The Social History Society Book Prize rewards the best original works of social and cultural history by established authors. The prize was launched in 2018 and has become a key part of the society’s calendar and conference.
Books are nominated by their publisher and judged by an independent panel of judges. This year’s winner is Professor Clare Anderson for Convicts: A Global History (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Convicts illustrates the links between the history of punishment and histories of empire and nation building. Spanning a period of five centuries, the book shows how convicts were used to satisfy the geo-political and social ambitions of expanding empires.
The judges described the book as:
An impressive, original, accessibly written and genuinely global history based on exceptionally wide-ranging international research.
Clare Anderson is Professor of History at the University of Leicester and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also a long-standing member of the Social History Society. She said:
I am thrilled and grateful to the Social History Society for honouring my work with the award of the 2024 prize. In this book, I try to balance big histories of mobility, punishment, labour, exploration, science, and medicine with convict-centred perspectives.
One of the great ironies of state-directed convict systems is that, especially since the 19th century, they produced extraordinarily detailed archives. I wanted to piece these together and see if I could trace patterns across time and contexts. When I started my research, I was primarily thinking about convicts as workers, but as I started to write the book, I began to realise that convicts played a vital role in imperial projects of expropriation, dispossession, expansion, science, and medicine. I was surprised at how tenaciously the global powers clung to different forms of punitive mobility, and this led me to question dominant narratives of the so-called rise of the prison.
More broadly, this book project has reminded me, time and again, to question the passive tense that we often find in records of empires. This simple shift in focus enabled me to reveal convicts as active historical subjects in the making of the modern world, whilst they resisted their oppression at every turn.
Clare was presented with her prize by Professor Naomi Tadmor, chair of the Social History Society, at the society’s annual conference in Durham.