Ruthless: A New History of Britain's Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800 -- Edmond Smith, Hardcover

A revelatory new history of Britain's industrial revolution and the exploitation that enabled it

Was Britain's industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency? Was it the country's natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ores for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain's colonies, where a brutalized enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories?

Acclaimed historian Edmond Smith shows how the world's first industrial nation was founded on the ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the planet. This economic system linked the plantations of the Caribbean with the colossal cotton mills of northern England, applied the innovations of science and agriculture to colonial exploration, and formalised financial markets in self-serving ways. At the heart of these processes were Britons themselves, early capitalists who spun webs of expertise and investment to connect exploitative practices across the globe.

Ruthless offers an eye-opening account of Britain's economic transformation--and the scale and breadth of brutality that it depended upon.


Author: Edmond Smith
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 01/06/2026
Pages: 464
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780300278514

About the Author
Edmond Smith is professor of economic cultures at the University of Manchester, and the prize-winning author of Merchants: The Community That Shaped England's Trade and Empire, 1550-1650. Merchants was described as 'wonderfully wide-ranging and deeply-researched' by William Dalrymple, and 'a superb book' by Jerry Brotton.