The judging panel is pleased to announce the winner of the Constance Blackwell Prize of 2024. The prize is awarded to the best first monograph in intellectual history published in the previous two years (2022-2023). Out of a superb shortlist, the panel decided to award the prize to Freddy Foks, for Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (University of California Press, 2023). The panel were impressed by the book’s breadth and ambition as well as its methodological sophistication in explaining the rise and influence of twentieth-century anthropology. It illuminates the discipline’s ideas and practices firmly through contexts of institution-building and global pressures, as well as anthropology’s effects in other disciplines. The book is deft, clear, and a delight to read.
The panel awarded the proxime accessit to Eva Piirimäe, for Herder and Enlightenment Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In particular, the panel noted the scholarly care and elegance of the argument.
