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Edmond Smith, "Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800" (Yale UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Professor Edmund Smith
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Edmund Smith about his book titled A New History of Britain's Rise to Wealth and Power, published by Yale University Press in 2025. Helping us understand how we get to a point where Britain is the first industrial nation, is doing all sorts of things in the uk, well beyond the uk, around utilising technology, people, labour, free and not free to make, I mean, all the things that we know, right, to make Britain the world power that it was at that point. This book takes us inside that history to talk about some aspects that maybe we are familiar with, some aspects we're maybe less familiar with, and of course, the intertwinings of things that makes history so interesting. So, obviously a lot to discuss. Edmund, thank you so much for joining, joining me on the podcast.
- [02:07]
Professor Edmund Smith
Hi, Ronald, thank you very much for chatting to me today around the book. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [02:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book, what questions you're asking in it? What's the origins and developments of this project?
- [02:27]
Professor Edmund Smith
Absolutely. So ruthless as a book is the story of how Britain's rise to global power was built, not just on steam engines and factories, which is perhaps the tradition, classic economic history story that we know. Both are about a wider exploitation of land, labor and empire across the world. And this effort to try and connect industry and innovation, on the one hand, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment and so on with this aspect of empire and the exploitation of the land really came together by my working on two projects simultaneously, one focusing on institutions and the ways in which the state and cultures create the conditions for innovation, and on the other hand, working on the legislature of the British slave trade project. And it became increasingly clear as I was doing that research that not just the people involved cut across both sides of this dynamic, but there's wider loops between the two as well, whether it's intellectual ideas about how to extract wealth or how to treat workers, or how to visualize a connected economy. And Ruthless really tries to show how those different aspects of Britain's history come together and to offer something that's a history of the Industrial Revolution that many of us know in one way or another. But to tie this much more deeply to wider histories that are happening at the same time, that are just as important for understanding Britain's development.
- [04:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
As I said in my introduction, the intertwinings of things is always what I'm most interested in from history. So hearing that this came out of two different projects you were working on at the same time and going, wait a second, there's a bunch of connections here, definitely makes a lot of sense to figure this out, though, to look at the time period of the Industrial Revolution. As with all good history, we probably need to go back before that to make sense of what changes. So if we look more in the sort of 1600s, maybe the 1660s roundabout, then what are some of the key ways that Britain's economy and ways of thinking about the economy might already be shaping up in ways that we usually look at later on with the Industrial Revolution.
- [04:47]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, great question. There's been lots of research over the past few years showing that when we look at classic markers of industrial development, whether that's the number of people working in urban environments rather than agriculture, productivity gains, the more that people can work, produce during one hour of labor, or just the overall GDP and the amount of trade that's going on in Britain, these studies have been showing that there's a longer trajectory of growth stretching at least into the middle of the 1600s, as you suggest. And this is across lots of different areas already. It's driven in part by the huge expansion of Britain's engagement of trade in the later 16th and early 17th century. Stories like the East India Company and the development of corporations that give access to British producers to global markets. At the same time, there's developments in agriculture, sometimes through as a consequence of conflict. The civil war in Britain creates conditions whereby different approaches to the land can be employed in consequent decades. And at the same time, there's this changing dynamic around the way in which people are writing about and talking about what would be called improvement at the time or possibly science and innovation today. So we see this upshoot in the way in which the economy is being envisaged that really has some quite fundamental impacts on the following decades, but also into the 18th century in terms of the way people are acting in relationship to the economy.
- [06:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
One aspect of the economy that is really important then and later on that I think we probably want to focus on is the wool industry. Why was this such an important part of the story?
