The BSHS Pickstone Prize 2026 Winner

Singerman uses a wide range of primary sources, including telling and well selected images, to explore the history of sugar production. Deftly handling a broad chronology and geography, the book takes readers into contrasting spaces – field, factory, refinery, laboratory, ship, dockside and centres of political and commercial power – and explains how different kinds of knowledge were used to make, sell, tax and purchase sugar. The book shows how this crucial commodity was defined, valued and redefined as chemical rather than plant product in the nineteenth century. Singerman provides a superb history of how commodification, metrology and standardisation became commensurable processes in the industrial age. Unrefined excels at explaining how an idealist capitalist commodity was produced through the coordinated exploitation of coerced labour, enslaved knowledge, the discipline of chemistry, and instruments, such as the saccharometer.  

The panel also Highly Commend two works, both of which are compellingly written and, in different ways, explore the entanglement of human and animal lives. 

Brad Bolman, Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Sadiah Qureshi, Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction (Allen Lane, 2025)

Qureshi’s Vanished explores the relationship between colonialism and the extinction of animal, plant and human ways of being. Her highly readable and incisive book puts key themes in the history of science to work, making them accessible to general readers and scholars across all disciplines. Her dazzling overview of events across two centuries tells a novel story of how the concept of extinction was naturalised and exploited for imperial purposes across the globe. Bolman’s Lab Dog reveals how species projection turned the beagle into a standard model for laboratory experimentation. This ingenious book upsets established narratives on the laboratory as scientific space. It makes an essential contribution to animal studies and the history of emotions as well as the history of science.