Kyle Richmond (centre front, light blue shirt) has won the 2025 Economic History Society New Researcher Prize, awarded for the best paper presented by a new researcher at the Economic History Society Annual Conference 2025 in Glasgow this April. He won the prize for a paper entitled “Big Tobacco: Monopoly Power and Competition Policy in the Post-War British Cigarette Market”, which will be part of his PhD Dissertation.

Kyle explained:

The idea behind my case study approach is it allows me to observe both beneficial and detrimental features of the policy vis-a-vis its structural impact, balance them against each other, and draw out some generalisable insights. Balancing the “twofold” channels mentioned below, I would say the policy gave rise to competition that was ultimately unsustainable if it disadvantaged the larger, dominant firms in a market.