Early Career Award 2025

SAGW’s Nachwuchspreis was renamed Early Career Award in 2025. The 2025 jury felt that the scientific work of Stéphanie Soubrier (University of Geneva), Madeline Woker (Collegium Helveticum / University of Sheffield) and Magdalena Breyer (University of Basel) merited the award most.

First prize

Putting the spotlight on the boys who worked on French ocean liners

Boys were recruited mainly from the populations of French colonies to serve on the liners of Messageries Maritimes, the first big French shipping line. Excluded from economic histories and the history of the labour movement, these domestic servants who worked on imperial passenger liners were long ignored by by historical researchers. Stéphanie Soubrier is correcting this omission.

As globalisation progressed and ocean traffic increased as a result, ocean liners became the setting for a pronounced hierarchical structure, with metropolitan passengers at the top and the boys from overseas at the bottom. The collective portrait painted by the award-winning article challenges the stereotypical image of feminised and submissive workers. Soubrier shows how the boys’ situation enabled them to put up resistance and further their own mobility. The shipping line’s efforts to stop one-way trips between the colonies and metropolitan regions, desertion, smuggling or unionisation failed.

Second prize

Improving our understanding of how tax havens come about

Second prize winner Madeline Woker starts from a statement that seems simple at first sight: From a long-term perspective, former French colonies have not developed into tax havens in the same way as their British counterparts. Why is that? The historian investigates this question by recording the rise and fall of tax havens in the French colonial empire between the mid-1920s and late 1950s.

During the interwar period, the gulf between metropolitan and colonial tax rates grew. A large number of companies and politicians were willing to implement legislation that favoured lower taxation in the colonies. In France, as elsewhere, this resulted in a growing number of colonial companies relocating their headquarters abroad. In contrast to the British empire, however, France feared losing significant tax revenue– while simultaneously dreaming of greater size and power. Consequently, the French authorities were much less inclined to let the trend continue unchecked. The French finance ministry played a key role in doing so. Wherever possible, it opposed the transformation of the colonies into tax havens and refused to amend legislation to further the transformation. By recounting this state of affairs, Madeline Woker sheds light on the role of the state in creating (or preventing) tax havens.

Third prize

Unequal gender representation increases votes for the Greens

Although the number of women in western European parliaments increased rapidly during the 1980s, equality is still a long way away, since progress towards equal representation has been stagnating for around 30 years. What impact does this state of affairs have on voters’ political mindset?

Magdalena Breyer conducted a survey in Germany and came up with several findings. Firstly, while men experience an implicit loss of status with improved representation of women in politics, this does not result in a reaction in the form of resentment or voting for Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Secondly, in the light of a perceived stagnation in the process of achieving equality, women tend to vote for progressive parties, particularly the Greens. By doing so they hope to achieve better representation in politics. And finally, both men and women regard growing representation of women and the associated progress towards equality as a positive trend. Breyer shows that progressive parties can mobilise upwardly mobile sections of the population (such as women) by making an issue of existing inequalities.