Dr Jules Skotnes-Brown has been awarded the 2025 First Book Prize of the Royal Historical Society

Congratulations to Jules Skotnes-Brown, who alongside Laura Flannigan has recently been awarded the Royal Historical Society's First Book Prize for 2025. His book Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2024.

Dr Skotnes-Brown's book explores the connections among pest control, science, and segregation in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century.

Judges' citation:

This is a fascinating, original, highly engaging, conceptually smart and extremely well-written interdisciplinary study that combines the history of science with its much wider social, political and racial context. It integrates animal and human history to powerful effect by considering what or who constitutes a 'pest' and how non-pests should be protected.

The book successfully argues that the control of 'pests' (always a controverted category) involved the creation of physical and conceptual boundaries that helped to confine or preserve positively regarded animals and humans. Its argument is carefully drawn and shocking at times in its implications, given the correlation that is drawn, especially in the final chapter, between attitudes to pests and to humans.

The book challenges historians to look beyond the realm of human relations and to see how the histories of elephants, rodents, wild birds and even small organisms interacted with, and at times even helped to shape, human perceptions, reactions and policies.

The work touches in interesting ways on the history of conservation, ideologies of categorisation, social and racial tensions, and the ambiguous status of 'native knowledge'. This rich book is impressively researched, nimble in its analysis, successfully experimental at times in its approach and superbly written.

Professor Mark Knights, chair, RHS First Book panel, 2025