2025 Winner: Talitha Ilacqua, Inventing the Modern Region: Basque Identity and the French Nation-State (Manchester University Press, 2024)
This book stands out as an authoritative and wide-ranging study of a key dynamic of modern French history, the relationship between the central state and the regions. It presents a clear argument from the outset about the invention of the French Basque region as a modern cultural construct in which, contrary to later, teleological separatist narratives, local Basque cultures were envisaged as existing within France. One of the book’s strengths lies in its ability to show that this is both and French and a Basque history by highlighting the constant negotiation between different understandings of French and Basque identities and the evolving yet always interconnected relationship between them. The judges were particularly impressed with the long-term chronology of the study, which includes discussion of the ancien régime, the Revolution, and the many regimes that followed; the combination of political and cultural approaches that develops to the full the potential of a cultural history approach to language and travel as markers of identity, as well as the significance of hard-nosed political negotiations; and the ability of the book to situate France in a European context, especially in its relations with Spain. The book is a must-read for historians of modern France and its regions and will make a major contribution to the field.
Talitha Ilacqua is a Career Development Fellow in Modern European History in the Department of History at Durham University.
The panel also commended the following book:
-
-
John Condren, Louis XIV and the Peace of Europe: French Diplomacy in Northern Italy, 1659 – 1701 (Routledge, 2024)
-
2024 Winner: Lewis Wade, Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France: Marine Insurance, War and the Atlantic Empire under Louis XIV, Boydell & Brewer, 2023
The panel commended Lewis Wade for this book, which deploys substantial archival research in a highly technical field – seventeenth-century marine insurance – and clearly demonstrates the significance of the Paris chamber of commerce for Louis XIV’s monarchy and its European rivals. Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France situates its case study within wider historical debates about economic policy, state formation and conflict resolution in the early modern world to make a broader argument about the financial resilience of the absolute monarchy, within the limits of political will. It is beautifully written, and has found some wonderful source material that introduces its characters effectively and makes a book about insurance compelling reading.
Lewis Wade is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University and completed his PhD at Exeter University in 2021. The book is available in Open Access here: https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781837650217/privilege-economy-and-state-in-old-regime-france/.
The panel also unanimously agreed to shortlist the following books for the 2024 prize:
- Benjamin Darnell, Maritime Power and the Power of Money in Louis XIV’s France:Private Finance, the Contractor State, and the French Navy, Boydell & Brewer, 2023
- Alexandra Paulin-Booth, Time and Radical Politics in France: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War, Studies in Modern French and Francophone History, Manchester University Press, 2023
- Gemma Tidman, The Emergence of Literature in Eighteenth-Century France: The Battle of the School Books,Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, Voltaire Foundation, Liverpool University Press, 2023