2024 British Academy Book Prize

Six rigorously researched non-fiction books that promote the public understanding of world cultures

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway (WH Allen / Ebury Publishing / Penguin Random House)

Salt, Iron, Copper, Oil, Sand and Lithium. The struggle for these tiny, magical materials has razed empires, demolished civilisations, fed our greed and our ingenuity for thousands of years. But the story is not over. We are often told we now live in a weightless world of information but in fact we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. And it's getting worse.

To make one bar of gold, we now have to dig 5000 tons of earth. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we extract six tonnes of other materials - from sand to stone to wood to metal. Even as we pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we have redoubled our consumption of everything else. Why? Because these ingredients build everything. They power our computers and phones, build our homes and offices, print our books and packaging. Our modern world would not exist without them, and the hidden battle to control them will shape our future.

Ed Conway is the Economics and Data Editor of Sky News and has been a regular columnist for The Times and The Sunday Times. He has won numerous awards for his television and newspaper journalism, among them the 2018 Wincott Foundation Journalist of the Year Award.

He is the author of the critically acclaimed book on Bretton Woods, The Summit: The Biggest Battle of the Second World War – Fought Behind Closed Doors (Little, Brown, 2014) and the bestselling 50 Economics Ideas You Really Need to Know (Quercus, 2009). Ed studied at Pembroke College, Oxford and the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he was a Fulbright scholar and a Shorenstein Scholar.

"Reading Material World opens our eyes to the 'material world' that supports every aspect of modern life, yet remains largely invisible. This new clarity of vision is both illuminating and rather terrifying. Conway demonstrates not only the importance of lithium, copper and the other materials he considers, but also the immense environmental and human damage we cause in our quest to utilise them. This book will absolutely change how you see the world."

- Judges' comment

Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray / HarperCollins India)

Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir and an excursion into history, both economic and cultural. Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India and China, as well as on the world at large. Engineered by the British Empire, which exported opium from India to sell in China, the trade and its revenues were essential to the Empire’s survival. Upon deeper exploration, Ghosh finds opium at the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, several of America’s most powerful families and institutions, and contemporary globalism itself. In India, the long-term consequences were even more profound.

Moving deftly between horticultural histories, the mythologies of capitalism and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, Smoke and Ashes reveals the pivotal role one small plant has played in the making of the world as we know – a world that is now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta, and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; he studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. He is the author of several acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction including The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, the Ibis Trilogy (comprising the novels Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire), Gun Island, The Great Derangement, The Nutmeg’s Curse, Jungle Nama and The Living Mountain.

Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been awarded and felicitated across the world. In 2019, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the most important global thinkers of the past decade. The same year, the Jnanpith Award, India’s highest literary honour, was conferred on him: he was the first English-language writer to receive it.

"Crossing continents and time, Smoke and Ashes weaves a complex picture of how opium provoked wars, shaped societies and helped to found wealthy dynasties. Ghosh also drives home the extent to which this is not an account of history but a story which continues to reverberate to this day."

- Judges' comment

The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell (Viking / Penguin Random House)

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell introduce readers to the mathematical boundary-smashers who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality.

From the brilliant Arabic scholars of the 9th-century House of Wisdom, and the pioneering African American mathematicians of the 20th century, to the 'lady computers' around the world who revolutionised our knowledge of the night sky, we meet these fascinating trailblazers and see how they contributed to our global knowledge today.

Along the way, the mathematics itself is explained extremely clearly, for example, calculus is described using the authors' home baking as they pose the question: how much cake is in our cake? This revisionist, completely accessible and radically inclusive history of mathematics is as entertaining as it is important.

Dr Kate Kitagawa is one of the world's leading experts on the history of mathematics. She earned a PhD from Princeton University, taught history at Harvard University and conducted research in the UK, Germany and South Africa.

Her first book was a national bestseller in Japan, and she has been named one of the 100 most influential people in Japan by Nikkei Business. She is currently Director of the Space Education Office at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Kate lives in Japan.

Dr Timothy Revell is a journalist and lapsed mathematician. He is currently the Deputy US Editor for the New Scientist. As a reporter and editor, he specialises in technology and mathematics, covering everything from artificial intelligence to the Abel Prize.

He appears regularly on WNYC's 'Science Friday', as well as on other podcasts and radio to talk about the latest developments in science. He has a master's degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science. His first book was Man vs. Maths. Tim is based in the UK.

"This engaging and accessible book is full of surprises as it takes us through the stories of mathematics and of mathematicians across the globe and through the ages. Powerfully reinforcing the message that ‘mathematics is a relay’ (p. 254), the authors describe the ways in which mathematicians built upon the insights of those who had gone before, bringing to life the worlds in which these exceptional men and women lived. This is a timely reminder of the need to situate mathematics in the broader field of the humanities."

