Edmond Smith: Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800 - Part of Summer Derby Book Festival 2026

Description

This event will be filmed and made available as a digital recording after the Festival. Available for purchase here.

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.

Edmond will be in conversation with Professor Keith McLay, Chair of Derby Book Festival and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Derby

“A timely, eloquent, compelling examination of an increasingly thorny question.”—Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

“A panoramic new history that reveals how industry, empire, inventiveness and ruthlessness made Britain ‘great.’ A must read for anyone who wants to understand the birth of the world’s first modern economy.”—Nicholas Radburn, author of Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade