."

Justin Roberts, Fragile Empire: Slavery in the Early English Tropics, 1645-1720 (Cambridge University Press)

"Fragile Empire reinterprets the rise of slavery in the early English tropics through an innovative geographic framework. It examines slavery at English sites in tropical zones across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and argues that a variety of factors – epidemiology, slave majorities, European rivalries, and the power of indigenous polities – made the seventeenth-century English tropical empire particularly fragile, creating a model of empire in the tropics that was distinct from other English colonizations. English people across the tropics were outnumbered by their slaves. English slavery was forged in the tropics and it was increasingly marked by its permanence, inflexibility, and brutality. Early English societies were not the inevitable precursor to British imperial dominance, instead they were wrought with internal vulnerabilities and external threats from European and non-European competitors. Based on thorough archival research, Justin Roberts' important new study redefines our understanding of slavery and bound labor from a global perspective."

Congratulations to these authors for their outstanding scholarship.