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Subject Guide: History

The Gladstone History Book Prize

This prize is for a history book published in Britain on any topic that must be its author's first solely written book on a historical subject which is not primarily related to British history. For more information about the Royal Historical Society, sponsors of this award, click here.

2024  Passages through India. Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940 by Somak Biswas
2023  On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia by Jennifer Keating
2022  Young Women Against Apartheid. Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle by Emily Bridger
2021  The purchase of the past : collecting culture in post-revolutionary Paris, c.1790-1890 by Tom Stammers
2020  A history of the Roman Equestrian Order by Caillan Davenport
2019  Associative political culture in the Holy Roman Empire : Upper Germany, 1346-1521 by Duncan Hardy
2018  The fullness of time : temporalities of the fifteenth-century Low Countries by Matthew S. Champion
2017  From empire to exile : history and memory within the pied-noir and harki communities, 1962-2012 by Claire Eldridge
2016  Political thought and the public sphere in Tanzania by Emma Hunter
2015  Interlopers of empire : the Lebanese diaspora in Colonial French West Africa by Andrew Arsan and The age of the Efendiyya : passages to modernity in national-colonial Egypt by Lucie Ryzova
2013  Freedom's price : serfdom, subjection and reform in Prussia, 1648-1848 by Sean A. Eddie
2012  Working knowledge : making the human sciences from Parsons to Kuhn by Joel Isaac
2011  Experiencing war as the 'enemy other' : Italian Scottish experience in World War II by Wendy Ugolini
2010  Settler society in the English Leeward Islands, c.1670-1776 by Natalie Zacek
2009  Legal practice and the written word in the early Middle Ages : Frankish formulae, c.500-1000 by Alice Rio
2008  Bonds of blood : gender, lifecycle and sacrifice in Aztec culture by Caroline Dodds-Pennock
2007  The great Partition : the making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan; Information and communication in Venice by Filippo De Vivo (runner up)
2006  The justice of Venice : authorities and liberties in the urban economy, 1550-1700 by James E. Shaw
2005  German strategy and the path to Verdun : Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870-1850 by Robert Foley
2004  Hitler's prisons : legal terror in Nazi Germany by Nikolaus Wachsmann
2003  Hindu kingship and polity in precolonial India by Norbert Peabody and From Reich to State : the Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age, 1780-1830 by Michael Rowe
2002  Soldier and peasant in French popular culture, 1766-1870 by David Hopkin and The dynastic state and the army under Louis XIV by Guy Rowlands
2001  At the gate of Christendom : Jews, Muslims and "pagans" in medieval Hungary, c.1000-c.1300 by Nora Berend
2000  State and society in the Middle Ages : the middle Rhine Valley, 400-1000 by Matthew Innes
1999  Who paid the piper? : the CIA and the cultural cold war by Frances Stonor Saunders
1998  The death of the KPD : Communism and anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956 by Patrick Major
1997  Thinking with demons : the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe by Stuart Clark

The Whitfield Book Prize
This prize is for a new book on British or Irish history. For more information about The Royal Historical Society, sponsors of this award, click here.

2024  Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars by Sara Caputo
2023  Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War by Síobhra Aiken
2022  Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 by Kristin D. Hussey

2021  England's northern frontier : conflict and local society in the fifteenth-century Scottish ,arches by Jackson Armstrong; and The making of an imperial polity : civility and America in the Jacobean metropolis by Lauren Working
2020  Ireland and the Great War : a social and political history by Niamh Gallagher
2019  Beyond slavery and abolition : Black British writing, c.1770-1830 by Ryan Hanley
2018  Communications and British operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918 by Brian N. Hall
2017  The smoke of London : energy and environment in the early modern city by William M. Cavert and The shape of the state in medieval Scotland, 1124-1290 by Alice Taylor
2016  Princely education in early modern Britain by Aysha Pollnitz
2015  Officers and accountability in medieval England 1170-1300 by John Sabapathy; Ireland and the Irish in interwar England by Mo Moulton
2013  Making toleration : the repealers and the Glorious Revolution by Scott Sowerby
2012  The politics of gender in Victorian Britain : masculinity, political culture and the struggle for women's rights by Ben Griffin
2011  Godly kingship in Restoration England : the politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660-1688 by Jacqueline Rose
2010  The art of hearing : English preachers and their audiences, 1590-1640 by Dr. Arnold Hunt
2009  The price of emancipation : slave-ownership, compensation and British society at the end of slavery by Nicholas Draper
2008  George Canning and liberal Toryism, 1801-1827 by Stephen M. Lee, jointly with Free trade nation : commerce, consumption and civil society in modern Britain by Frank Trentmann
2007  The earls of Mercia : lordship and power in late Anglo-Saxon England by Stephen Baxter, jointly with The idea of greater Britain : empire and the future of world order, 1860-1900 by Duncan Bell
2006  Birth control, sex and marriage in Britain, 1918-1960 by Kate Fisher
2005  Queer London by Matt Houlbrooke
2004  Making English morals : voluntary association and moral reform in England, 1787-1886 by M. J. D. Roberts
2003  Patterns of piety : women, gender and religion in late medieval and Reformation England by Christine Peters
2002  Popular politics and the English Reformation by Ethan H. Shagan
2001  God's house at Ewelme : life, devotion and architecture in a fifteenth-century almshouse by John Goodall; and Building on ruins : the rediscovery of Rome and English architecture by Frank Salmon
2000  Oral and literate culture in England, 1500-1700 by Adam Fox
1999  Understanding popular violence in the English revolution : the Colchester plunderers by John Walter
1998  The gentleman's daughter: women’s lives in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery
1997  Domestic biography : the legacy of evangelicalism in four nineteenth-century families by Christopher Tolley
1996  Youth and authority : formative experience in England, 1560-1640 by Paul D. Griffiths
1995  The sense of the people : politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715-1785 by Kathleen Wilson
1994  The hanging tree : execution and the English people, 1770-1868 by V. A. C. Gatrell
1993  Commoners : common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700-1820 by Jeanette M. Neeson
1992  Locality and polity : a study of Warwickshire landed society, 1401-1499 by Christine Carpenter
1991  Cheap print and popular piety, 1550-1640 by Tessa Watt
1990  Political change and the Labour party, 1900-1918 Duncan M. Tanner
1989  Medieval Westminster, 1200-1540 by Gervase Rosser
1988  Reforming London : the London government problem, 1855-1900 by J. H. Davis
1987  Criticism and compliment : the politics of literature in the England of Charles I by Kevin M. Sharpe
1986  Suffolk and the Tudors : politics and religion in an English county, 1500-1600 by Diarmaid MacCulloch
1985  Annals of the labouring poor : social change and agrarian England, 1660-1900 by K. D. M. Snell
1984  Methodism and politics in British society, 1750-1850 by David Hempton
1983  The English alehouse : a social history, 1200-1830 by Peter Clark
1982  Faith by statute : Parliament and the settlement of religion, 1559 by Norman L. Jones
1981  The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536-7 by Scott M. Harrison
1980  The Parliamentary agents : a history by D. L. Rydz
1979  Denzil Holles, 1598-1680 : a study of his political career by Patricia Crawford
1978  The Queen's two bodies : drama and the Elizabethan succession by Marie Axton
1977  John Burns by K. D. Brown