Thanks to Ashley at Midas PR for alerting me to the glorious Wolfson Prize for History, the 2023 shortlist has just been announced and I honestly do not know how they managed to whittle a superb list down to these final 6!
As you may have seen from the featured image, the titles are as follows-
‘African and Caribbean People in Britain’ by Hakim Ali (Published by Allen Lane)
Britan’s first person of African heritage to become a professor of history in the UK, Hakim has recently been in the spotlight as his course, the MRes in the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Chichester, has been cancelled after a review by the university’s planning committee (Guardian), with Hakim having just been made redundant from his position as a result.
Hakim is passionate about the importance of ensuring the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain is included on university degree courses and school curriculums. Hakim’s shortlisted book is published in paperback on 7 September.
A major new history of Britain that will transform our understanding of this country’s past
‘ I’ve waited so long so read a comprehensively researched book about Black history on this island. This is a journey of discovery and a truly exciting and important work’ Zainab Abbas
Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest.
Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain’s heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian’s Wall while Rome’s first ‘African Emperor’ died in York. In Elizabethan England, ‘Black Tudors’ served in the land’s most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom – a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.
Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements – universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS – owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.
Links-https://www.hakimadi.org/
‘The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe’ by James Belich (Published by Princeton University Press)
Belich sheds new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes: that the human tragedy of the plague brought about cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed.
A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.
James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons.
Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.
‘The Perils Of Interpreting : The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and The British Empire’ by Henrietta Harrison (Published by Princeton University Press)
An impressive new history of China’s relations with the West–told through the lives of two language interpreters who participated in the famed Macartney embassy in 1793
The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney’s fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East’s disinterest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting, Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney’s two interpreters at that meeting–Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in China-British relations. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars.
Harrison demonstrates that the Qing court’s ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li’s influence as Macartney’s interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices, the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain.
Uncovering the lives of two overlooked figures, The Perils of Interpreting offers a valuable argument for cross-cultural understanding in a better-connected world
‘Resistance :The Underground in Europe, 1939-1945’ by Halik Konchanski (Published by Allen Lane)
The first English-language history of resistance to study the whole of Europe, uncovering powerful, human stories of resistors who have often been overlooked
It’s almost shocking to think that now, more than seventy years after the Nazi surrender in 1945, there is not a single volume that has attempted to unify the resistance movements that convulsed Europe during the brutal years of occupation. In her extraordinary work, Resistance, Halik Kochanski does just that, creating a prodigiously researched account that becomes the first to bring these disparate histories into a single narrative.
Taking us from France in the west to parts of the Soviet Union in the east, Resistance reveals why and how small bands of individuals undertook actions that could lead not merely to their own deaths, but to the destruction of their entire communities. As Kochanski demonstrates, most who joined up were ordinary people who would not have been expected—even by themselves—to become heroes. Simultaneously panoramic and heartbreakingly intimate, Resistance is an incomparable history necessary for any home library.
‘Vagabonds’ by Oskar Jensen ( Published by Duckworth Books)
A compelling, moving and unexpected portrait of London’s poor from BBC New Generation Thinker Oskar Jensen, bringing the Dickensian city vividly to life.
Compelling, moving and unexpected portraits of London’s poor from a rising star British historian – the Dickensian city brought to real and vivid life.
Until now, our view of bustling late Georgian and Victorian London has been filtered through its great chroniclers, who did not themselves come from poverty – Dickens, Mayhew, Gustave Doré. Their visions were dazzling in their way, censorious, often theatrical. Now, for the first time, this innovative social history brilliantly – and radically – shows us the city’s most compelling period (1780–1870) at street level.
From beggars and thieves to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, Jensen unites a breadth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words. What emerges is a buzzing, cosmopolitan world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, origin, ability and occupation – a world that challenges and fascinates us still.
Links-https://oskarcoxjensen.com/
Twitter @oskaroxjensen
‘Portable Magic’ by Emma Smith (Allen Lane)
An exciting history of books and their power over us, exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books.
Most of what we say about books is really about the words inside the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, ‘a uniquely portable magic‘. Here, Emma Smith shows us why.
Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium’s worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books’ physical form – their ‘bookhood’ – that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper’s Riders , to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways.
Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a ‘classic’-and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal – and more turbulent – than we tend to imagine.
Any of these titles catch your eye?
As usual, don’t forget to drop me a line if you’ve read any, and let me know what you think!
Always eager to hear from fellow book lovers!
Twitter @WolfsonHistory @midascampaigns
Author
bridgeman.lenny@gmail.com