Asheesh Kapur Siddique, assistant professor in the UMass Amherst Department of History, is the recipient of the 2020 Dorothy Ross Article Prize, awarded by the Society for U.S. Intellectual History for the best article in U.S. intellectual history.
Siddique's article, “The Archival Epistemology of Political Economy in the Early Modern British Atlantic,” was published in the William & Mary Quarterly [3rd Ser., 77, No. 4 (Oct. 2020), 641-674] and “explores the origins, applications, and demise of a hitherto-overlooked technique of producing political economic knowledge in the early modern British Atlantic world: arguing from the authority of official paperwork contained in bureaucratic archives.”
This award goes to an emerging scholar whose article must have appeared in an academic journal in the 2020 calendar year. Siddique is a historian of early America, early modern Europe, and the British empire whose research and pedagogy explores the role of collecting, managing, and using knowledge to the history of state formation and governance.
From the award committee: "Original in its approach to examining the history of archival work, Siddique provides a rich and carefully researched account of the growing importance of archives for British imperialism over the eighteenth century. Furthermore, by tracing the rise and decline of archival methods in the British empire by the nineteenth century, his article helps historicize, flesh out, and then frustrate, our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power."