- [06:41]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, so wool is, and this might surprise some listeners in every year of the 17th century and every year of the 18th century, wool, woollen cloth was Britain's most important export. It was the most important manufactured product, it employed the most workers in manufacturing and so on, until it was eventually replaced by cotton textiles, sort of at the peak of industrialization as we know it, at the end of the 18th century. And this was really important because different parts of Britain, despite different environments for farming and conditions, sheep were able to be reared in many different places, often interacting with more arable forms of farming like raising wheat and so on, cereal crops. And the two or three sides of wool's impact on the economy came from the intersections. Again, across these, we see, on the one hand, people in different parts of the country finding ways to innovate in wool production to sell their goods into changing global markets. It's perhaps not surprising that the East India Company, selling goods into somewhere like Mocha in Asia, weren't really looking for the same heavy duty woolen cloths that 50 years before had been sold into Germany and northern Europe. So we see people starting to adapt and innovate, finding new ways of designing goods and sometimes stealing technology or employing workers from parts of Europe, bringing them to Britain and using this new information to start off a new type of wool production. And this triggers lots of innovative changes, both of course, in the production of wool itself, but also in the the wider structures of the economy that support that. We see the development of roads connecting areas of woollen and district to market towns, the development of ports to help ship these goods overseas, a sharing of new information around things like water wheels that could be used in fulling mills to improve parts of the cloth production process and so on. So these links go back and forth between manufacturing and other parts of the economy in really important ways. One that's perhaps often overlooked is, of course, that wool is so important to Britain's economy, in part because you can rewool in Britain. And there's this obsession during the 17th and 18th century with improving the production of goods that can be made from Britain's soil, as it were. Native commodities. And wool stands out among those. But what was really novel was how people started to integrate the husbandry of sheep and the organization of sheep farming, alongside the improvement of other forms of agriculture, notably cereal crops. So you see things like the field rotation system forming, whereby the manure from sheep helps improve the productivity of farms despite climatic challenges brought about by the Little Ice Age. And this increases outputs in farms, leading to some of the aspects that we describe as the Agricultural Revolution and the ability for people to move from farms into more urban areas to take up jobs in manufacturing, like the production of wool and cloth. So, again, we see cycles of interactions that are really important for understanding this development.
- [10:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's very helpful to understand the importance of wool. And obviously we talk about it for a reason. It is a huge part of Britain's economy, as you've stated, but there are some other key industries too, that we don't want to neglect. So if we can talk a little bit, please, about the iron and metal industries and maybe along sort of similar lines. Is this an answer that they are important because Britain just sort of geologically happens to have a lot of them? Or is this also a story of interactions between business practices and technological development?
- [10:43]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, so the metallurgical industry, I think, by the 18th century becomes very. We understand it as a key part of industrialisation, especially when we think of areas like Birmingham or Wolverhampton in the West Midlands that became cities renowned for their metallurgy. But in the 17th century, Britain's lagging behind in many respects in terms of the productivity of these industries, despite the natural abundance of things like iron ore or copper ore in certain parts of the country. The dynamic I mentioned in answer to wool about these changing ideas about how to take native commodities and benefit from them is an important part of this story as well. And we see around the 1690s, some truly insane plans to try and build a brand new metallurgical industry in Britain, often Specifically to out compete European rivals who at this point are still sending iron goods to Britain for iron manufacturers to use. So the raw materials are being imported and there's this great desire to find ways to substitute that with locally British made products. It's a classic story, this idea of bringing production into Britain that we see repeating across the Industrial Revolution. What makes the metallurgical industry so interesting though, is that it required a shift in understanding of how different parts of the process of producing metals were understood and the connecting of different parts of this process. So we see lots of these early efforts, particularly in South Wales, that are designed not necessarily to use new technology to extract more ore or to use new types of furnaces, but just as importantly, they're making connections between the coal producing regions of South Wales and the copper producing regions of Cornwall that are brought together through places like Swansea. You can carry the ores to the coal, as it were, because this is a cheaper process. And there we see new furnaces, new industries established to produce the raw materials that are then shipped to places like Bristol or into the Midlands for final production. So there's these integration of a wider economy in Britain that's really important to this story and it doesn't end there with metals especially. We see overseas markets, particularly in the Caribbean and North America and Africa, proving really, really important for the ongoing success of these industries. A significant proportion of goods, say copper, are made for export, and this export is often linked into these overseas, often colonially structured trading environments. So the further connections there are really important to acknowledge too.
- [13:39]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think connections are going to come up in a lot of ways as we continue our conversation. And especially if we're talking about expansion of Britain's empire, not all those connections are necessarily sort of yay happy. Everyone's equally benefiting from them. Of course, that's obviously very much not the case. How then should we be understanding these British capitalists being able to expand what they're doing, for example, by profiting from 18th century warfare?
