2024 Conference Best Paper Prize Announced!

Many congratulations to all of our honorable mentions for their important and vibrant scholarship, and especially to Sarah Donovan for her paper “‘Doing their Mock Justice there’: The Whiteboys, the British Legal System, and a Transatlantic Language of Violence”! In the words of our selection committee:

“Sarah Donovan's “‘Doing their Mock Justice there’: The Whiteboys, the British Legal System, and a Transatlantic Language of Violence," offers a beautiful, compelling argument about marginalized peoples and extralegal violence and the eighteenth-century British legal system. It uses the Whiteboys as a means by which to demonstrate how those at the frontiers and fringes of empire met violence with violence, a language of violence with a language of violence, lending legitimacy to their cause and creating a sort of pan-Atlantic discourse and pageantry that lay bear yet another way in which violence permeated the legal and social world of the British Empire. Donovan's piece crucially explains the resort to violence in the imperial context as a means of protest and, in addition, shares new, deeper, and essential insights into the Irish resentment of British rule. We think this essay provides an exciting and much-needed foray into a vital period, topic, and pair of locations (colonial rule in Ireland, colonial rule in America) and will be both interesting and relevant to our readership.”

We know that this paper will be at home in the pages of our Britain and the World journal and are looking forward to the publication process!