Edmond Smith

Prof Edmond Smith is an historian and professor at The University of Manchester. Their research seeks to uncover the origins of our globalised world. Instead of focusing on states, or empires, or corporations, Smith peeks under the hood of these seemingly monolithic, homogenous entities to find the individuals who were at the beating heart of this process. Whether these are the rock-salt entrepreneurs of Ghana, Gujarati brokers haggling over silk in Surat, or English merchants planning to colonise the Arctic with Lapp settlers, each has their own stories to tell – and all contributed to the creation of the global, connected world we know today.