Dr Emma Hunter awarded the Gladstone Prize for 2016
Dr Hunter has been awarded the prestigious Gladstone Prize for 2016. (Published 12 July 2016)
Dr Hunter's book 'Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization', published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, was awarded the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize for a history book on a topic not primarily related to British history which is the author’s first sole book publication.
The judges commented:
This sophisticated book is surely at the vanguard of a new way of writing intellectual history. It builds a history of ideas ‘from below’ by working from Swahili language newspapers and other texts in circulation in Tanganyika and from archives in Tanzania and elsewhere. Tanzanians become political thinkers and agents in the transformation of key mid-twentieth century concepts such as freedom, progress, democracy, representation and citizenship. The changing senses of a ‘word in motion’ gesture to the changing possibilities open to Hunter’s agents as decolonization took root. Hunter takes seriously prior forms of political organisation and so never sees Africa as pre-political, nor does she see the rise of single-partyism as a straight story. Instead she places Africa at the heart of the widest canvas of international and world history. The way Hunter’s focus moves between the microscopic conditions of localities far from any metropolis to the biggest questions of the twentieth century history, such as the theory and practice of democracy, is deeply admirable.