The Royal Historical Society awards an annual book prize for first monographs published by early career historians. Submissions are invited from historians who gained their PhD at a UK or Irish university. The 2025 book prize includes several new elements which are set out below:
- the move to one annual book prize — the Royal Historical Society First Book Prize — which will be awarded to early career authors of two books each year; each winning author will receive £1000;
- the submission of all monographs, on any subject area or geographical region, to the new format First Book Prize
- books will be received for judging by self-nomination from the author. This replaces the previous model of recommendations by publishers.
Applications for the Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize are now invited via the RHS Applications Portal (prior to the closing date of Friday 31 January 2025).
Further details of those monographs eligible for consideration for the 2025 award are provided below.
Eligibility for the RHS First Book Prize, 2025
To be eligible for consideration for the prize, the book must:
- be an early career historians first solely written history book and take the form of a monograph;
- be on any historical subject, covering all topics, chronologies and geographies;
- be an original and scholarly work of historical research by an author who received their doctoral degree from a UK or Irish university;
- have been published in English during the calendar year 2024 (for the 2025 award). Only printed and e-books bearing a 2024 copyright date are eligible for consideration in the current round. Books issued by publishers in the final weeks of 2024, which bear a copyright date of 2025, will be eligible for nomination in the 2025 awards.
- be a publication from a recognised academic or university press, or a publisher of academic monographs in history.
Submitting your book to the RHS First Book Prize, 2025
From 2025, entries for the Book Prize are via self-nomination by the author, from Monday 2 December 2024. The process for submission is as follows:
- eligible authors whose books qualify for the 2025 prize should submit an application via the RHS applications platform (open Monday 2 December 2024 to Friday 31 January 2025).
- at this stage, applicants will be asked to provide information about their book (title, date of publication, publisher, etc.).
- when submitting an application to the RHS First Book Prize, you will be required to upload a copy of the ‘Introduction’ or introductory chapter of the monograph as a pdf or via a link to an online edition. Options to provide further content from the monograph, if possible, are also available. The closing date for online applications for the 2025 prize round is Friday 31 January 2025.
- all submissions will then be reviewed by the judging panel to create a long-list. Print copies of long-listed books will be requested from their respective publishers by the RHS and allocated to the judging panel.
- judging then takes place leading to the creation of a Shortlist of eight titles, from which two final winners of the RHS First Book Prize will be chosen. The award of the next round of book prizes is expected to occur in or soon after July 2025.
Winners of the 2024 book prize
Somak Biswas for his book, Passages through India. Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940
Judges’ citation:
We are very pleased to award this year’s prize to Somak Biswas’s ‘Passages Through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940′.
The panel agreed that is an elegantly written and inventive study that provocatively unsettles our historical understandings of leading Hindu Indian figures (including Gandhi, Tagore, Vivekananda), through analysing the intimate and affective ways in which their relations (embodied, spatial, social and imagined) with Western devotees was brokered and negotiated.
Somak’s book provides a nuanced reading of a strikingly emotive epistolary archive (English source material), and fluently moves from intimate registers to more expansive debates on subjecthood, transnational allegiances and the politics of belonging. ‘Passages Through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890-1940′ is a very worthy winner of this year’s prize and we send our congratulations to Somak for his achievement.
Sara Caputo for her book Foreign Jack Tars: The British Navy and Transnational Seafarers during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
Judges’ citation:
Sara Caputo’s ‘Foreign Jack Tars’ is an extraordinary debut: original, highly ambitious and makes a clear and well-defined contribution on a range of important historical debates. It is based on extensive and meticulous research, presents a balanced and nuanced analysis and is written in a lively and engaging way.
On one level it provides an original and meticulously detailed study of the experiences of foreign and non-white sailors, casting a fascinating light into the pragmatic way they were made use of and integrated into the navy during the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. On another level, Sara uses these findings to address much wider issues, deftly situating her research within some very broad historiographical parameters. She pushes the argument beyond the boundaries of naval/maritime history and into broader British social and cultural studies.
‘Foreign Jack Tars’ is not just an impressive and potentially transformational contribution to maritime history, but a real innovation in the way we approach the history of ‘Britain and the World’. It is a very worthy winner of the 2024 prize.
A full listing of winners of the Royal Historical Society’s first book prizes (1977-2024), previously known as the Whitfield and Gladstone prizes, is available here.
General enquiries about Society’s Prizes should be sent to: administration@royalhistsoc.org.
IMAGE: ‘Books and Scholars’ Possessions’, Korean, early C20th, Metropolitan Museum of Art Collections, public domain