Hakim Adi’s African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History is on the shortlist for the Wolfson History Prize 2023 announced on Tuesday, September 5, 2023.
The Wolfson History Prizes are literary awards given annually to promote and encourage standards of excellence in the writing of history for the general public in the United Kingdom. Prizes worth £40,000 are given annually for two or three exceptional works published during the year, with an occasional oeuvre prize (a general award for an individual’s distinguished contribution to the writing of history). They are awarded and administered by the Wolfson Foundation, with winning books being chosen by a panel of judges composed of eminent historians. Some previous winners of the prize first handed out in 1972 have been David Abulafia, Mary Fulbrook, and Christopher de Hamel. Sudhir Hazareesingh won the award in 2021.
The jury this year comprises chair David Cannadine, Mary Beard, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Richard Evans, Carole Hillenbrand, and Diarmaid MacCulloch. This team announced their shortlist on September 5 with six books in the running for the award including Hakim Adi’s African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History. Adi is the first person of African heritage to become a Professor of History in the U.K.
The book blurb states
A major new history of Britain that will transform our understanding of this country’s past
Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest.
Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain’s heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian’s Wall while Rome’s first ‘African Emperor’ died in York. In Elizabethan England, ‘Black Tudors’ served in the land’s most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom – a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.
Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements – universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS – owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.
Interestingly enough, the professor got the news of his shortlist weeks after he was declared redundant in cost-cutting measures by the University of Chichester where he was lecturing. As we await the results on the news on the winner in November, you can join the campaign to reinstate the course suspended arbitrarily and abruptly without consultation in breach of the UK Equality Act 2010. Listen to the press conference on the campaign to reinstate the department below;
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