BAC Wadsworth Prize

The BAC Wadsworth Prize is awarded annually by the Business Archives Council for a book judged to have made an outstanding contribution to British business history. 

This year's event, which took place on 20 November 2025, was hosted by the Baring Archive in London and sponsored by Profile Books. The winner of the £500 prize was Sarah Palmer for her book Maritime Metropolis: London and its Port, 1780–1914 published by Cambridge University Press. This year’s judges were Dr Valerie Johnson, Kiara King and last year’s winner, Professor Anne Murphy. Speaking on behalf of the judges, Professor Murphy described how the winning book distinguished itself through its combination of intellectual rigour, narrative clarity and its impressive command of both detail and context. In her acceptance speech, Sarah Palmer spoke passionately about the Port of London Authority archives that had informed much of her research. Two other books were commended: Transatlantic Finance in the Age of Revolutions: Hope, Baring, and the Financing of the Sale and Purchase of Louisiana by Mark Edward Hay and Reflecting Imperial Overstretch and New Realities: The British Trade Corporation, 1917–1926 by Brian O’Sullivan. 

This was the 47th occasion on which the Prize has been awarded. Previous winners are listed here:

Past prize winners.

Wadsworth Prize – Submission Guidelines for Publishers

We welcome submissions for the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. 

For books to be eligible, they need to be published in the year previous to the Award ceremony. For example, the 2023 Wadsworth Prize was awarded to a book that was published in 2022.

 These are the criteria we use to judge the prize:

  • The book should be well-researched, well-written and accessible
  • It should engage with British business records and other archival material
  • It should expand the ‘debate’ in business history
  • It should make an outstanding contribution to the history of British business
  • It should be the book that both academics, and the wider public, would want to read.

Please send details of any books that you wish to submit on the form that you’ll find here: https://businessarchivescouncil.org.uk/contact/