Nick Bunker Wins $50,000 2015 George Washington Book Prize
The winner of one of the nation’s largest literary awards, the George Washington Book Prize, was announced Wednesday evening, May 20, at a black-tie gala at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The $50,000 prize went to Nick Bunker’s An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (Knopf).
The George Washington Book Prize honors the year’s best new books on early American history, especially books that are written for a broad audience. The three institutions that sponsor the prestigious prize — Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington’s Mount Vernon — are devoted to furthering historical scholarship that contributes to the public understanding of the American Revolution and the founding era.
An Empire on the Edge is a probing account of Great Britain’s internal political and financial tensions on the eve of revolution. Drawing on a careful study of primary sources from Britain and the United States, Bunker crafts a compelling story of the deepening antagonism between England and her colonies, giving equal weight to the commercial as well as the political ambitions of the British Empire. Bunker’s series of fully visualized scenes of familiar events like the Boston Tea Party and lesser-known episodes such as the Gaspee Affair, provides a nuanced description of the Anglo-American conflict.
An independent scholar in Lincolnshire, England, Bunker was formerly a journalist for the Financial Times and an investment banker. Bunker’s background in finance is evident in his insightful portrait of London’s speculative cycles, the financial woes of the East India Company, and the networks of global trade that put the imperial system “slipping into ruin.”
In addition to claiming the Washington Book Prize, An Empire on the Edge was recently announced as a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in history, earning praise for its “bifocal perspective on the countdown to the American Revolution.” Empire on Edge is Bunker’s second book: he previously authored Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History (2010). ...