John K. Fairbank Prize
The John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History is offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800. It honors the late John K. Fairbank, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and director of the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University, and president of the American Historical Association in 1968. Only books of high scholarly and literary merit will be considered. Anthologies, edited works, and pamphlets are ineligible for the competition.
List of prizes
| Year | Recipient | Title | Publisher |
| 1969 | Harold Z. Schiffrin | Sun Yat-Sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution | University of California Press |
| 1969 | Tetsuo Najita | Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, 1905-1915 | Harvard University Press |
| 1971 | Jerome B. Grieder | Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-37 | Harvard University Press |
| 1973 | William G. Beasley | The Meiji Restoration | Stanford University Press |
| 1975 | Yu-wen Jen | The Taiping Revolutionary Movement | Yale University Press |
| 1977 | Gail Lee Bernstein | Japanese Marxist: A Portrait of Kawakami Hajime, 1879-1946 | Harvard University Press |
| 1979 | Guy S. Alitto | The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity | University of California Press |
| 1981 | Conrad Totman | The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862-1868 | University of Hawaii Press |
| 1983 | Bruce Cumings | The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-47 | Princeton University Press |
| 1985 | Philip C. Huang | The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China | Stanford University Press |
| 1986 | Carol Gluck | Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period | Princeton University Press |
| 1987 | Joseph W. Esherick | The Origins of the Boxer Uprising | University of California Press |
| 1988 | Sheldon Garon | The State and Labor in Modern Japan | University of California Press |
| 1989 | Prasenjit Duara | Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 | Stanford University Press |
| 1990 | Miriam Silverberg | Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu | Princeton University Press |
| 1991 | Andrew Gordon | Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan | University of California Press |
| 1992 | Carter J. Eckert | Offspring of Empire: The Ko-ch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945 | University of Washington Press |
| 1992 | Kathryn Bernhardt | Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950 | Stanford University Press |
| 1993 | Elizabeth J. Perry | Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor | Stanford University Press |
| 1993 | Stefan Tanaka | Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History | University of California Press |
| 1994 | Kenneth Pomeranz | The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853-1937 | University of California Press |
| 1995 | Kären Wigen | The Making of Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 | University of California Press |
| 1996 | David G. Marr | Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power | University of California Press |
| 1997 | Paul A. Cohen | History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth | Columbia University Press |
| 1998 | Louise Young | Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism | University of California Press |
| 1999 | John W. Dower | W.W. Norton & Co./New Press | |
| 2000 | Kenneth Pomeranz | The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy | Princeton University Press |
| 2001 | Peter Zinoman | The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 | University of California Press |
| 2002 | Julia Adeney Thomas | Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology | University of California Press |
| 2003 | Norman J. Girardot | The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage | University of California Press |
| 2004 | Jordan Sand | House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 | Harvard University Asia Center |
| 2005 | Ruth Rogaski | Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-port China | University of California Press |
| 2006 | Madeleine Zelin | The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China | Columbia University Press |
| 2007 | Eugenia Lean | Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China | University of California Press |
| 2008 | Susan L. Mann | The Talented Women of the Zhang Family | University of California Press |
| 2009 | Klaus Mühlhahn | Criminal Justice in China: A History | Harvard University Press |
| 2010 | James C. Scott | Yale University Press | |
| 2011 | Carol A. Benedict | Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010 | University of California Press |
| 2012 | Jun Uchida | Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 | Harvard East Asian Monographs |
| 2013 | Barbara Mittler | A Continuous Revolution : Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture | Harvard University Asia Center |
| 2014 | |||
| 2015 | Rian Thum | The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History | Harvard University Press |
| 2016 | Barak Kushner | Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice | Harvard University Press |
| 2017 | Christopher Goscha | Vietnam: A New History | Basic Books |
| 2018 | Thomas Mullaney | The Chinese Typewriter: A History | MIT Press |
| 2019 | Chris Courtney | The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood | Cambridge University Press |