Stephen Platt, an American historian, has won the $75,000 US Cundill Prize in History, for his book giving a gripping account of China’s 19th century Taiping Rebellion.

In Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, The West, And The Epic Story of The Taiping Civil War, he argues the rebellion shaped modern China.

His book examines the Western role in the Taiping Rebellion, how events in China interacted with the simultaneous Civil War in the U.S., and how difficult it can be to distinguish between humanitarian intervention and imperialism....