Lisa Jardine, author of Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, has been awarded the Cundill International Prize in History, described as the world's largest historical literature award for non-fiction.

Jardine collected a prize of $75,000 U.S. at the Mount Royal Club in Montreal Sunday night.

"It is humbling to be chosen as this year's winner from such a stellar list of historians," Jardine said. "The Cundill prize is the most important history prize in the world."

Two runners-up each pocketed a prize of $10,000 U.S.:

In Champlain's Dream, published by Knopf Canada, author David Hackett Fischer presented the first full-scale biography in decades of explorer Samuel de Champlain, whose travels extended from the St. Lawrence to the Spanish Empire in Mexico.

Fischer dealt with Champlain as a complex, elusive man whose impact on North America continues to reverberate four centuries after a life lived in mystery.

Fischer is a professor at Brandeis University.

In Comanche Empire, Pekka Hämäläinen described a long-gone empire built by the Comanche Indians in the 18th and early 19th centuries...

... Hämäläinen teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara....