There was far more to the British empire than slavery
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Writing in this paper, Professor Corinne Fowler provided evidence of the abuse and intimidation she has suffered since publishing reports and books on the links between colonialism and properties owned by the National Trust. She’s entirely justified to complain about such treatment which no author writing in good faith should receive.
But her remarks suggest that she may not fully understand why reasonable people objected in 2020 to her report for the Trust, and will probably also criticise her forthcoming edited volume entitled Colonial Countryside to be published next month.
In 2020 she investigated “Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, including links with historic slavery”. Her new book will include discussion of National Trust properties “whose owners engaged in the slavery business, in colonial administration or who were involved with the East India Company or British Rule in India”.
The association of slavery with the much broader history of empire in these books is one major cause of disquiet with Professor Fowler’s work.
We can all agree on the moral, physical and personal wrongs of slavery and wish that it had never occurred, whether in the British empire or anywhere else. But to speak of imperial history in general in the same breath is neither morally nor historically valid. Many people whose ancestors helped run the empire and had nothing to do with slavery will be understandably aggrieved that, as Professor Fowler implies, they were engaged in something malevolent. At a stroke, the many social, legal, and educational achievements of the empire, including the anti-slavery campaigns themselves after 1787, are written out of history. ‘Colonialism’ itself is made a dirty word in these titles, but it formed one of the key strands to British History for three centuries. Historical research should try to explain, not condemn.
What is the point of it, if, in these cases, it merely imposes Professor Fowler’s values on those who thought and acted differently?
The National Trust may have been equally misguided in commissioning the 2020 report and, one imagines, supporting Professor Fowler’s forthcoming anthology. If it sponsors a report on the Trust’s links with colonialism, why not also support a report on the history of all the charitable contributions made by owners of National Trust properties down the centuries, including the gifting of the properties themselves to the nation? Or about the sacrifices of landed families in the two World Wars? Or about landed wealth and the historic patronage of the arts in Britain?
Or, on the other side, why is there not also a report in the offing about National Trust properties and the enclosure of common land by hundreds of private Acts of Parliament in the eighteenth century? No historian would dare again say the fact that the vast bulk of landholders’ wealth came not from slavery and colonialism, but from profits from the lands they owned and also grabbed. Either we do the history of landed society and the National Trust properly, or not at all: no one should just cherry pick the fashionably bad bits.
The disquiet over Churchill’s inclusion in the 2020 report arose from the implication that to serve as Colonial Secretary – the reason he was ‘named’ – was, in itself, a cause of shame. Do we likewise blame the Victorian Presidents of the Poor Law Board for administering a harsh system of poor relief now superseded by the welfare state? Or blame Home Secretaries who enforced former laws on homosexuality? Should we blame today’s ministers for immigration and prisons because they have difficult responsibilities and are often opposed by bien pensant intellectuals? In public service you cannot always choose the nice jobs, those that will recommend you to posterity. Churchill and other colonial officials who lived in what are now National Trust properties were the servants of the laws, the electorates, the opinion and the policy of their time, not ours.
One theme that links Professor Fowler’s article in the Telegraph with the history she writes is that of victimhood. Her work is premised on the suffering of victims overseas and she has herself become a victim of abusive behaviour which is lamentable and distressing. If we’re writing history in this manner, I think she overlooks another and much larger group of ‘victims’ in her story, the British agricultural labourers who, through centuries of toil, worked on the land, some of it now owned by the National Trust, for their weekly shillings.
But history written in this way, that is by starting from moralistic assumptions like “colonialism is bad” and looking for its victims – will never be more than “a dreary record of wickedness”, a phrase used in 1887 in a famous exchange between two great Victorian historians, Mandell Creighton and Lord Acton. Exploration, navigation, trade, cultural and technological exchange, medical advances, the spread of Christianity and the English language? There’s more to the history of empire than the history of victims.
Professor Lawrence Goldman is Emeritus Fellow in History, St. Peter’s College, Oxford
