The Elsa Goveia Book Prize

The ACH is pleased to announce the recipient and honorable mentions for the 2025 Elsa Goveia Book Prize.

Elsa Goveia Book Prize — Woodville Marshall
for
Near a Plantation: Free Villages in Barbados, 1840-1945

Professor Emeritus Woodville Marshall’s Near a Plantation: Free Villages in Barbados, 1840-1945 (University of the West Indies Press, 2024) packs a powerful, compelling study of the post emancipation free village system in Barbados into a deceptively slim volume. Working especially from stipendiary magistrate, census, and royal commission records, Marshall weaves a deliberate, thoughtful re-examination of the archival record that upsets previous assumptions about the smallholding class in the post-slavery period. The book challenges stereotypes often attached to smaller territories and what we commonly refer to as “high density islands”; and demonstrates the importance of focused, specialised enquiry. The work is at once deeply in dialogue with multi-decade debates about land availability and labour conditions throughout the Caribbean and with the very best of new work that seeks small actions taken for autonomy and dignity during emancipation, often beginning with the re-orientation of housing and the remaking of home. It shares new details on what we already know and at the same times upsets what we have come to accept as historical truths.  Marshall makes the methodological underpinnings of his results lucid, inviting debates to continue and offering his data for curious readers. The maps and tables are  themselves a gift to a reader or a classroom. Mature, confident writing. The historian’s craft is on full display and the result of its thoughtful, meticulous  execution clearly shows it has been mastered by the author. A must read for students of Caribbean history.

HONOURABLE MENTION
Dr Lisa G. Materson’s Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) aptly interweaves the story of a white female anti-racist, anti-imperialist pacifist who became an ally to Puerto Rican pro-independence activists in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Coming of age as a child of settler colonialism in native American territory South Dakota, Ruth Reynolds engaged in anti-imperialist efforts to free India and advocated for civil rights for Black Americans, eventually making the independence of Puerto Rico her lifelong struggle. Materson crafts a vivid tale from newspapers, government documents, interviews, and memoirs. Radical Solidarity is not simply a biography but meditates on the relationships between Reynolds and the radical activism of pro-independence Puerto Rican activists, situating them within the wider global anti-imperialist struggle, beyond Reynolds’ 1989 death into the present day. Her ability to keep these different scales in view is quite impressive.

HONOURABLE MENTION
Dr Chelsea Schields’ Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2023) is an original study that marries the study of sexual and reproductive politics with extractive economies focusing on lesser studied parts of the Caribbean in English language scholarship: the Dutch Caribbean. Schields does an excellent job moving between the specific cases of Curacao and Aruba and taking up gender seriously with her focus on marital and sexual relationships as well as family, reproduction, and discourses about racism. The study will generate further interest on these themes, not only in the Dutch Caribbean. Indeed, it is reminiscent of Lara Putnam’s classic The Company They Kept, intertwining the study of gender, labour, and sexual politics, in the Caribbean Costa Rica at the time of the United Fruit Company’s economic dominance there. “Those thinking in and from the Caribbean have developed a rich conceptual vocabulary for understanding the region’s uneven links to global power,” she writes, and extraction and exception have been the norm. Yet, as Schields concludes, Caribbean individuals and their kin “made visible what was so often concealed…[and] sought actively to shape the conditions of their labor, love, and belonging” (193).

Many thanks to Heather Cateau, Elsa Goveia Prize Committee Chair, of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Sharika Crawford, of the United States Naval Academy, and Anne Ellers of Yale University, for their hard work.

Previously awarded every three years, the ACH book prize has been awarded every two years since 1995 and recognizes excellence in the field of Caribbean history If you would like more information on the award, please contact the ACH Secretary-Treasurer at: achsecretary@gmail.com.

The next award will be made at the 58th Annual Conference in 2027. The call for submissions will be issued after the 57th Annual Conference in 2026 and will be open to books published in 2025 and 2026.