Colonies and the countryside: an interview with Corinne Fowler

Our Island Stories by Corinne Fowler

Your book is a study of the British countryside and the impact of colonial history told through ten different walks. Could you give readers a flavour of one of the walks?

One of my walks is called the Enclosure Walk. The walk really challenges the way in which our British enclosure story has been told.

Enclosure was a gradual process by which common land was taken into private ownership. Fences and hedges were placed around portions of land where landless people could once graze their livestock, catch game and collect gorse and firewood to burn.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, this process intensified when acts of parliament were used to enclose more and more land. Historians of enclosure see this period as marking a shift from relative independence to dependency on wage labour. Once people were removed from the commons, they had to pay rent for allotments.

However, all of this has been seen as a domestic story, a series of local land struggles and very personally felt losses. All this is true enough, but my walk highlighted the colonial dimension to enclosure, which was the case up and down the country.

In the case of Norfolk, I show that common land—known as Outney Common—was declared as wasteland. It was then enclosed with money from a lucrative Jamaican plantation known as Donington Castle estate.

One of your themes is that wealth from slavery benefited the rich but not their workers, in fact it often impoverished them. Can you say a bit about this?

The answer to this question is complicated. On the one hand, farmworkers and landless people commonly sought work or refuge in British colonies.

They worked on sugar plantations or working as indentured labourers in the West Indies, Virginia and Maryland.

While a few of these figures made eye-watering profits, indentured labour was brutal and often resulted in suffering and early death. 

Historians of the British Empire have shown that large-scale landownership is a major legacy of empire in rural Britain.

Vast portions of the West Highlands and Islands in Scotland were bought with slavery profits. Historians have shown that slave owners were prominent in the infamous Highland Clearances. Here crofters were mercilessly evicted because more money could be made from deer parks and sheep grazing pasture.

There is no question that people’s lives were impoverished by all of that.

My Cotton Walk shows how millworkers in East Lancashire were affected by the American Civil War, which quickly became about slavery.

The raw cotton for Lancashire’s factories was produced by enslaved people who were forced to harvest it in the southern states of America, known as the Confederate States.

When Abraham Lincoln’s forces blockaded the Confederate ports, Lancashire’s cotton supply stopped.

The factories ground to a halt and unemployed millworkers endured a miserable “cotton famine” with reports of them burning their own furniture to keep warm. To receive financial support they had to work in cold, damp conditions quarrying stone or digging footpaths. Nonetheless, the people of Rochdale and many other millworkers across Lancashire did show solidarity with the anti-slavery movement, recognising this as a greater cause despite their own impoverishment.

I explored a further example in my Labourers’ Walk through Dorset, which showed that slave-owners like the Drax family were prominent suppressors of agricultural workers’ wages. I also discuss the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, famous agricultural workers who formed a union and were sent to Australia.

These labourers had massive support back in Britain and were recalled from harsh labour in these colonies.

As all these examples suggest, the major beneficiaries of colonial wealth were not British labourers but propertied families.

Your book talks about resistance of enslaved people and the struggles of workers within the industries producing “slavery commodities”. How much did this shape today’s countryside?

Resistance to slavery and colonial rule was widespread in the West Indies and anti-colonial activism was a hallmark of every part of the British Empire.

There is no doubt that the British countryside was transformed by colonial wealth and activities linked to the British Empire.

I have mentioned the case of the Highland Clearances and enclosure, but the book also explores the woollen industry.

In the town of Dolgellau, the site of my Wool Walk, sheep shearers, carders, spinners and weavers made a coarse fabric called Welsh woollen plains.

The workers largely knew that this fabric was destined to clothe enslaved people on plantations in the Americas.

They themselves did not much profit from it, though the town grew in size and importance and they received employment from it.

Most wool workers got involved in the production of woollen plains because agricultural work was poorly paid and seasonal.

My Copper Walk also shows how copper is linked substantially to the slavery system. At one point, Gwenap, near Redruth in Cornwall, was known as the world’s richest square mile.

But much of that copper was destined for trade for enslaved people along the West African coast or for vast copper boiling vats in thousands of plantations.This copper was also used to sheath the wooden hulls of slave ships and navy ships that were engaged in colonial wars.

The copper mines really changed the Cornish landscape and left those classic post-industrial landscapes so familiar to us today.  

It was inspiring to read your account of the Lancashire cotton workers and their solidarity with the fight against slavery. How common was it for workers to oppose the slavery industry they themselves were part of?

The actions of the Rochdale workers, in showing solidarity with Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery cause, is heartening. It is also true that many cotton workers in Britain just wanted their ordeal to be over, hoping that the factories would re-open so they could once again find employment.

Britain does have an honourable tradition of anti-slavery support.

However, within Britain, comparisons between African and “white slaves” were frequently made by prominent union figures, sympathetic politicians and labour leaders.

Though the suffering of workers in England was considerable, the conditions they endured were less severe than those experienced by people in chattel slavery.

For the latter, their lives legally belonged to their enslavers, they were denied freedom of movement and their children were born into slavery.

Punishments, though severe for resistant labourers on British soil, were far worse in the West Indies. For example, after the “Slave Code” of 1661 became law in Barbados, enslaved people could be legally maimed or murdered by their enslavers.

Your walking companions all describe their experiences of racism and feeling like an outsider when visiting the countryside. How can we change that?

I frequently hear white people saying that there is no problem with racism in the countryside, but I ask myself how can we be so sure?

Research into the experience of living in or visiting the countryside for people of colour shows that there is a problem.

Yet when people try to tell those stories, their experience is dismissed or denied. One of my colleagues, Viji Kuppan, was met at a village pub door with a knife and racial slurs.

My student was similarly greeted with a racial insult when she arrived at a country inn for Sunday lunch with her husband.

When people tell those stories, a chain of comments beneath their accounts is almost always dominated by disbelieving responses.

There are practical measures that would help, such as not asking people where they are really from or why they are in the countryside. Saying hello and being friendly is another way of promoting inclusive rural spaces.

Our Island Stories: Country Walks through Colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler. Available from Bookmarks: the socialist bookshop