Ruthless is a revelation of Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency and exploitation that enabled it.

Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ones for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain’s colonies, where a brutalised enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories?

Historian Edmond Smith reveals 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 wens of expertise and investment to connect exploitative practices across the globe.

Why Britain a small set of islands proved able to generate the world’s first mineral-based Industrial revolution remain an important and complex topic. Was it because of a sequence of quaintly named inventions, spinning jennies and Crompton mules? Or was  “ghost acreage” Britain’s overseas colonies and some 2.85 million enslaved Africans in the 18^th century alone- the vital cause of take-off?

Edmond smith, a professor at the University of Manchester, reveals how Britain was aided by geographical compactness. Together with an exponential rise in print from the 1690s, rapid urbanisation and better roads and postal systems, which facilitated the interchange of ideas and the rate of commercial deal making and collaboration between men on the make. The Lunar Society in Midlands, the Select Society in the Midlands, the Select Society in Edinburgh and the Society of Arts in London, emerging venues for discussions and entrepreneurial display.

Britain benefited from diversity of its contacts with the rest of the world as the empire always mattered. Colonial America, kept it well supplied with iron ore and timber, with continental Europe’s quality manufacturers.

Smith describes how two English brothers stole machine designs and expert artisans from an Italian silk works in the 1710s before setting up their own silk mills in Derbyshire, as Britain’s new silk industry seemed unstoppable, employing more than half the population of Congleton in Cheshire by the 1760s. The slave trade also contributed to British economic take-off , as the unpaid and desperately shortlived worked it supplied.  Plantation colonies in the Caribbean sucked in British exports. Copper mined in South Wales went to make equipment for refining sugar and distilling rum.

Liverpool remained the dominant slave trading port, its capitalists and city fathers constructed advanced new dockyards excelling “everything of the kind in Europe” investing in the slave trade, mariners, tradesmen, widows and farmers, ordinary people rising in society by way of human suffering thousands of miles away.

Ruthless is about self-betterment and making money, and why Britain, at this particular time and in this particular way?

Between 1660 to 1800 the pace of Britain’s economic change accelerated and so did the pace of the political change.

1660, witnessed the end of its most vicious civil wars as well as a restored Stuart monarchy with a vested interest to fostering imperial and economic expansion. By 1688, both strengthened parliament and entangled Britain in successive major wars, as ambitious parliament and military conflicts provided economic stimuli. Smith  explains British parliament’s economic interventionism, accelerated new patents, offered premiums for new inventions and supplies arena for landowners and merchants to lobby for new roads, bridges and  canals. Britain’s electorate remained under 10 per cent of adult males able to vote also aided industrial advance. Britain’s governors rarely needed to worry about the thousands of poor mineworkers killed in the country’s unsafe pits, or the mutilating effects of the new piecework and unguarded machinery on human body. Black slaves paid the price for rapid capitalist change.

Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800 by Edmond Smith, Yale £25, 464 pages.