Literary prize for Birkbeck academic

Professor Frank Trentmann has been awarded the prestigious Whitfield Prize by the Royal Historical Society for his book Free Trade Nation. In awarding the prize the judges said that Trentmann's human history of Free Trade was a “brilliant achievement”.

The citation that accompanied the award states that: “He identifies Free Trade as 'uniquely central to (British) democratic culture and national identity' between the 1870s and the 1930s. He rightly finds it odd, therefore, that both its dominant role in Edwardian Britain, and its erosion during and after the First World War, have received almost no serious attention -- let alone explanation -- from historians or social scientists. After all, all western societies generated protectionist pressures after 1900, but what needs explanation is why they were so successfully resisted in Britain by 'a popular Free Trade army'. Professor Trentmann explains with admirable clarity and conviction both that resistance and its later erosion; but his massive study does much more than that. He looks back to the origins of the Free Trade movement in and before the 1840s, and forward to the present, to globalisation and to the rising demands today for Fair Trade rather than Free Trade.”

Click here to learn more and order Free Trade Nation

Click here to visit Prof Trentmann’s academic web page