In expanding and resourcing public understandings of the countryside’s colonial past, we can tell our islands’ stories and address colonial legacies from a position of knowledge rather than fear.
Corinne Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. Her previous published work includes co-authoring the 2020 National Trust report on its country houses’ historical links to the British Empire, a child-led history and writing project, Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted, and Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections. Here she takes ten walks through landscapes of Britain that have been affected by the profits from and returnees from the British colonial project, each time accompanied by a Black or Brown writer, thinker or cultural figure – Sathnam Sanghera, Graham Campbell, Ingrid Pollard, Pete Kau, Bharti Parmar, Charlotte Williams, Raj Pal, Zakia Sewell, Ibrahima Seck and Louisa Adjoa Parker – who has some kind of link to the place in question.
The topics range from the business ventures of William Wordsworth and his family, the connection between Welsh wool and African enslavement, the role of the Scottish Clearances in sending people across the seas to work in the colonies and many other links and connections. As they walk, they discuss both national and personal histories, linking the political to the personal and learning about the landscapes they are walking in.
The opening Preface sets out Fowler’s stall: while we think of rural Britain as being detached from empire, a closer look shows it’s been very much shaped by money and journeys into empire and owning of plantations and enslaved people, and puts forward the idea that by knowing more than most of us were taught at school and more than we’ve picked up so far about the involvement of cities like Liverpool in the trading of enslaved people or Birmingham in the forging of manacles to restrain them, we can have a full understanding of our history and how it’s affected rural as well as urban areas. She acknowledges the sensitivity of the topic and how some don’t want it discussed, but goes ahead and discusses it through own voices, carefully setting out her own family history and the fact that there’s opposition when Black and Brown people walk in the countryside or are seen to do so on the media. She emphasises the idea that “exploring the history of Britain’s countryside is not incompatible with a love for it”.
Then Fowler launches into her first walk, with Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland, previously reviewed here, in Berkshire, looking at returning empire builder Francis Sykes’ Basildon House, commissioned based on the proceeds of empire as a “nabob”, a not universally loved category of returnee from empire. She is even-handed, mentioning that, like David Lascelles of Harewood House, the current Sir John Sykes has spent time researching his family’s history and sharing it with the world and, later, how the National Trust and the Church of England have started to address their pasts.
This chapter discusses the important issue of Britain’s own oppressive labour history, and throughout the book Fowler attempts to link colonialism and this strand, working against the tendency of some to try to shut down discussions of empire with domestic classism and oppression: It comes up in discussion about cotton mills, workers and Gandhi later on in the book, too, and in discussions of secondary investments into local industries such as fishing funded by colonial wealth, as well as the role of slave-owners’ post-Abolition compensation payments in bankrolling the Highland Clearances, and is an important strand in it.
There’s another important strand in the book showing that while White aristocrats and industrialists can easily trace their heritage, those whose ancestors have been forcibly moved one way across oceans then travelled other ways by invitation can find it harder to trace their roots. Profits from empire, slave-trading and ownership of enslaved people show up in church monuments and bits of architecture all over the country as well as big monuments, houses and statues.
I don’t have room to discuss all the chapters at length but we go to Jura with the Scottish National Party’s first Caribbean-heritage councillor to look at connections between the Highlands and Jamaica (where there are famously many Campbells, but also Black Campbells in Scotland); to Dolgellau to look at how Welsh cloth was bought by plantation owners to clothe enslaved people in American and West Indian plantations; to Norfolk where profits from slave-owning allowed Enclosure to spread; the links between Senegal, Louisiana and Hampshire through records from Whitney Plantation, a museum which focuses on the lives of enslaved people rather than the enslavers who lived there.
We visit Tolpuddle to look at intersections of race and class and the treatment of Indigenous communities in Australia; and finally Fowler does one walk on her own to look at Cornish copper which was exported around the world. The Conclusion covers Jane Austen and the presence of slavery in her world, viewed through the work of Edward W. Said and the British Afro-Guyanese poet John Agard, demonstrating the depth and breadth of the book as a whole.
Fowler reiterates the work that is being done by various institutions to look at their histories in this light and finishes with a 2022 Kinder in Colour commemoration of the Kinder Scout Trespass. She finishes: “I hope that this book will inspire and resource many more countryside walks across and beyond Britain’s final frontier of belonging”.
This excellent and important book is fully resourced itself with copious notes full of bibliographical references (these are properly footnoted, too, happily), nicely drawn maps and an index.
Liz Dexter didn’t learn about this stuff at school, either, but is trying to make up for it now. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Corinne Fowler, Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (Allen Lane, 2024). 978-0241561638, 432pp., ill. hardback.
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