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In a Cotswolds pub, Corinne Fowler has one of the heartfelt conversations with British writers and artists of Black or Asian heritage that punctuate this book. Birmingham-based historian Raj Pal, “stabbing the air with a chip”, notes that the East India Company, which ruled much of the subcontinent for a century, promoted not only bigoted thugs but also connoisseurs of Indian culture. “The trouble with conversations about history . . . ” he laments, is that “there’s no f*****g nuance!”
Fowler, professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester, learnt the hard way about the UK’s nuance deficit. In 2020, she co-authored a National Trust report about the colonial and slavery connections of many of the charity’s properties. Suddenly, she found herself drenched in what she describes as a “wave of hostility” from pundits and politicians alike.
Uncomfortable truths about the historical origin of many great fortunes — and the beloved sites they funded — aroused considerable ire. Rightwing populist politician Nigel Farage accused the trust of “trashing” the nation’s past.
Our Island Stories, however, makes ample room for nuance. Fowler treats rural landscapes not as trash but treasure — albeit treasure that often hides a murky hinterland. The 11 walks she sets out on through houses, parks, coasts and hills confirm, she writes, that “exploring the history of Britain’s countryside is not incompatible with a love for it”.
In a country whose elite routinely converted trading wealth into landed prestige, empire wrote its story across fields, mansions and woods as much as cities, churches and factories.
Her itinerary, accompanied by authors and creators who have a special commitment to the land beneath their feet, takes her from Wordsworth country in the Lake District to idyllic Dorset villages; from Scottish islands to the foothills of Snowdonia; from Lancashire mill towns to Cornish creeks and the flamboyant Mughal-style fantasy palace of Sezincote in Gloucestershire. Everywhere, she tells multi-layered stories of trade, empire, wealth, conflict and protest that combine the “intimately local and sweepingly global”.
Inevitably, the riches colonial slavery brought to many landed estates loom large: for the Jamaica-trading branch of the Campbell clan, who purchased the islands of Islay and Jura, as much as for the Draxes of Dorset, with their Barbadian sugar holdings.
Our Island Stories shows how the Atlantic traffic in humans, and the plantation system it fed, “intertwine” (a favourite word of Fowler’s) with profound change at home — whether the enclosure of common land in East Anglia or the pivot from American to Indian cotton in Lancashire mills. In a society that lived or died by overseas commerce, a “vast intercontinental geography” might transform the sleepiest hamlet.
As she ponders the role of Welsh wool in clothing enslaved workers before abolition, the Welsh-Guyanese academic Charlotte Williams insists that historical discussion “is nothing to do with finger-wagging”. Our Island Stories heeds that message. It acknowledges that any historical figure “is not just one thing, but many”, and (to choose one example) refuses to deploy John Wordsworth’s ill-fated ambitions in the opium business as a cheap “gotcha!” to sabotage his brother William’s poetry.
The book does, sorrowfully, shake its head at enduring prejudice. Fowler’s co-walkers of colour repeatedly report that, growing up, their affection for rural life went unreciprocated. Williams “felt disowned” by Wales, she says, but “had no intention of disowning it”. In Devon, writer Louisa Adjoa Parker loved the countryside but sensed “it didn’t love her”.
These testimonies furnish some of Fowler’s most poignant passages. Our Island Stories engagingly mingles chatty or lyrical travelogue with digests of scholarly research. It aims for — and deserves to reach — a wide and open-minded readership.
Sometimes she elides crucial ties with tangential links, direct causation with loose association. Lancashire cotton kings’ dependence on plantation slavery hardly belongs in the same explanatory frame as John Constable sailing on an East India Company ship.
Fowler does, however, press home her key argument that colonial history abroad and labour history at home count as “two sides of the same coin”. Many slavers, bankers and traders ploughed their assets into picturesque scenery then became peasant-evicting Highland landlords, commons-enclosers in Norfolk, or persecutors of pioneer trade-unionists in Dorset.
Even readers with no desire to view British history “through a prism of guilt and fear” may simply be struck by how much of the world — and the past — finds its way into sheep-cropped valley slopes, Georgian harbour towns or flower-bedecked cottages surrounding village greens. Fowler and her fellow walkers relish the beauty and charm they encounter, even as they tussle with one contested legacy after another.
History, as she writes in one of many pastoral similes, “bursts forth like a vigorous hare” and bounds off down paths of its own. Past pains shadow present pleasures, but never quite extinguish them.
Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain by Corinne Fowler Allen Lane, £25, 432 pages
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