THE COUNTRYSIDE

A historian of colonialism examines its effects on the quietest corners of rural Britain.

Colonialism, writes Fowler, reshaped every inch of the British Isles, “from small Cumbrian ports and Scottish islands to rural Norfolk and the depths of Cornwall.” As the subtitle promises, she hits the hiking trails and backroads in the company of scholars, descendants, and activists, turning up evidence of the kind that drives the Tories crazy: Knowing that a country manor was built on the backs of enslaved people can “guilt-trip visitors into feeling ashamed of British history,” as one querulous commentator objected. Of course, countless country manors were funded by the slave trade. For example, the island of Jura, Scotland, was an important entrepôt for a sugar trade controlled by members of the Campbell clan, who intermarried with other sugar barons and, living in splendor around Glasgow, organized resistance to reform: “Unsurprisingly, given the money to be made, Glaswegian businesspeople supported the slavery system.” Slavery meant that Welsh wool went to make plain cloth with which to clothe the enslaved people on sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Providing pasturage for the textile industry meant enclosing the land, which meant wresting the commons from country people and building walls and fences. Fowler’s essays tend to run a touch too long, but she turns in some fascinating tidbits, including the role of William Wordsworth’s colonializing brother in paying William’s way so that he could write at leisure (and, in the bargain, opening the door to the opium trade, whose fruits William’s pals de Quincey and Coleridge so enjoyed); the subtle critique of slavery in Jane Austen’s descriptions of the English rural gentry; and the ongoing effects of a new kind of empire, financial and globalist, on Britain’s byways and hedgerows.

A deftly critical, readable contribution to the historiography of empire.