- [14:06]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, warfare is a great way to approach this question. As I mentioned right at the start, one of the intellectual shifts we see that connect into the Industrial revolution is this idea of improvement, the idea that humans have a capacity for taking things and making them better. But this can be applied not only to technologies and innovations that benefit everybody, but of course can be equally applied to technologies or business practices that are exploitative and have a hugely negative impact on the people involved. And we can see this dynamic at playing something like warfare and the production of military equipment like firearms. Because on the one hand we see these same efforts to improve and to increase the efficiency of the gun making business, especially in Birmingham, which is granted the opportunity to produce guns for the first time right at the end of the 17th century, in opposition to a long standing monopoly in London that had restricted the production of these goods. And they sell on the one hand to the British state, which has the benefit on the one side for capitalists across Britain of allowing Britain to sustain the defence of the islands, restrict invasion or warfare from having a huge impact damage on British soil. But on the other hand, of course, the British state is also using these same weapons to impose British rule in different parts of the world. And the conquest of territories in the Caribbean or in North America is very often violent and has sustained violence built into this system. Additionally, we see through the production of firearms links to further trades that might surprise us. When warfare declined during peacetime. Few and far between as long pieces were during the 18th century, we see gun makers shifting their priorities away from producing goods for the British state and towards producing guns for markets overseas. Predominantly among them was West Africa, where British firearms were sold explicitly so that enslavers could then purchase captive African people to transport to the Caribbean to work on plantations. And that of course creates a further link between these different parts of the system and is sustained later by yet further violence on the part of the state to defend those colonies and to expand those colonies. So we see cyclical processes here taking place that link the scientific, the idea of improvement, the idea of innovation with the most extractive and exploitative forms of business organization in the British economic world.
- [17:06]
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- [18:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And we've Mentioned it a little bit, and especially there you. It came in kind of obviously, given these links. But is there anything further we want to say about the role of the state in this?
- [18:15]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, the state is inevitably really a central factor or a feature throughout Britain's economic development. I think when we talk about the institutions that underpinned economic activity and innovation, it's often useful to recognize the personal networks, familial links, the role of informal societies and so on in helping connect people across different industries. But at the same time, the state plays a huge role in underwriting these in some respects and providing the stability and support for these to either be established or for these to be maintained. The most clear examples on the scientific side might be support for things like the Royal Society, which was established in 1660 to support the development of natural and understanding of the natural world. But it's worth remembering that that same year that the Royal Society was founded, we also see the establishment of the first royally backed slave trading corporation, which in the 1670s becomes the royal African Company and helps establish a militarized British presence on the African coast. So the state's taking a dual role here in both trying to create conditions for innovation at home while also supporting muscular, mercantilist, militarized economic activities overseas. And it's obviously the same state, the same interests in promoting Britain's wealth and power that underpin both sides of that equation. When we think about the state, there's obviously changes over time during this period. My book covers 140 years. There's different parliaments, different rulers and so on. But throughout there's an enduring policy goal, if we want to use that term, that recognises that Britain's wealth is and will continue to benefit from support for certain British industries and this effort to move Britain up the productivity chain, as well as supporting industries like gun manufacturing, which has quite obvious relationship to the state because of the state's capacity to conduct warfare. There's also support for innovation through things like support for patents, monopolies for certain trading corporations, state backing for significant parts of the new financial infrastructure of London connected to the bank of England, and through all of this, an effort to ensure that the relationships that are being established between the state and private interest focus primarily on the encouragement of British manufacturing, the effort to protect the most important industries in Britain, and support for import substitution in the way that I mentioned in relation to iron, and a desire to support production in Britain in order to stop imports coming from places like Sweden and elsewhere. And it's quite coherent throughout this period in ways that we could describe partly as mercantilist, which might be a term that's familiar to most listeners, but is also not just restricted this idea of international competition, but does also engage with trying to create conditions for innovation at home as well, which is really important. Yeah.
- [21:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It is in fact, this innovation and some of the knowledge pieces of it, the patents, for example, that I want us to talk a bit more about. Because connections or similarities between industries is one thing, but the similarities aren't there by accident. There's all sorts of knowledge about how to innovate one's business practice, new bits of technology that can be used in different ways that are being purposely told from one sector to another by obviously individual people. So can you tell us more about these connections? Because we might, for example, assume that like, oh, that's protected knowledge and you wouldn't share with a potential competitor. But as the examples in your book really demonstrate, there was a lot of information sharing very purposefully, not accidentally at all. So can you maybe help us understand this web of sort of information networks and the role it plays?
