Pollard_w5cmThis year’s Pollard Prize for the best paper given at an IHR seminar by a postgraduate student or  researcher within one year of completing the PhD has been won by Cornelis Heere with ‘That racial chasm that yawns eternally in our midst’: the imperial politics of Asian immigration, 1900–14.

Nominated by the International History seminar. Cornelis is currently enrolled as a third-year PhD student in the Department of International History at LSE where he is working under the supervision of Dr Antony Best. His thesis concerns the influence of the Russo-Japanese War on the British Empire in the late 1900s and is entitled ‘The British Empire and the Challenge of Japan, 1904-1911’.

The panel said:

An excellent, wide-ranging and well-contextualised piece.

A relevant and compelling study.

Challenging the metropole/colony binary, considers immigration and exclusion and provides fresh insights into competing definitions and implications of empire, race and national identity as they played out across “imperial politics”.

 

The runner up was Martin Spychal with ‘One of the best men of business we had ever met’: Thomas Drummond, the boundary commission and the 1832 Reform Act.

Nominated by the Parliament, Politics and People seminar. Martin Spychal is a PhD student at the IHR under the supervision of Professor Miles Taylor. His thesis is on ‘Parliamentary boundaries and reform in England, 1830–1868’.

The panel said:

A real find in the well-trod realm of the first Reform Act.

Very well-researched and well-argued with the case for the importance and influence of Drummond’s work firmly made.

Fascinating account of a most impressive man and his achievement.

 

Both papers will be published in Historical Research next year.