The Countryside
Ten Rural Walks Through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jun 11, 2024
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- $20.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Ten walks through idyllic scenery reveal the countryside’s forgotten links to transatlantic slavery and colonialism—a work of accessible history that will transform our understanding of British landscapes and heritage.
The green fields, rugged highlands, and rolling hills of England, Scotland, and Wales are commonly associated with adventure, romance, and seclusion as well as literary figures like Jane Austen and William Wordsworth. But in reality, many of these rural places—with their country houses, lakes, and shorelines—were profoundly changed by British colonial activity. Even hamlets and villages were affected by distant colonial events.
Taking ten country walks, author Corinne Fowler explores the unique colonial dimensions of British agriculture, copper-mining, landownership, wool-making, coastal trade, and factory work in cotton mills. One route shows the links between English country houses and Indian colonization. Another explores banking history in Southern England and its link to slavery on Louisianan plantations. Other walks uncover the historical impact of sugar profits on the Scottish isles and 18th-century tobacco imports on an English coastal port. The history of these countryside locations—and the people who lived and worked in them—is closely bound up with colonial rule in far-away continents.
Accompanying the author on her walks are a fascinating group of people—artists, musicians, and writers—with strong attachments to the landscapes featured in this book and family links to former British colonies like Barbados and Senegal. These companions illuminate the meaning of colonial history in local settings. Crucially, this is not just a history book but a compassionate reflection on the way we respond to sensitive, shared histories which link people across cultures, generations, and political divides.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"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.