Stansky Book Prize Shortlist

The committee has selected the following four books for the 2025 Stansky Book Prize shortlist for the best book in British Studies dealing with the period since 1800.

• Stephen Brooke, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City (Oxford University Press)

• Jonathan Connolly, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press)

• Allen MacDuffie, Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press)

• Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press)

Brief descriptions of the books and links to the publishers’ websites appear below.

The winner of the Stansky Prize will be announced at the NACBS awards ceremony, which will take place this year virtually on November 5 at 12:00pm ET. We hope you will join us to celebrate. You can rsvp to attend the award ceremony here.

Stephen Brooke, London, 1984: Conflict and Change in the Radical City (Oxford University Press)

"Using a wide array of sources, many of which have never been used before, London, 1984 explores the radical history of the capital in this tumultuous era, from a major anti-apartheid march in central London to an alternative childcare centre in Dalston, from a protest staged on the Thames against Docklands development to tensions on housing estates in the East End and Tottenham around racial violence and policing, from a raid on a gay bookshop in Bloomsbury to the Greater London Council's attempt to build a challenge to Thatcherism from County Hall, Lambeth, and from controversial and well-known historical actors, such as Ken Livingstone and Margaret Thatcher, to the compelling stories of numerous less famous Londoners who also sought to influence the shape and nature of their city. This is a story of struggles within the corridors of power, but it is also one of those on the ground, waged through popular culture and activism, and in daily life.In so doing, London, 1984 offers a panoramic, timely, and revealing portrait of the city in a pivotal decade in its modern history. These years saw deep problems of racial violence, policing, and poverty, as well as other controversies and struggles—over feminism, gay and lesbian rights, anti-racism, jobs and economic strategy, neoliberalism and the nature of the state, and global issues, such as Apartheid, nuclear weapons, and Northern Ireland. Across these, and the stories of those who lived, shaped, and fought them, we see the roots of London and Britain today."

Jonathan Connolly, Worthy of Freedom: Indenture and Free Labor in the Era of Emancipation (University of Chicago Press)

"In this book, historian Jonathan Connolly traces the normalization of indenture from its controversial beginnings to its widespread adoption across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Initially viewed as a covert revival of slavery, indenture caused a scandal in Britain and India. But over time, economic conflict in the colonies altered public perceptions of indenture, now increasingly viewed as a legitimate form of free labor and a means of preserving the promise of abolition. Connolly explains how the large-scale, state-sponsored migration of Indian subjects to work on sugar plantations across Mauritius, British Guiana, and Trinidad transformed both the notion of post-slavery free labor and the political economy of emancipation. Excavating legal and public debates and tracing practical applications of the law, Connolly carefully reconstructs how the categories of free and unfree labor were made and remade to suit the interests of capital and empire, showing that emancipation was not simply a triumphal event but, rather, a deeply contested process. In so doing, he advances an original interpretation of how indenture changed the meaning of “freedom” in a post-abolition world."

Allen MacDuffie, Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Stanford University Press)

"Many people today experience the climate crisis with a divided state of mind: aware of the extreme effects, but living everyday life as if the crisis is not actually happening. This book argues that this structure of feeling has roots that can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when Western culture encountered the profound shock of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Darwin's theory made it increasingly difficult for secular humanists to flatly deny that humans are animals, fully enmeshed in natural systems and processes. But like those of us confronting climate change today, many writers and scientists struggled to integrate its depersonalizing vision into their understanding of the place of humans in the natural order. The result was that the radical environmental implications of The Origin of Species were evaded as soon as they were articulated, abetted by a culture of denial structured by the illusions of capital and empire.

In light of the climate emergency, Climate of Denial recontextualizes nineteenth-century texts to offer rich insight into the defensive strategies used—then and now—to avoid confronting the unsettling realities of our situation on this planet."

Priyasha Mukhopadhyay, Required Reading: The Life of Everyday Texts in the British Empire (Princeton University Press)

"In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers archives of everyday writing from the British empire. Mukhopadhyay rummages in the drawers of bureaucratic offices and the cupboards of publishers in search of how historical readers in colonial South Asia responded to texts ranging from licenses to manuals, how they made sense of them, and what this can tell us about their experiences living in the shadow of a vast imperial power. Taking these engagements seriously, she argues, is the first step to challenging conventional notions of what it means to read. Mukhopadhyay’s account is populated by a cast of characters that spans the ranks of colonial society, from bored soldiers to frustrated bureaucrats. These readers formed close, even intimate relationships with everyday texts. She presents four case studies: a soldier’s manual, a cache of bureaucratic documents, a collection of astrological almanacs, and a women’s literary magazine. Tracking moments in which readers refused to read, were unable to read, and read in part, she uncovers the dizzying array of material, textual, and aural practices these texts elicited. Even selectively read almanacs and impenetrable account books, she finds, were springboards for personal, world-shaping readerly relationships.Untethered from the constraints of conventional literacy, Required Reading reimagines how texts work in the world and how we understand the very idea of reading."

Congratulations to these authors for their outstanding scholarship!