- Judges' comment

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 by Marcy Norton (Harvard University Press)

A dramatic new interpretation of the encounter between Europe and the Americas that reveals the crucial role of animals in the shaping of the modern world.

When the men and women of the island of Guanahani first made contact with Christopher Columbus and his crew on October 12, 1492, the cultural differences between the two groups were vaster than the oceans that had separated them. There is perhaps no better demonstration than the divide in their respective ways of relating to animals. In The Tame and the Wild, Marcy Norton tells a new history of the colonisation of the Americas, one that places wildlife and livestock at the centre of the story. She reveals that the encounters between European and Native American beliefs about animal life transformed societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans’ strategies and motives for conquest were inseparable from the horses that carried them in military campaigns and the dogs they deployed to terrorise Native peoples. Even more crucial were the sheep, cattle, pigs, and chickens whose flesh became food and whose skins became valuable commodities. Yet, as central as the domestication of animals was to European plans in the Americas, Native peoples’ own practices around animals proved just as crucial in shaping the world after 1492. Cultures throughout the Caribbean, Amazonia, and Mexico were deeply invested in familiarisation: the practice of capturing wild animals – not only parrots and monkeys but even tapir, deer, and manatee – and turning some of them into 'companion species'.

These taming practices not only influenced the way Indigenous people responded to human and nonhuman intruders but also transformed European culture itself, paving the way for both zoological science and the modern pet.

Marcy Norton is Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the award-winning Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2008).

"In this readable, learned and fascinating book, Norton contrasts the ways in which Europeans and Indigenous Americans thought about and interacted with animals around the time of Europe’s invasion of the continent in the 1500s. It tells a big story that challenges our ideas about the emergence of domestication and animal husbandry. It is also rich in human detail about how early modern Europeans felt about their hunting dogs, how Amazonian women related to their tamed parrots, and much more."

- Judges' comment

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues by Ross Perlin (Grove Press UK)

Language City offers a portrait of contemporary New York City through six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of little-known languages. Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped New York and dives deep into these six speakers’ communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming linguistic loss. Perlin also invites us to a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world.

Half of all 7000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and – because many have never been recorded – when they’re gone, it will be forever. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, 100 of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N’ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonisation and displacement, Lenape, the city’s original indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan ('the place where we get bows'), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish.

A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America’s doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of 'killer languages' like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator. Since 2013 he has co-directed the Endangered Language Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to documenting Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages. He has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, Harper’s, and n+1, and the Endangered Language Alliance has been covered by the New York Times, the New Yorker, BBC, NPR, and many others. He is also the author of Intern Nation: How to Learn Nothing and Earn Little in the Brave New Economy (2011). Perlin was a New Arizona Fellow at New America and is a native New Yorker.

"The speed with which endangered languages are vanishing often prompts despondency and alarm. But here is a captivating, joyful book which shines a spotlight on the little-known stories of migrants in New York City who are preserving and adapting their endangered native tongues to 21st-century urban life. In Language City, Ross Perlin not only celebrates the subtleties of linguistic diversity but also probes deeper questions: when is a language a distinct entity and not a dialect? And how does a language survive when uprooted from its origins?"

- Judges' comment

Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare by Annabel Sowemimo (Profile Books / Wellcome Collection)

In the wake of the pandemic and with an NHS in crisis, we are all too aware of the urgent health inequalities that plague our world. But these inequalities have always been urgent: modern medicine has a colonial and racist history.

Here, in an essential and searingly truthful account combining data, history and interviews, writer, campaigner and NHS doctor, Annabel Sowemimo unravels the colonial roots of modern medicine. Tackling systemic racism, hidden histories and healthcare myths, Sowemimo recounts her own experiences as a physician, patient and activist.

Divided exposes the racial biases of medicine that affect our everyday lives and provides an illuminating – and incredibly necessary – insight into how our world works, and who it works for. This book will reshape how we see health and medicine – forever.

Annabel Sowemimo was born and grew up in London and is a registrar in sexual and reproductive health currently working in a clinic in Leicester. She also runs the charity Reproductive Justice Initiative which aims to educate and empower specifically BPOC in sexual health matters of all kinds. She is currently working on a PhD at King’s College London (KCL) and teaches at KCL, University College London (UCL) and the London School of Tropical Medicine as well as speaking on all of these matters in the media.

"Passionate, lucid, deeply felt and thoroughly researched, Sowemimo’s critique of the supposed objectivity of modern medical systems brings a global, decolonising and reconstructive perspective to how we could go about dismantling health inequalities. Urgent and relevant, it is a call to rethink everything we imagine we know about medical practices."

- Judges' comments