The ruthless revolution that made Britain great

What did it really take for Britain to become the workshop of the world? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Eleanor Evans speaks to historian Edmund Smith, whose new book, Ruthless, re-examines the rise of industrial Britain and its wealth and power through a global, interconnected lens. Moving beyond the classic steam and smokestacks narrative, Smith uncovers how technological innovation was deeply entwined with colonial ambition, transatlantic slavery, stolen intellectual property, and environmental exploitation. Britain's rise to industrial power and its dominance is described in your eye-catching title, Edmund, as ruthless. And to start us off, I wondered if we can unpick this a little bit.

Could you give a bit of the meaning behind this and introduce people to the sweep of your book? Absolutely. Ruthless is a term that I think captured my imagination when I was writing, really, because you see it apply today in contexts that range from admiring biographies of entrepreneurs who ruthlessly pursue their own personal goals and are willing to sort of set aside other interests or other demands on their time to achieve their ends, whether that's technological or otherwise. But of course also has a meaning that's merciless and cold-hearted.

And when we try and encapsulate sort of the scope of Britain's history and the rise to wealth and power, as I put it, in the Industrial Revolution, this balance of contexts in the way that people approach the economy, I think is quite useful because we see those innovative thinkers on the one hand, the scientists, the engineers and so on, really pursuing goals in a way that you might describe as quite ruthless, but those same ideas and same methods are being applied to lots of other parts of the economy, whether that's the exploitation of miners or enslaved people or the destruction of the environment, that also carries with it this merciless aspect as well. And ruthless, I think, yeah, neatly ties the two together in ways that force us to think about both sides of this equation. And that's really what the book's all about, acknowledging that there's this simultaneous movement in both science and innovation on the one hand, but also empire and exploitation on the other.

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