The Whitfield Book Prize is a prize of £1,000 awarded annually by the Royal Historical Society to the best work on a subject of British or Irish history published within the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland during the calendar year. To be eligible for the award, the book must be the first history work published by the author.[1]
The prize was founded in 1976 out of the bequest of Archibald Stenton Whitfield. Originally, the prize was £400; five years later, it was increased to £600.[2] Currently, the prize is £1,000.
Source: Royal Historical Society
Ireland and the Great War, written by Niamh Gallagher, became the first book about Irish history to win the prize in 2020.[3]
| Author | scope=col | Title | scope=col | Result | scope=col class="unsortable" | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1977 | John Burns | Winner | ||||
| 1978 | Winner | |||||
| 1979 | Denzil Holles, 1598–1680: A study of his Political Career | Winner |
| Author | scope=col | Title | scope=col | Result | scope=col class="unsortable" | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Winner | |||||
| 1981 | Winner | |||||
| 1982 | Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 | Winner | ||||
| 1983 | Winner | |||||
| 1984 | Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 | Winner | ||||
| 1985 | Annals of the Labouring Poor | Winner | ||||
| 1986 | Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500–1600 | Winner | ||||
| 1987 | Criticism and Compliment: The politics of literature in the England of Charles I | Winner | ||||
| 1988 | Reforming London, the London Government Problem, 1855–1900 | Winner | ||||
| 1989 | Medieval Westminster, 1200–1540 | Winner |
| Author | scope=col | Title | scope=col | Result | scope=col class="unsortable" | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | Political change and the Labour party, 1900–1918 | Winner | ||||
| 1991 | Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 | Winner | ||||
| 1992 | Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401 -1499 | Winner | ||||
| 1993 | Commoners: common right; enclosure and social change in England, 1700- 1820 | Winner | ||||
| 1994 | Winner | |||||
| 1995 | Winner | |||||
| 1996 | Youth and Authority Formative Experience in England, 1560–1640 | Winner | ||||
| 1997 | Domestic Biography: the legacy of evangelicalism in four nineteenth-century families | Winner | ||||
| 1998 | Winner | |||||
| 1999 | Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers | Winner |
| Author | scope=col | Title | scope=col | Result | scope=col class="unsortable" | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 | Winner | ||||
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="2" | 2001 | God's House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth Century Almshouse | Winner | |||
| Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture | Winner | |||||
| 2002 | Popular Politics and the English Reformation | Winner | ||||
| 2003 | Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England | Winner | ||||
| 2004 | Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral reform in England, 1787–1886 | Winner | ||||
| 2005 | Queer London | Winner | ||||
| 2006 | Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918–1960 | Winner | ||||
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="2" | 2007 | Winner | ||||
| Winner | ||||||
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="2" | 2008 | George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801–1827 | Winner | |||
| Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain | Winner | |||||
| 2009 | Winner |
| Author | scope=col | Title | scope=col | Result | scope=col class="unsortable" | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | Winner | |||||
| 2011 | Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 | Winner | ||||
| 2012 | Winner | |||||
| 2013 | Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution | Winner | ||||
| 2014 | Dating changed from "year published" to "year of award" | |||||
| 2015 | Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170-1300 | Winner | ||||
| 2016 | Princely Education in Early Modern Britain | Winner | ||||
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="2" | 2017 | Winner | ||||
| Winner | ||||||
| 2018 | Communications and British Operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918 | Winner | ||||
| 2019 | Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830 | Winner |
| Author | scope=col | Title | scope=col | Result | scope=col class="unsortable" | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="6" | 2020 | Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History | Winner | [4] | ||
| Black Handsworth: Race in 1980s Britain | Shortlist | |||||
| Inauguration and Liturgical Kingship in the Long Twelfth Century: Male and Female Accession Rituals in England, France and the Empire | Shortlist | |||||
| The Veterans’ Tale. British Military Memoirs of the Second World War | Shortlist | |||||
| Sharing the Burden. The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention, and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order | Shortlist | |||||
| Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–1985 | Shortlist | |||||
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="6" | 2021 | England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches | Winner | [5] | ||
| Winner | ||||||
| History and the Written Word: Documents, Literacy, and Language in the Age of the Angevins | Shortlist | |||||
| Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour | Shortlist | |||||
| The Intelligence War against the IRA | Shortlist | |||||
| Irish Women and the Great War | Shortlist | |||||
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="6" | 2022 | Imperial Bodies in London. Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 | Winner | |||
| Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire | Shortlist | [6] | ||||
| Histories of Everyday Life: The Making of Popular Social History in Britain, 1918-1979 | Shortlist | |||||
| Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology | Shortlist | |||||
| Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England | Shortlist | |||||
| ‘The First National Museum’: Dublin’s Natural History Museum in the Mid-Nineteenth Century | Shortlist | |||||
| scope=rowgroup rowspan="6" | 2023 | Spiritual Wounds. Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War | Winner | [7] | ||
| Shortlist | ||||||
| Giving Birth in Eighteenth-Century England | Shortlist | |||||
| Illegitimacy, Family, and Stigma in England, 1660-1834 | Shortlist | |||||
| Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700 | Shortlist | |||||
| Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age | Shortlist | |||||
| 2024 | To be announced July 2024[8] | Winner |