- [22:45]
Professor Edmund Smith
Absolutely. And again, this is something that happens throughout the period that the book talks about, but in bursts of interest around particular industries, we see an escalation of exchange of particular forms of knowledge. One example that always stands out to me is that of the lone brothers, who are two individuals who are responsible for kicking off first a mechanized silk industry in Britain, but also through their innovations, connecting into the later mechanization of the cotton industry as well. And I think they're really useful because their story starts in quite an unexpected place with John Lohm, one of the brothers, traveling to Italy, where he sneaks into the Sardinian silk mills that are currently producing the most, some of the most sought after silk in Europe. And he steals the technology that's been long protected by the Kingdom of Sardinia to ensure that this part of Europe holds on to their information superiority in this particular sector. And John Lane brings this back to England, where with his brother Thomas, a local engineer called Serracauld, and the help of some Italian works who have come with him, they build the first textile mill that's powered by water and using machinery near Derby. And this first step already, I think, shows some of these links. It requires that initial technological innovation, the theft of technology in this case, and at other times, of course, we have domestic invention as well. Development things like steam engine would be an obvious example of that. But in this case, the theft of technology has to be combined with the information, the knowledge of the local engineer, Serra Cold, who understands better how the water wheel works in the mill and how the specific requirements of British workers might be better adapted to the use of these machines. And then of course, the technical expertise of the Italian workers who are brought in as well. All three are needed to create the conditions for this new mill complex outside Derby. What's I think fascinating with this particular example is that after the establishment of this mill, well, firstly, John Lohm, who stole the technology just a couple of years later, dies in mysterious circumstances. And there's the suggestion that he was assassinated on the orders of the Sardinian king because he stole this product, which I think is a dramatic demonstration of just how sought after this sort of technology was and how states would do what they would do to protect it. But after his unfortunate death, his brother Thomas is able to patent the technology and establish his mill. But the real success of the mechanization isn't necessarily the profits that he makes as an individual, but because it has knock on effects into other industries. A few years later, Richard Arkwright, who famously developed the water frame, which was a mechanization of spinning cotton, he acknowledged and visited this silk mill in Derby and used this structure as a means of sort of modeling how he would produce his own mills for the development of his new cotton spinning industry. And we See later references, 20 years later, again to cotton magnates around Manchester, reflecting back on the importance of this mill as having triggered the development not just of the new technology, because the spinning, sorry, the machines used for silk were very different to the machines used for cotton, but because it had demonstrated the efficacy of this new form of business practice. This idea of using water, power and machinery and a factory context to organize labor and to produce goods in new and different ways. And here it's not necessarily information passed just from individuals intentionally, but also the creation of networks that allow the spread of this knowledge to happen more effectively. Sometimes through individuals who work in one partnership and then move to another partnership, but sometimes through the publication of patents and information and the licensing of particular machinery through that process. But sometimes because once in Britain, we still see people stealing and adapting and taking technology from their competitors. So that first spark for the lone brothers, the theft of technology from Italy, we can see replicating itself as competition in Britain encourages people to take on the best practices of the people around them, sometimes through positive exchanges of knowledge, but often also through a competitive desire to replicate and take advantage of other people's developments. And the both sides really come together in understanding how technology is shared. And patents were Certainly important, but they were only one part of this process. And other forms of collective innovation were really important as well.
- [28:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, the fact that there's so many more than just one way for all this to transmit is definitely a key part of it. And obviously shapes individual businesses, shapes sector, shapes specific technologies. But also one output of this that you talk about in the book is this all seems to enable some really big projects. And I don't just mean big in terms of capital though, it was that, I mean literally really big. Physical projects are also directly enabled by this sort of thing, is that right?
