Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800,  Edmond Smith, Yale University Press, £25

‘Ruthless’ is a double-edged word. Contestants on The Apprentice like to brag about being ruthless: they mean that they are uncompromising, determined, take no prisoners and get things done. ‘Donald Trump is ruthless’, his supporters and opponents chant in unison. ‘Ruthless’ is a ‘résumé virtue’, if not a ‘eulogy virtue’; or it is, at least, a private vice capable of producing public benefit.

Ruthless, Edmond Smith’s new history of the Industrial Revolution, plays with the word’s double meaning. The capitalists, industrialists and entrepreneurs of early modern Britain, no less than 21st-century hosts and contestants on The Apprentice, prided themselves on their ‘ruthlessness’. They were valiant, single-minded and energetic. They let nothing stand in their way.

When Smith describes his characters ‘ruthlessly pursuing efficiencies’, he could be reading from a McKinsey memo. Obviously, though, he intends for the term to carry its pejorative spin. That much is made clear in a description of the book on the inside of the dust jacket, where ‘ruthless’ is swapped for a less ambiguous attribute. ‘Ruthless offers an eye-opening account of Britain’s economic transformation, exposing the scale and breadth of brutality that it depended upon.’ Nobody puts the word ‘brutal’ on their CV.

Smith’s book is the result of many years’ thorough research. Two dozen archives are listed in the bibliography. There are graphs, statistics, spinning mules and spinning jennies; there is plenty of information about pig iron and puddling. None of this gets in the way of Smith’s thesis, however, nor the target at which it is squarely aimed. That target is the general consensus in economic history that slavery was of little practical significance to Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It’s a consensus that now wears the halo of the Nobel Prize: Joel Mokyr is cited early on, representing all those scholars who have presented Britain’s leap into industrial modernity as the result simply of its ‘inventiveness and technological advances’.

Mokyr has argued that ‘in the absence of West Indian slavery, Britain would have had to drink bitter tea, but it still would have had an Industrial Revolution, if perhaps at a marginally slower pace’. Smith offers an interesting counterargument. He calculates that, by 1800, the sugar from Britain’s slave colonies provided enough calories to sustain the population of Manchester eight times over, allowing 858,000 acres of prime agricultural land in Britain to be used for other purposes. In the absence of West Indian slavery, then, Britain not only would have had to drink bitter tea, but might also have had to forego some of the scones and sandwiches made from homegrown corn. Such arguments, of course, rest on counterfactuals, and other counterfactuals are available: in a world without slavery, for instance, might not the British still have traded freely with the West Indies for sugar, potentially even at lower prices? Perhaps we all might have seen the light of comparative advantage sooner. Still, Smith is right that, when weighing up the impact of slavery on the British economy, we ought to turn an eye, however speculatively, to its second- and third-order effects.

Other sources of Britain’s wealth, in Smith’s account, leave no less of a stain on the country’s moral record. War was a major driver of innovation and growth, and sometimes waged for this very purpose; many of the advantages by which British capitalists rigged the game were obtained by violence, theft and villainy. The silk-spinner half-brothers Thomas and John Lombe snuck under cover of darkness to Piedmont; there they bribed the factory workers in order to see a machine up close, and patented its design on their return. When John died, in 1772, it was rumoured that he was killed in retribution by an Italian assassin. (There is, one may be pleased to know, no reference in Smith’s book to the Jenny Bulstrode Affair – though her arguments, combining theft with slavery, would, if only they were correct, be grist to the author’s mill.) Britain became the richest country on earth, in Smith’s view, because bad behaviour pays.

Well, plenty of countries behaved badly, then as now; they stole, they sabotaged, they went to war, they trafficked slaves. Yet it was Britain that first industrialised. Perhaps, as Smith says, the confluence of factors, in just the right proportions, is what set Britain apart. Still, one feels at times as though Smith is leaving out some crucial ingredients. There is mention of Wedgwood, Priestley and the Lunar Circle, but little on what we might call their moral life. Does it matter that so many of these early modern capitalists were Nonconformists? Does it matter, in relating the history of Coalbrookdale, that Abraham Darby I, II and III were all Quakers?

The problems with leaving out this aspect – of dealing with all forms of ‘improvement’, that great watchword of commercial society, save the moral kind – are most evident on Smith’s central subject of slavery. Abolition is the rock on which his arguments are liable to end up splitting. The discussion of Wedgwood does not refer to his abolitionism; and indeed, how could it, if slavery was so fundamental to early modern British capitalism, and if the capitalists were, as a rule, as ruthlessly amoral as Smith would have us believe? Smith is at pains to show that slave-traders were ‘part of the British commercial and political elite’, that they called the shots. ‘The ruthless pursuit of profit pushed Britain’s capitalists to do whatever was needed to maximise their returns in every sector: the enslavement and exploitation of their fellow man was no different.’ No different, that is, until it was.

Smith is partly rescued here by his decision to finish the story, arbitrarily, around 1800 – precisely the moment, in fact, when Britain’s economic growth really got going. We get only the gesture that ‘over the following decade, pressure to end the transatlantic slave-trade increased’. He does not address the question of why the pressure increased, nor how it translated into political action – both of which ought to cast some doubt upon the ‘endemic’ centrality of the slave-trade to the British economy, and the real extent of ‘ruthlessness’ among his protagonists. ‘During Britain’s rise to wealth and power in the eighteenth century’, Ruthless concludes, ‘the lives of millions of people were spent in the name of profit.’ We may be so minded now to add a further sentence: that during Britain’s continued rise to wealth and power in the 19th century, millions of pounds – and thousands of sailors’ lives, as well – were spent in the name of humanity. Any explanation of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, and any picture of the mentalité of its capitalist elite, has to accommodate that fact.