Corinne Fowler - Our Island Stories: Country walks through colonial Britain

Having thoroughly enjoyed Corinne Fowler's previous book Green Unpleasant Land I was very pleased to pick up this, her most recent book. It takes a look at the close links between the British countryside, colonial history and class struggle. Unusally, as the subtitle suggests, it is constructed around ten walks, in landscapes as varied as the Western Isles of Scotland, the Lake District and North Wales. On each journey Fowler is accompanied by a historian, artist or writer who adds their own perspective to the events and landscape, often in deeply personal ways.

I was expecting much of the book to focus on the way that Britain's wealthy had benefited from slavery. Fowler has been central to the investigations that have highlighted the extensive links between National Trust properties and slavery. So I expected that much of the book would focus on how the wealth from slavery had been used to construct huge country houses and large estates. This is, of course, true. Fowler writes about the Conservative MP Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, whose "massive portfolio of property still includes the Drax Hall estate on Barbados, which, founded by the Draxes in the 1650s, still cultivates sugar cane today. His planatations, historically, were worked by enslaved people." Drax, like many other landowners, owes the family wealth to the labour, blood and sweat of enslaved people.

Important though these insights into our countryside are, this is not all there is to Fowler's book. I was repeatedly struck by a more dynamic relationship between colonialism and the landscape. This is, perhaps, best shown by the walk Fowler takes us on around the town of Dolgellau in North Wales. Now principally known as a base from which visitors can explore Snowdonia, it once was at the epicentre of a global trade in wool. Dolgellau's wool was "distinctive" and often called "Welsh plains". It was a "cheap, coarse and durable... strong fabic" and "at the height of production, 718,000 yards of webs were produced almost entirely for export with around eighteen mills operating in and around Dolgellau."

The nature of Welsh Plain cloth made it idea for clothing enslaved people in the Americas and the West Indies. Fowler quotes the historian Marian Gwyn, "who found that in 1806 just three plantations in Clarendon, Jamacia ordered over 8 miles of fabric; 15 percent of this was woollen and from north Wales". The brutal reality of this is brought home to the reader as Fowler quotes from various advertisments from the 1700s which aim to identify and recapture escaped slaves. These frequently note that slaves escaped wearing Welsh wool.

As the example of Welsh Wool demonstrates, Fowler's book explores much more than the flow of  wealth from slavery into the hands of wealthy merchants and bankers in Britain. It also shows how that money was used to transform Britain's landscape, its people and its economy, in order to squeeze more wealth out of the slave trade. Dolgellau's growth was driven by the money the local economy made from manufacturing wool for the slave trade: "Around 1690, Welsh plains clothed 97,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean and North America.. by the mid-eighteenth century - the period when Dolgellau's smart houses started going up - this number grew to just under 2 million yards for some 279,000 enslaved people."

Thus the slave trade, in terms of the development of the town, is literarily written into the landscape if we look for the expansion of housing and development. It is also written there in terms of the transformation of the local economy and, as Fowler further develops her argument in later chapters through the enclosure of land and the transformation of the peasantry.

For the slave commodities made and sold from Britain like wool, iron, or copper required labour. They also required the creation of a new proletariat, and the destruction of historic ways of organising the rural economy. For many landowners the wealth they got from slavery drove these processes forward, impoverishing local workers, destroying traditional agriculture and manufacturing and concentrating workers in bigger and bigger industrial concerns. As Fowler points out, the wealth from slavery did not "trickle down" to the employees in Britain, instead if was concentrated in the hands of the already rich, and allowed them to exploit workers more:

Transatlantic slavery permeated the lives of rural working people: sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers. Not that these people were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harse. The money was bing made by people far higher up the economic ladder: landowners with sheep-grazing pasture, wool-merchants, slave-traders and their backers.

In fact I would go further. The wealth from slavery allowed the destruction of older economic relations, to the detriment of the population. British workers ended up sicker, poorer and dying earlier as a result of the industrialisation bring by the slave trade.

These workers, even in times of great hardship, often spoke out against slavery. Fowler describes the Lancashire cotton workers whose struggle to support the North in the US Civil War was born out of opposition to slavery. She also notes the rebellions and revolutions of the slaves themselves who fought their masters and occasionally, such as with the Haitian revolution, won.

The final aspect of this book that is worth noting is the personal stories of Fowler's walking companions. Their knowledge of the history of colonialism adds greatly to Fowler's work, as does their art and poetry. But it is perhaps most interesting regarding the modern countryside. Repeatedly her Black and Asian friends tell her about their own negative experience of such walks. Feeling like and outsider, experiencing racism or, for instance, never seeing someone like them working or living in the country. 

Part of challenging that racism has to come from a real recognition that the British countryside was never a pastoral idyll. The history and landscapes of rural Britain have been shaped by capitalism, class struggle and colonialism. As Corinne Fowler's wonderful work shows, slavery, imperialism and colonialism are written into the very countryside, into the shapes of small rural towns, and into the history of the people who lived there. For those of us who love the country, and who want to know its history, this is an indespensible work.

Related Reviews

Fowler - Green Unpleasant Land
Howkins - The Death of Rural England
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle
Blackburn - The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
Fryer - Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain
Rediker - The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery & Freedom