Previous Doctoral Prize Winners
2022-23
Rachael Utting (St Andrews) for her thesis: 'Collecting Leviathan: The British Southern Whale Fishery and Global Knowledge Production 1775-1860'.
Read the abstract here.
2021-22
Jake Dyble (Exeter and Pisa) is the winner of the 2022 Doctoral Prize for their thesis on ‘Average-Transaction Costs and Risk Management During the First Globalisation (16th-18th Centuries)’. Download the abstract
2020-21
Dr Lewis Wade (University of Exeter), for Privilege at a Premium: Insurance, Maritime Law and Political Economy in Early Modern France, 1664-c. 1710 (University of Exeter).
This is an impressive study of two French insurance institutions. Using the data sets that are available from these institutions the author explores how the insurance market worked in Paris and what this means for our understanding more generally of early modern insurance markets. He has also been able to develop a framework for using the data in an examination of absolutism in France. The study raises questions about the reach of French absolutism and how the state used the market to shift risks of its policies onto its subjects.
A book based on Dr Lewis Wade's thesis has now been published by Boydell & Brewer. Find out more.
2019-20
Dr Sara Caputo (University of Cambridge), for Foreign Seamen and the British Navy, 1793-1815.
2018-19
Dr Melanie Holihead (Oxford), for ‘Their Allotted Place: social conditions, survival strategies and comparative respectability among naval wives in mid-nineteenth century Portsea Island’.
2017-18 (Joint Prize Winners)
Dr Katherine Roscoe (Leicester), for ‘Island Chains: Carceral Islands and the Colonisation of Australia, 1824-1901’
Dr David Wilson (Strathclyde) for ‘Pirates, Merchants, and Imperial Authority in the British Atlantic, 1716-1726’.
2016-17
Dr Elin Jones (Queen Mary, London) for ‘Masculinity, Materiality and Space Onboard the Royal Naval Ship, 1756-1815’.
The abstract and complete thesis are available at Queen Mary Research Online.
2015-16
Dr Megan Barford (Cambridge) for ‘Naval Hydrography, Charismatic Bureaucracy and the British Military State, 1825-1855’.
2013-14
Dr Steven Gray (Swansea University) for ‘Black Diamonds: Coal, the Royal Navy, and British Imperial Coaling Stations, 1870-1914’.
2012-13
Dr Joan Abela (University of Exeter) for ‘The Impact of the Arrival of the Knights of the Order of St. John on the Commercial Economy of Malta 1530-1565’.
2011-12
Dr Coriann Convertito (University of Exeter) for ‘The Health of British Seamen in the West Indies, 1770-1806′.
2010-11
Dr Matthew McCarthy (University of Hull) for ‘A Sure Defence against the Foe? Maritime Predation and British Commercial Policy during the Spanish American Wars of Independence, 1810-1830’.
