The Shortlist for the 2021 RHS Gladstone Prize is announced
This year, as in past competitions, the Gladstone Prize has attracted an outstanding range of submissions on the Atlantic World, British imperial, and trans-national contexts. The field was so strong that the committee shortlisted eight first monographs, in recognition of their originality, rigorous research, and vigorous contribution to past and current debates.
– Professor Barbara Bombi, Gladstone Prize Committee Chair
The Prize offers £1,000 to the author of a work not primarily related to British or Irish history.
The 2021 shortlist recognises the scholarly contribution and quality of eight excellent history monographs published in 2020.
- Princely Power in Late Medieval France: Jeanne de Penthièvre and the War for Brittany by Erika Graham-Goering (Cambridge University Press)
- A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1760 by Simon Mills (Oxford University Press)
- Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India by Ali Raza (Cambridge University Press)
- The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris, c.1790–1890 by Tom Stammers (Cambridge University Press)
- Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in the Divided Germany by Marcel Thomas (Oxford University Press)
- The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750 by David Veevers (Cambridge University Press)
- On Hospitals: Welfare, Law, and Christianity in Western Europe, 400-1320 by Sethina Watson (Oxford University Press)
- Ishikawa Sanshirō’s Geographical Imagination by Nadine Willems (Leiden University Press)
Video introductions to the shortlisted books are also now available.
The winner of the 2021 Gladstone Prize will be announced at the annual RHS Awards Ceremony for Publishing, Teaching and Research.
Held online at 5.30pm on Friday 23 July. More details soon.
About the Prize
The Gladstone Prize is one of the Royal Historical Society’s two annual book awards. To be eligible for the prize the book must:
- be its author’s first solely written history book;
- be on any historical subject not primarily related to British history;
- be an original and scholarly work of historical research by an author who received their doctoral degree from a British or Irish university;
- have been published in English during the calendar year 2020.
The Gladstone Memorial Trust made it possible for the RHS to launch the Gladstone History book prize in 1998, in honour of the value William Gladstone placed on the study of history. Find out more about the Prize, and its previous winners, on the RHS website.
Don’t forget
Shortlist for the 2021 RHS Whitfield Prize is also now available
