The Countryside

Starred review from April 15, 2024
“Colonialism... affected the remotest corners” of Britain’s landscape, demonstrates historian and curator Fowler (Green Unpleasant Land) in this revelatory travelogue-cum-exposé. Narrating ten walks through the British countryside, Fowler traces how a global web of slavery, indentured servitude, and resource extraction altered the country’s “uplands, shorelines, valleys, lakes, villages and fields.” Touring Berkshire, a county outside of London, she delineates changes brought about by East India Company officials who flocked there in the 18th century and spent their fortunes on gardens and landscaping. On Scotland’s Isle of Jura, she tracks the flow of wealth from Jamaica to the prominent Campbell family, who used money earned in the trafficking of slaves, sugar, and tobacco to invest in Jura’s flax industry and build up the red deer population by way of extensive enclosure. Visiting the Lake District, Fowler reveals that the home where William Wordsworth lived and wrote, with its gorgeous grounds, was underwritten by his brother John’s involvement in the opium trade in Asia. The account transfixes throughout, but especially in Fowler’s description of the backlash she faces for her research—in 2020, her study of how many of the country’s preserved stately manor homes were funded by colonial exploitation became fodder for “culture war”–style attacks. This is a staggering look at some of the less-studied repercussions of colonialism.

April 15, 2024
A historian of colonialism examines its effects on the quietest corners of rural Britain. Colonialism, writes Fowler, reshaped every inch of the British Isles, "from small Cumbrian ports and Scottish islands to rural Norfolk and the depths of Cornwall." As the subtitle promises, she hits the hiking trails and backroads in the company of scholars, descendants, and activists, turning up evidence of the kind that drives the Tories crazy: Knowing that a country manor was built on the backs of enslaved people can "guilt-trip visitors into feeling ashamed of British history," as one querulous commentator objected. Of course, countless country manors were funded by the slave trade. For example, the island of Jura, Scotland, was an important entrep�t for a sugar trade controlled by members of the Campbell clan, who intermarried with other sugar barons and, living in splendor around Glasgow, organized resistance to reform: "Unsurprisingly, given the money to be made, Glaswegian businesspeople supported the slavery system." Slavery meant that Welsh wool went to make plain cloth with which to clothe the enslaved people on sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Providing pasturage for the textile industry meant enclosing the land, which meant wresting the commons from country people and building walls and fences. Fowler's essays tend to run a touch too long, but she turns in some fascinating tidbits, including the role of William Wordsworth's colonializing brother in paying William's way so that he could write at leisure (and, in the bargain, opening the door to the opium trade, whose fruits William's pals de Quincey and Coleridge so enjoyed); the subtle critique of slavery in Jane Austen's descriptions of the English rural gentry; and the ongoing effects of a new kind of empire, financial and globalist, on Britain's byways and hedgerows. A deftly critical, readable contribution to the historiography of empire.

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June 1, 2024
Grappling with the historical accuracy of revered spaces is not solely a problem in the U.S. University of Leicester professor Fowler ably shows this through 10 walks in the British countryside with people whose strong bonds to these places are informed by their perspective as descendants of subjects of British colonies in the Caribbean, East Asia, Africa, and North America. Their viewpoints expand the scope of history and show that ""exploring the history of Britain's countryside is not incompatible with a love for it." Stately manors and gardens, purchased with profits from slavery and foreign exploitation, increase political and social status, privatize public lands, and sanitize history. Industrialization within Britain due to colonial products like sugar, cotton, and wool, and British copper that made colonization possible, demonstrates how the empire exploited British workers as well. Fowler references anti-slavery themes in literary works of the time, like Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, debunking the idea that reexamining colonial history is mere modern revisionism. In this well-researched and thoughtful history, Fowler's evocative descriptions will engage both armchair and in-person travelers.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.