History Book prizes announced (UK)

The Royal Historical Society’s book prizes for 2007 have been announced. Joint winners of the Whitfield Book Prize (£1,000) were Dr Stephen Baxter for The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press) and Dr Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton University Press). This award for an author’s first book on a British history subject is financed by the Whitfield Fund and the Royal Historical Society. The Gladstone Prize (£1,000), for a book outside the field of British history, went to Dr Yasmin Khan for The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press). The judges said: ‘Khan has produced a well-written and accessible book that has a regrettable modern resonance as well as a profound historical significance.’