Frank Watson Book Prize
2025 Frank Watson Book Prize in Scottish History
The Frank Watson Book Prize for the best book or monograph published on Scottish History in 2023 and 2024 has been awarded to:
Catriona M.M. Macdonald, The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History. Edinburgh: John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., 2024. ISBN: 9780859767200.
The jury's citation reads:
Catriona M.M. Macdonald’s book The Caledoniad: The Making of Scottish History, is a captivating survey of the discipline of Scottish History as it professionalized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is an exceptionally rich and original contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the historical discipline in modern Scotland. It situates contemporary historical practices in relation to the development of important research institutions, from records repositories and libraries to universities and associations and societies, as it engages with their intellectual evolution and fragmentation through a variety of lenses. Macdonald shows how novelists and popular historians scorned by the historical establishment in their time often anticipated the interest and insights that later came from the academy. The book stands out for its importance to Scottish History as a field. It will be central to training and to scholarship for a generation and beyond.
The prize jury is very pleased to honour Dr. Macdonald alongside the past winners of this prestigious prize.
The Frank Watson Book Prize is awarded in odd-numbered years for the best monograph, edited collection and/or book-length original work on Scottish History published in the previous two years. The prize consists of a cash award, an invitation to present a public lecture, and permission to advertise success in the competition.
Past Winners
2023: Neil McGuigan, Máel Coluim III, 'Canmore': An Eleventh-Century Scottish King (Edinburgh: John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., 2021).
2021: Fiona Edmonds, Gaelic Influence in the Northumbrian Kingdom: The Golden Age and the Viking Age (Suffolk, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2019).
2019: Tim Shannon, Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
2019 "Honorary Mention": Aaron Allen, Building Early Modern Edinburgh: A Social History of Craftwork and Incorporation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
2019 "Best First Book": Valerie Wallace, Scottish Presbyterianism and Settler Colonial Politics (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
2017: David G. Barrie and Susan Broomhall, Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).
2017 "Highly Commended First Book": Matthew P. Dziennik, The Fatal Land. War, Empire and the Highland Soldier in British America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
2015 - Allan Kennedy, Governing Gaeldom: The Scottish Highlands and the Restoration State, 1660-1688 (Northern World, Leiden: Brill, 2014).
2015 "Highly Commended": David H. Caldwell and Mark A. Hall (eds.), The Lewis Chessmen: New Perspectives (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2014).
2015 "Highly Commended First Book": Siobhan Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560-1713 (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2014).
2013: Marjory Harper, Scotland No More? The Scots who Left Scotland in the 20th Century (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2012).
2011: Diarmid A. Finnegan, Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009).
2011 "Highly Commended": S. Karly Kehoe, Creating a Scottish Church: Catholicism, Gender and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
Mark R. M. Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750-1820 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishing, 2010).
2009: John J. McGavin, Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
2009 "Highly Commended": Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
2009 "Highly Commended First Book": David G. Barrie, Police in the Age of Improvement: Police Development and the Civic Tradition in Scotland, 1775-1865 (Uffculme: Willan Publishing, 2008).
2007: Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment & the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, & America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
2005: David Stevenson, The Hunt for Rob Roy: The Man and the Myths (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 2004).
2003: Richard Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2001: Keith Brown, Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family, and Culture from the Reformation to the Revolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
1999: Callum G. Brown, Up-helly-aa: Custom, Culture and Community in Shetland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
1997: Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce, and the House of Stuart, 1603-1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996).
1995: Carol Eddington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
1993: David Allen, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993).