U.K. author wins $75,000 US Cundill History Prize
Last Updated: Monday, November 2, 2009 | 11:14 PM ET
CBC News
Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory won the $75,000 US history prize. (Harper) British historian Lisa Jardine has won the Cundill History Prize for her book Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, which tells the story of a Britain occupied by a foreign power.
She was presented with the $75,000 US prize, established last year by Montreal-born investment manager F. Peter Cundill, on Sunday at McGill University in Montreal.
Jardine's book is about the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when a group of parliamentarians led by Dutch stadtholder William II of Orange-Nassau overthrew King James II.
"I tell the story of Britain being really invaded, invaded like Iraq was by the Western forces, occupied like Baghdad was by invading forces, because we must never forget the past of which we are made," Jardine told CBC News.
"To call our invasion a Glorious Revolution and pretend we invited the Dutch stadtholder in to be our monarch is to distort our past and therefore to distort our present and our future," she said.
It wasn't a peaceful revolution, she said, and she takes pains to describe the defeats and humiliations involved as well as testing the traditional view that the rise of England as a world power took place at the expense of the Dutch.
"The readjustments in attitude that come about as part of defeat are every bit as important as the great triumphs we like to record on our monuments," Jardine said.
"The historian's job is to say 'wait a minute. Yes there are these moments of triumph but we need to remember the moments that it was a little more difficult.'"
Jardine, a professor of Renaissance studies at England's University of London, said she was "ecstatic" at winning such an important prize and regards the win as a great "responsibility."
"We historians have to keep telling our nations about what made them, what created them and what will make their future."
Jardine is a regular contributor to BBC Radio and to national newspapers and magazines. Her previous books include Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution and biographies of Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke.
Two $10,000 US Recognition of Excellence prizes were also awarded Sunday. They went to:
- Champlain's Dream, by Brandeis University history professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner David Hackett Fischer.
- The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen, a Finnish-born professor of native American history at the University of California.
The Cundill prize is the world's largest prize for historical literature. Cundill, a graduate of McGill University who is one of Canada's most successful investment managers, established the prize in April 2008.
"Going Dutch has been selected because of its exceptional scholarship; written quality; original presentation and broad accessibility: all the criteria that are set for this prize," said Canadian Senator and jury member Serge Joyal.
Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker essayist and McGill University alumnus who attended the ceremony, said he thought all three finalists dealt with one of the essential themes of Canadian history — how disparate peoples learn to live side by side.
"In the case of the English and the Dutch, it's fundamentally an optimistic story about forging a new society of tolerance out of two very different peoples," he said.
