Colonial aspects of Britain’s countryside and heritage sites in relation to sensitive history, national self-fashioning and academic freedom.

This lecture explores the repressed histories of rural Britain’s connections to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company. It details the colonial links of country houses, coastlines, moorlands, woodlands and village graveyards. 

The countryside is an important source of ideas about Britishness, and especially Englishness. Literary tradition has played a formative role in this regard. Many influential pastoral works were produced during four hundred years of colonial rule. These works comment upon the relationship between colonial wealth and British landscapes, including Acts of Enclosure, country estates and the nation’s longest stone wall. Today, authors and poets are transforming the pastoral tradition in response to recent research into imperial Britain. 

Colonialism’s cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. Narratives are equally part of that legacy. Britain’s recent ‘culture wars’ can be understood as a resurgent yet longstanding reluctance to explore the nation’s colonial past. What is at stake in our contemporary response to sensitive history and what are the implications for academic freedom?

Biography

Corinne Fowler is a Professor in the School of Arts and directs a child-led history and writing project called ‘Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted’. Corinne co-edited the 2020 National Trust report on colonialism and historic slavery and is author of 'Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections' (Peepal Tree Press, 2020).