The Social History Society’s Book Prize recognises innovative scholarship the fields of social and cultural history.

It is awarded by a panel of judges, who look for the best original work of historical research published in the preceding calendar year. The only stipulations are that the book must be written in English, by a scholar normally resident in the UK, and must be at least the author’s second history book.

Books are nominated by publishers.

The 2023 judging panel was chaired by Pat Thane and comprises Lucy Noakes, Phillipp Schofield and Naomi Tadmor.

2024 Prize

WINNER: Clare Anderson for Convicts: A Global History (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Find out more about the 2024 winner here

2023 Prize

WINNER: Laura Gowing for Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

RUNNER UP: Simon Morgan for Celebrities, Heroes and Champions: Popular Politicians in the Age of Reform, 1810-67 (Manchester University Press, 2021).

Find out more about the 2023 winners here

2022 Prize

WINNER: Lucy Noakes for Dying for the Nation. Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (Manchester University Press, 2020).

Find out more about the 2022 winner here

2021 Prize

WINNER: Lucy Bland for Britain’s Brown Babies: The stories of children born to black GIs and white women in the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2019)

COMMENDATION: John Henderson for Florence under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (Yale University Press, 2019)

COMMENDATION: Suzannah Lipscomb for The Voices of Nimes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc (Oxford University Press, 2019)

Find out more about the 2021 winners here

2020 Prize

WINNER: Khaled Fahmy for In Quest of Justice. Islamic Law and Forensic Medicine in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2018)

RUNNER UP: Ian Forrest for Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith made the Medieval Church (Princeton University Press, 2018)

Find out more about the 2020 winners here

2019 Prize

WINNER: Hannah Barker for Family & Business during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2017)

RUNNER UP: Sabine Lee for Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press, 2017)

Find out more about the 2019 winners here

2018 Prize

WINNER: Sasha Handley for Sleep in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 2016)

RUNNER UP: Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery for Consumption and the Country House by (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Find out more about the inaugural winners here