This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Throwaway remarks in a preface can be indicative of a lack of care. Let us pass by “the decline of empire in the early twentieth” (sic), a period that saw the British Empire reach unprecedented extent in 1919, make a major contribution in World War Two and, even after subsequent withdrawal from South Asia, still rule much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, South-East Asia and Oceania.
More interesting is the mention of Africans enduring and resisting slavery, for that leaves out Africans’ major role in enslavement, thus denying them “agency”. This is important, not in some form of the all-too-frequent point-scoring in Corinne Fowler’s Our Island Stories but because it curiously robs “agency” from non-Europeans, presumably in order to throw greater criticism on Europeans.
So also with the account of the Battle of Plassey, where defeat for the Nawab of Bengal is attributed to deceit by Sir Francis Sykes rather than the role of Mir Jafar, the Nawab’s former commander-in-chief who proved a very skilful defector and also of the sepoys in the army of Robert Clive. The same pattern can be found throughout: in place of the nuances and shared activities seen in empire and discussed in the genre of “world history”, there is an emphasis on exploitation and oppression.
There is also much unintentional humour. I chuckled as Fowler (repeatedly) praised herself and validated her stance against past and present criticism, not least by presenting a choice between virtue (her good self) and evil (trolls et al.), a choice in which her walking companions were also enfolded. This is “oh so convenient”, for all critics, unless subsequently enlightened by her, can then be tarred with some brush of evil, which of course is one way to close down debate.
It is always instructive to see how books are presented by the publishers. Penguin cites the first of Fowler’s fellow-walkers, Sathnam Sanghera, who describes it as a “real, difficult, essential history, delivered in the most eloquent and accessible way. Her case, that rural Britain has been shaped by imperialism, is unanswerable … ”
That, I am afraid, captures both the parti pris nature of the work, as well as its grandstanding character. To take the first, rural Britain has been shaped by a lot as it has been inhabited for thousands of years, for much of which Britain was not an imperial power. Yet Fowler is not looking at the legacy of when much of Britain was part of an empire ruled from elsewhere.
If we turn to this long period, we should say that agriculture has been the prime shaper, with deforestation, the spread of pastoralism and the management of crops being central themes. The wiping out of other predators was significant but more so was the development of settlement.
Fowler notes place names linked to empire, but most rural ones are derived from the Anglo-Saxons, though Norse and Danish ones are important in places. Whatever Sanghera might think, Fowler avoids the “difficult”, for that would require an account of her subject in light of the role of these other aspects.
Of course, it is well known, as Fowler discusses in “The Copper Walk”, that metallurgy was to a degree linked with supplying the sugar economy, but much was not, whilst rural Britain as a whole was greatly affected by mining and quarrying that did not centre on empire. Indeed, for these and much else, domestic and continental markets were more significant, but Fowler lacks the engagement with the “difficult” required to assess this issue and how it changed through time.
So also with “The Enclosure Walk”. Fowler presents enclosure in terms of the activity of slave-owning landowners who were industrious active enclosurers. She writes: “Enclosure coincided with colonial expansion — but in fact this was no coincidence at all. A great deal of land in England was bought and enclosed using wealth from the West Indies.” But there was much enclosure prior to the age of colonial expansion whilst, during the latter, much land was bought and enclosed using wealth from other sources.
The last is a matter Fowler underplays. To say for the Lowthers, “Sir James’ wealth came from coal; it also came from slavery,” is dramatically to underplay the significance of the development of the West Cumberland Coalfield for the family’s wealth.
William Wordsworth is then involved in the slipstream of opprobrium, suffering “reputational damage … as a political turncoat”. Perish the thought that, as he matured, Wordsworth came to appreciate that the French Revolution he had initially applauded led to an imposed atheism, the staccato labours of the guillotine and a military tyranny in the shape of Napoleon, with whom the Whigs, when they came to power in 1806, were unable to settle.
Fowler prefers to cite Byron and Shelley (“a true radical”), without any engagement with the complexities of the era. This, alas, is all too typical of the book, where the lack of an adequate grasp of the relevant contexts is matched by the misunderstanding of the difference between causation and association.
There is also a failure adequately to engage with the significance of religious views in the period treated. Far from ebbing, apocalyptic ideas were encouraged by the repeated crises of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. The search for providential support and the struggle against evil were demonstrated by, and in, national prayer days and also played a role in the discussion around particular items of legislation, not least (as John Coffey has shown) the abolition of the slave trade.
The novelist Henrietta Mosse in The Old Irish Baronet (1808) was far from alone in attacking the slave trade when critiquing ideas of the divine underpinning of situations. Possibly part of the problem is that Fowler is overly prone to treat what she dislikes as a monolith spanning past and present that can only be shattered by radical consciousness and action, as well as the “light of pure reason” (i.e. Fowler and those of whom she approves). The reality, however, is not only the absence of monolithic identity and unity but also the ability of anciens regimes, however defined, to change from internal causes.
The problem, ultimately, may be that of different understandings of history. Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester and is described as a public historian. That is certainly a way to present the past, but it can lead, in a drive for “accessibility”, to a clarity or stridency that fails to engage with the nuances, contexts and contingencies that engage much scholarly history.
Fowler claims to be offering “an antidote to brash posturing and the mutual incomprehension of people with different relationships to British colonial history”, but there is quite a strong element of posturing in her presentation. In addressing this “incomprehension”, it might be an idea for her to walk with some who do not share her suppositions.
