Dramatic story of a slave rebellion wins 2021 Cundill History Award

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Marjoleine Kars received the 2021 Cundill History Award Thursday for her book Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast.

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The award, administered by McGill University and named for McGill alumnus and philanthropist F. Peter Cundill, recognized the Netherlands-born historian Kars based in Washington, DC, for her pioneering work on a rebellion. Little-known slave trade from 1763 that took place in a Dutch colony. in what is now Guyana.

Drawing on more than 900 previously inaccessible verbatim transcripts of interviews with participants and witnesses to the rebellion, Kars’s work was cited by Jury President Michael Ignatieff as a book that “transforms our understanding of two vitally important issues – slavery and the empire – and (…) it tells such a dramatic story (…) that no reader will be able to put the book down ”.

Speaking to Zoom from his home in DC shortly after learning of his win, Kars expressed particular gratitude for the newly raised profile moment in his book.

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“I am very happy, because it is a book about slavery, and that is a very attacked subject in the United States. I think the prestige of the Cundill Prize will be a shot in the arm for this field of study, so I am glad that, of all the books they could have chosen, they chose one on slavery. “

Perhaps the most notable achievement of the book is the discovery of a rebellion that had been lost to history. Berbice, the colony where it happened, is an unknown place for the vast majority of the Dutch, much less globally.

“This was a rebellion that I was not aware of, even though I had studied the African diaspora in graduate school,” Kars said. But it was a massive event. It lasted over a year, while most slave rebellions were put down in a matter of hours or days. As I read the transcripts, I found it to be a very moving story, often gruesome, but very fascinating. “

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When asked to explain the centuries-long obscurity of his subject, Kars cited both language and evolving cultural attitudes.

“People who study the history of the Atlantic have focused on the records in English, French and Spanish, because those are the languages ​​that most historians can read,” he said. “American academics, for a long time, simply couldn’t read Dutch. Even Dutch historians were more interested in Dutch East Indian history, because it somehow seemed more exotic. But all of that is beginning to change. There are all these untapped Dutch archives that are full of rich records. “

What most distinguishes the transcripts from their source for Blood on the River, Kars said, is that they provide “the bottom-up, inside-out view. We can see how ordinary men, women and children fared, compared to just the leaders. ”She contrasted this with contemporary records of the Haitian Revolution, for which, she said, “There were no interrogations afterwards, because the rebels won.”

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Published by The New Press in August 2020, the book has already been translated into Dutch. Kars hopes it will make a significant contribution to the conversation in his native country about slavery. The will to address it is growing, Kars said, pointing to the recent Rijksmuseum exhibition on slavery in Amsterdam, the country’s first large-scale exhibition devoted to the subject, as an example.

“(The Dutch) are beginning to pay attention to their own historical involvement in forced labor,” he said. “For a long time it was thought that slavery happened (only) in the United States, that racism was something American.”

As mentioned in the Ignatieff quote, Kars, a University of Maryland professor whose work fully exhibits the rigor and methods of an academic historian, has directed her book directly to a general audience.

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“I wish more historians would do that,” he said. “Of course, there is room for more articles and technical books, but I wish it were thought of a wider audience. It is clear to me that in this political moment, people need to be more historically aware ”.

When asked to describe her vocation as a historian, Kars came up with a suitable analogy.

“What can you do more important than helping people understand where their own lives come from, what are the building blocks of their own world?” he asked rhetorically. “It is like being a therapist, but not for an individual person. For a culture “.

The Cundill History Award presents US $ 75,000 to its winner, the largest purse for a non-fiction award in English. Two finalists receive $ 10,000 each. This year, along with Kars, Rebecca Clifford was shortlisted for Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust and Marie Favereau for The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World.

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