- [28:39]
Professor Edmund Smith
Absolutely. And the ability for people to reshape their natural world by building infrastructure, by taking advantage of new engineering techniques and so on, is a really important feature that is needed to sustain some of the interactions that I've mentioned already. Things like building roads or building canals were often very difficult and very expensive. Especially if you're trying to cut through Britain's often quite difficult landscape with hills and valleys and rivers all leading in the wrong direction. These man made efforts made it possible to integrate an economy more tightly and to move vital goods from one place to another to maximize the potential of combining, say, the extraction of coal in one area, the extraction of iron in another, and then the expertise of workmen in a third. If you can have infrastructure to bring those different things together in somewhere like Birmingham, say, it creates the conditions for really rapid economic growth. But the example that stands out to me is probably the docks in Liverpool, which developed dramatically during the 18th century as Liverpool itself is completely transformed from being a relatively small port on the north coast of England into being one of the major ports of the Atlantic world. Increasing in size from a few thousand people to almost 100,000 people. And with a similar increase in scale in the amount of shipping that passes through the port. And to achieve this in Liverpool on the River Mersey required local merchants, local manufacturers and local landowners to work together. Not just to pool their income to pay for this sort of infrastructure in the way you suggest, but also to manage it, to maintain it, and to constantly find ways to improve it. The first dock in Liverpool is built as the first commercial dry dock in the world right at the start of the 18th century. And this is the first step towards a transformation of the port. But it takes years before it necessarily starts to show profits and returns for the people involved in its production. But during this period, Liverpool not only becomes a predominant port for ships from Britain traveling to colonies in North America, but also becomes in time the predominant slave trading port in Britain. By sending Its ships first to Africa and then to the Caribbean and back to Liverpool. This infrastructure that's built is a necessary part of this story. Because without an ongoing investment in infrastructure and the development of different types of docks, improved facilities and so on, this increase in shipping, the increase in investment that goes alongside of it, wouldn't be possible. And this, of course, ties very much the relationship of Britain's infrastructural development, the development of places like Liverpool into these histories of slavery and exploitation in the Americas. Because it was capital from these exchanges, the incentive of trying to participate in these exchanges that encouraged the investment and supported the investment in Liverpool in the first place. And we see a knock on effect from there into other forms of infrastructure as well. Liverpool being linked by canal in the north of England to places like Leeds and Manchester, so that goods could flow into the port that could sustain these trades overseas was vital. And later, this same infrastructure, this port at Liverpool, is where the majority of cotton was. Raw cotton was landed in Britain before being transported onto places like Manchester. There was an absolute requirement for the industrialization of the textile industry. Without raw cotton carried through this infrastructure, first the port and then the canals and the roads, of course, as well, we couldn't possibly see the scale and the speed of development of textile industrialization at the very end of the 18th century. So again, webs of connections are so important for recognizing not just how infrastructure is built and its impact, but also for its continuing effects into other industries beyond the simple construction of the docks or the canals themselves.
- [33:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Now, when you give us the outputs of those sorts of projects, it makes a lot of sense why, you know, these big investments would be made in the first place. Because the impact of having these docs, for instance, is really quite clear. But obviously, when they started off putting together all of the resources needed to make this happen, that was the hope, but not the guarantee. And given how much different capitalists were competing with each other, as you mentioned earlier, sort of stealing from each other. Definitely trying to always have one up from each other. Yes, they were sharing information, but those things all kind of suggest that there would be some sort of tension around, like, let's collaborate, but also let's compete. How were those kinds of tensions navigated?
