Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain

“Raj, we both studied the Industrial revolution and how cotton, tobacco and sugar changed the face of the northwest, when we were students at Lancaster university all those years ago,” reminisced an old friend when we met after a gap of more than thirty years. I nod my head as we both clink our glasses of wine. “But do you remember anyone seriously questioning the role of colonialism and the slave trade in the creation of all that new wealth?” I can’t and we discuss how our lecturers, eminent scholars in their chosen discipline and “good, progressive” people, would deride Eric Williams’ “Capitalism and slavery” which drew upon just such an umbilical cord. (Williams’ work is today all the rage and taken seriously at long last.) Dadabhai Naoroji’s “drain of wealth” hypothesis in 1867 was likewise, not seen to be a work of any great depth too. The reworking of that very same theory by Shashi Tharoor in his book, “Inglorious empire” in 2018 became an international best seller.

There has been a trend, accelerated by the “Black Lives Matter” movement towards revising our traditional, dominant narratives on empire, slavery and its impact upon shaping Britain’s economy and culture in recent years. Much of this has taken place within the context of new evidence, previously unheard of voices and societal and demographic changes as Britain has become a more diverse and multicultural society. Older works, such as EP Thompson’s magisterial “Making of the English working class” in 1963, a book that incidentally shaped my political worldview through the lens of class, have looked at class and dispossession at the heart of the shaping of our “eternal, unchanging” countryside. Professor Corinne Fowler, an academic whose 2020 report delving into the connection between National Trust properties and colonialism and the slave trade, provoked a backlash from “culture warriors” of the Right, explored these connections in dept in her iconic 2022 book, “Green, unpleasant land”, a worthy successor to Thompson’s work.

In her new book, “Our island stories: country walks through colonial Britain”: Penguin 2024, Corinne Fowler explores ten places and sites through the perspective of walkers with colonial connections. Made up of artists, writers and activists the book is a unique collection of individuals’ take on what the seemingly pristine and quintessentially English countryside and well known historic houses and properties means to those who often also have a conflicting relationship with them. The walks turn out to be revelatory about the hidden nature of places such as Wordsworth’s cottage in the Lake District where the walk with photographer Ingrid Pollard explores the famous writer’s family and financial connection with the East India Company. The chapter, my favourite, tracks Wordsworth’s personal journey from a radical Romantic who writes a paean to Toussaint Louverture, who led the world’s first successful slave rebellion in Haiti in late 18th century to a reactionary defending his Tory benefactor, an advocate of slavery. In the tobacco walk with the writer Peter Kalu in Whitehaven, we discover a place that is less diverse today than in the 18th century when, as records show, many black individuals and families lived and worked in the area.

Other chapters in the book, ten in all, use the same refreshing approach to give us some truly unique insights in places through the length and breadth of the land. But perhaps the greatest strength of the book, and the reason I wish to recommend it as a must read, is the connection it draws between the “external” factors such as colonial and slave trade and the eviction of millions through the process of enclosures throughout the 18th and 19th centuries to reshape and mould our countryside through investing fortunes derived from such trade, as the playground of the rich.