Wadsworth Prize
The Wadsworth Prize is awarded annually by the BAC to an individual judged to have made an outstanding contribution to the study of British business history in that year.
The Council awarded its Wadsworth Prize for Business History 2008 on 24 November 2009 at the National Archives, Kew, London to Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale for their book Defending the Indefensible: The Global Asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival published by Oxford University Press. The three judges for this year’s prize were John Marshall, Jeanette Strickland and Professor Peter Scott. The award was presented to Dr Tweedale by Sir Geoffrey Owen, President of the BAC.
In the early twentieth century, asbestos had a reputation as a lifesaver. In 1960, however, it became known that even relatively brief exposure to asbestos can cause mesothelioma, a virulent and lethal cancer. Yet the bulk of the world’s asbestos was mined after 1960. Asbestos usage in many countries continued unabated. Defending the Indefensible is the first global history of how the asbestos industry and its allies in government, insurance, and medicine defended the product throughout the twentieth century. The book is based on a wealth of documentary material gained from legal discovery, supplemented by evidence from visits and researches in the US, the UK, Canada, Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, Australia, Swaziland, and South Africa.