- [33:53]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's worth remembering that despite the increasing connectivity of Britain during this period, in terms of the increase in ability for people to travel and move goods between various different parts of the country, there is still a greater distance between different areas than perhaps we can imagine today. And the very distance sometimes allowed for competition that led to further innovation. So the managing of direct competition between, say, if we turn back to the wool industry, between the people who reared cheap and then the wool manufacturers themselves. During the start of this period, there's debates about whether raw wool should be permitted to be exported to the continent, so that people who reared sheep could profit directly from their wool. And the state there decided to ban the sale of raw wool overseas, insisting that it was made into manufactured products first as part of this strategy for moving Britain up the productivity chain. And we see that happening in various different areas of the economy. But I think in terms of direct competition that perhaps isn't given a sort of blanket strategy on the part of the British state, we see a slightly more complicated dynamic where the industries of certain parts of the country are allowed to fall and suffer as a consequence of developments elsewhere. Again, if we look at wool production, because of the changing sorts of goods that are required by purchasers, a finished cloth, often for transport overseas, we see a decline relatively in some parts of southern England in comparison to places like Yorkshire, which quite quickly is partly through the use of water power, but partly through different types of wool and different types of organization and design able to out compete in terms of the production of new types of goods. And there's no real effort by the state to try and stop this happening. Instead, there's support for further innovation and further development of goods to then out compete, say, with these Yorkshire producers. The reason I mentioned distance just a couple of minutes ago, after you asked the question, was because when it comes to innovation and the development of new industries, sometimes that very lack of state control or the lack of oversight from things like craft corporations that are quite dominant in the 17th century, is really important for the emergence of some of these new, innovative ways of doing business. In the book, I talk about the example of wool manufacturers around Bristol and the Southwest who start producing goods combining techniques from the Netherlands and bringing workers from the Netherlands and wool imported from Spain to produce a completely new type of product that really quickly becomes very, very popular. And in part, they're only able to do this because they don't have the oversight and the demands from a state forcing them to follow particular types of rules in terms of manufacturing. And this is even more clear when we think about the development of Manchester and the Northwest as the hub of the new cotton industry. Because even BY in the 17th century, people are acknowledging that there's innovations going on in how people are combining different types of fibres, producing new types of cloth, most famously being Manchester fustians, which are a combination of cotton, linen, wool, in different combinations, depending on the precise product. And this, of course, is needed to build in the sort of the local, the workers expertise, their understanding of these fibers. That's needed to support their later innovations related to machinery. Lots of the people we see developing machinery for the textile industry is taking place in areas where there's less control, potentially, and where they're able to experiment and out compete other parts of the country. So I think the role of the state here is often very much focused on thinking about the way in which competition internationally and the way markets can be opened overseas, or the way in which the use of military force might increase markets in the Caribbean, say, by conquering territory, but sometimes less focused on the control of economic practices in Britain itself. And alongside the many stories that we have, of course, of capitalists being successful as they develop these new ways of doing business, there's lots of stories of people who fail and fall by the wayside. And I think that's important to acknowledge as well, that we're not talking about a period of completely ubiquitous gains for all of society, even in Britain, let alone when we think about the imperial and colonial contexts, where, of course, the exploitation of labour is even more pronounced. And the idea that there's a common vision of a richer and more prosperous future just doesn't really make sense at all.
- [39:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I definitely want to talk about these perceptions of how things are going, but first I wonder if we can talk more about these connections between what's happening in Britain and overseas. Obviously, some of those industries that have lots of those connections we've mentioned already, but especially if we're talking about Liverpool, we should probably mention sugar refining, maybe also copper mining, to link back to what we were talking about with metallurgy before.
- [39:53]
Professor Edmund Smith
Absolutely. When we think about the connections between the development industries in Britain and colonized places overseas, there is an ease perhaps, to imagine that the exchange is often taking place just sort of at a single level where goods are produced in plantations in colonies in the Caribbean, raw goods like sugar, and they're shipped to Britain and they're consumed by customers. But there's lots of steps within that process that are more industrial in terms of the way that they're organized, but also the objects and items that are required to undertake them. It's always worth remembering that sugar production, sugar being the most significant commodity that was transported from the Caribbean into Britain during this period, was produced in plantations in a process that was very much at the peak of how people are imagining industrialized agricultural production during this period. The exploitation of enslaved people, of course, was central to this, and it allowed the grouping of hundreds of workers, following very strict discipline, to operate in the same environment. And this was needed for the way in which sugar is produced on the agricultural side, in terms of clearing fields, planting crops and so on. But most of these plantations also included facilities for the first stage of processing of sugar, and this included huge copper, huge copper vessels through which sugar could be boiled and processed and so on, before it was shipped to Britain. So we see there already an industrial process at play, even just at the first stage. And the copper for those objects was, of course, typically mined in Britain, manufactured in Britain and then shipped to the Caribbean on behalf of British manufacturers. So that's the first link. The second would be, and just as importantly, when these goods were brought to Britain, there was often a further stage of refining that took place before they were either exported overseas or consumed in Britain itself. And this added a further industrial opportunity for people. And we see efforts in Liverpool, in Bristol, in London and in Edinburgh, among other places, to put lots of investment into sugar refining as a British industry. And despite much like cotton sugar being impossible to grow in Britain itself, by the end of the 18th century, refined sugar that's manufactured in Britain has become one of the larger exports from the British Isles. This is only possible because of these exploitative links, but also because of investment in industries in Britain related to, say, cotton product, sorry, copper production and the export of copper goods to the Caribbean in the first place, but also the development of. Of mills for refining sugar in Britain itself, often, again, with expertise brought from abroad or using new innovations to increase the efficiency of production. So the loops between these different parts of the economy are really clear and.
