Edmond Smith - Böcker

WINNER OF THE 2023 RALPH GOMORY BOOK PRIZE  “A superb book.”—Jerry Brotton  “Wonderfully wide-ranging and deeply-researched.”—William Dalrymple  “Sharply observed, innovatively analysed, and always accessible.”—Nandini Das  A new history of English trade and empire—revealing how a tightly woven community of merchants was the true origin of globalized Britain  In the century following Elizabeth I’s rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these "mere merchants," England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin.  Edmond Smith traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. Smith unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. They reveal that the origins of "global" Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain’s relationship with the world.

A revelatory new history of Britain’s industrial revolution and the exploitation that enabled itWas 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.

Global Trade in the Premodern World offers an authoritative and expansive history of exchange and interaction across Eurasia from the prehistoric origins of trade to the integration of large parts of this world-system by the fifteenth century CE.The book tackles questions that are critical to our understanding of premodern globalization. How did global trade in the premodern world take shape? Who did the trading and what motivated them? Which commodities were traded and how did different goods influence how trading networks functioned? How did geography change how and where people carried goods? How did states and communities seek to control the practice of commerce? And finally, what was the impact of trade on political structures and in the relationship between different states, empires, and communities?Drawing on the fruits of research in history, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as primary sources produced by authors from Africa, Asia, and Europe, Global Trade in the Premodern World is a book of remarkable scope written engagingly and accessibly with scholars, students, and non-specialists in mind.

Global Trade in the Premodern World offers an authoritative and expansive history of exchange and interaction across Eurasia from the prehistoric origins of trade to the integration of large parts of this world-system by the fifteenth century CE.The book tackles questions that are critical to our understanding of premodern globalization. How did global trade in the premodern world take shape? Who did the trading and what motivated them? Which commodities were traded and how did different goods influence how trading networks functioned? How did geography change how and where people carried goods? How did states and communities seek to control the practice of commerce? And finally, what was the impact of trade on political structures and in the relationship between different states, empires, and communities?Drawing on the fruits of research in history, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as primary sources produced by authors from Africa, Asia, and Europe, Global Trade in the Premodern World is a book of remarkable scope written engagingly and accessibly with scholars, students, and non-specialists in mind.