- [43:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Continuous and kind of get deeper and deeper as it goes. So it is, as you said, never just one thing. And to go to your earlier point then, about sort of the perceptions of all of this, especially given how many links there were, how aware was the wider British population of the extent to which all of these new consumer products, all of this booming industry in Britain, was not just linked in one way, but completely, inextricably linked from the use of enslaved labour in the Caribbean.
- [43:55]
Professor Edmund Smith
I think the knowledge that many of these products came from tropical regions was apparent to many people who were consuming them, because they obviously weren't products that were produced in Britain. So there's an element where the very process of consumption had to bring some connection to the colonial world from which these items originated. I think the depth of a deeper understanding of slavery, the slave trade and plantation exploitation is probably quite difficult to measure, but clearly was much higher in places like Liverpool or Bristol, where there was such dependence on these markets for the wealth of the people. In these cities and even further afield, many of the items that went around these projects, like containers of sugar, were often even for a sort of middling market, produced with imagery of colonies of tropical places and so on. I think there's a dynamic where that information does spread. And with the abolition of the slave trade movement, again, there's more and more material produced to try and expose and share information about the horrors of slavery across these industries. But I think when we. In terms of how the extent to which people understood these links, the example again of Liverpool, I think, is really interesting and horrifying because these links aren't just understood, but they're celebrated by the city as being part of the reason for its very success. There are warnings against the abolition of slavery, not because it's inhumane. So not because they're arguing that it's not inhumane, but rather because it's too important for the British economy for abolition to be allowed to happen. There's arguments that huge amounts of capital would be lost, that the main trade that has sustained a city like Liverpool would disappear, and that this would be a threat to the country itself. There are warnings that if slavery is abolished, you'll have revolutions happening like those elsewhere in, say, Haiti or in France. And there's this fear that letting this colonial trade break down will have severe repercussions because of just how integrated it is into the wider economy on the part of the British state. For another perspective, it's quite clear from the very start of the period that we're talking about that there's an understanding of the relationship between the African trade, the trade and enslaved people. Plantations in the Caribbean and the British economy, we see things the early development of the slave trade through the royally supported companies, explicitly making reference to the need to supply enough labor to support and develop the plantations in the Caribbean. And that doesn't disappear in the 18th century. In fact, the opposite is true. And the number of people transported who are taken captive from Africa to colonies, especially in the Caribbean, but also North America, increases and increases and increases and increases. And it peaks around 1800, at the height of the abolition movement, rather than being something that slowly fades away as people understand more and therefore change their ideas about it. So I think the relationship is understood across a wider range of people in Britain than we might expect. But it's especially understood and even supported by the people who profit most from involvement in the slave trade and slavery.
- [48:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Speaking in fact, of profit. I wonder if we can talk about two industries that have come up a number of times in our discussion and we've sort of implicitly talked about their relationship to each other, but it is a pretty big deal. So I want to make sure we don't just sort of gloss over the fact. You started us off early in the conversation explaining the importance of wool, but then we've talked about cotton a bunch of times and often when we think about the Industrial Revolution, we do think of cotton. So when, how and why do we get to the point of cotton surpassing wool as Britain's most important textile?
- [48:38]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, it's a really important question and I think wool never disappears, which I think is the first important thing to note even into the 19th century. Parts of Britain, especially to the North East, Yorkshire and so on, maintain wool as a really important part of their economy, in particular, because they are producing products that are really well suited both for sale into Britain, but also for sale into Europe. I haven't mentioned it already, but Europe remains the largest destination, the largest market for most of Britain's trade during this period. Sometimes that's the re export of colonial goods, say, but very often it's woolen goods and other forms of British manufacture as well. And that market doesn't disappear. The reason that cotton provides such a competitive alternative to wool is in part because it's lighter weight, it bears dyes more vibrantly, and British consumers, and consumers in Europe and other parts of the world want products that replicate those that were so sort over and carried from Asia, India in particular, into Europe by organizations like the East India Company. These are different, they look different, they're designed differently, they're lighter weight and so on. And this makes them really attractive as alternatives to wool, but not necessarily replacing them entirely because they, of course, serve different markets. And a woolen coat is great in certain circumstances and that's never going to go away. One of the reasons that cotton takes off is that this experience of wool and working with wool provides Britain with a deep workforce, a deep knowledge, both technically and practically, in terms of the everyday sort of working with fibres, that provides some of the knowledge necessary for working with other types of fibres as well. And as I mentioned, around Manchester and other parts of the Northeast, we see quite early experiments to combine wool with linen or with silk or with raw cotton. The big change really starts to come about for cotton in the second half of the 18th century, as machinery starts to give British manufacturers a competitive edge over manufacturers elsewhere, especially in India. Not that they're yet reaching anything like the quality of goods that can be imported, but through mechanization, the quantity that can be produced in Britain increases very, very quickly. And this allows for goods to be produced suddenly at a competitive price, Especially because there's state support restricting the amount of Indian cotton goods that could be sold into Britain. So there's something of a trapped market. This market has a lot of demand, and there's the expertise necessary to launch this new industry. This development grows quite quickly in the next couple of decades as new inventions start to increase again the efficiency and the quality of cotton threads that can be spun in England. But the real takeoff, in terms of the dramatic increase, really happens in the 1790s, when we see a huge spike in the amount of cotton produced in Britain. And the reasons for this are, yes, the ongoing innovation and the ongoing expertise that I've mentioned, but also because developments in other industries and links to other colonial contexts create sort of a perfect storm for cotton growth. On the one hand, developments of James Watt's steam engine have taken place that suddenly allow the steam engine to be used to turn the machines that are needed for cotton production. Previously, only water wheels were used, and this means that you can suddenly build cotton mills, not just in places like the Calder Valley, where surging streams can turn the wheels and keep the mill working, but suddenly you can build them anywhere that you can have access to coal, such as Manchester. And this gives access to places that have connections into, say, Liverpool and a wider domestic market that allows the growing number of workers, the growing number of mechanical engineers and so on, needed to have explosive growth in the industry, and vitally, an increasing amount of raw cotton that can be used in these machines to produce thread and then clothes that comes through ports, especially Liverpool. And we don't have this explosion of cotton growth without all of these different things happening. The machines that are being used require those new techniques of iron production that we see earlier in the century. They require access to coal that's now being pulled from further under the ground, because steam engines and other techniques allow miners to go deeper and deeper into the earth. And they rely on, on an imperial and global network, both to source the raw materials needed, but also to sell these goods to markets across the world. And it's all these different factors coming together that allow cotton to take off in the way that it does and to suddenly catch up. And then overtake wool as Britain's main manufactured commodity.
- [54:12]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And I think that's so true of everything you've told us so far that it's not one reason that Britain becomes such a powerhouse. It's so many different reasons and how they're all sort, building off of each other. So I think that's actually a good place to end our discussion about the book, leaving me with just a final question of what you might be working on now that it's done. Anything you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [54:34]
Professor Edmund Smith
Yeah, thank you. And before I do, just thank you again for having me along to talk today. It's been, it's been really interesting. My next work is taking this similar idea around thinking about connectivity and how people work together, but trying to use it not to understand just Britain's economic development, but a wider world of globalization over an even longer period. I want to understand how different commercial practices and experience and laws and regulations across the world were able to coalesce and come together in the early modern period to create the globalized world that we see today. So I'm running a project that combines a study of West Africa, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean world and Southeast Asia to think about how linkages across all these different spaces simultaneously triggered new ways of doing business that led to the hyper connected modern world that we know today.
- [55:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So, you know, nothing ambitious at all.
- [55:39]
Professor Edmund Smith
You have to do something here.
- [55:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, it certainly sounds like a massive and intriguing project, so best of luck pursuing it.
- [55:47]
Professor Edmund Smith
Thank you very much and thank you again for having me today.
- [55:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I was very pleased to have you here to tell us about the book and of course, any listeners who want to learn more can go read it, titled A New History of Britain's Rise to Wealth and Power, published by Yale University Press in 2020.
- [56:08]
Professor Edmund Smith
Sam.