In the face of pushback, historian Corinne Fowler is trying to open minds to Britain’s legacy of slavery

James Evan Baillie died in his bed in Mayfair in London in 1863 aged 83, leaving behind a fortune worth more than £500,000 in the money of the day, reckoned to be nearly £100 million today. He died unmarried, so his money was enjoyed by relatives.

The fortune of the West Indies plantation owner, banker and politician had more than a few roots, including a successful fleet of trading ships that plied routes between England and the Caribbean.

However, his ownership of nearly 500 slaves was a founding pillar of his wealth – both when they slaved in his Jamaican plantations, and for the £100,000 “compensation” he received from the British government when they were freed under the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.

Like other slave-owners, Baillie used the compensation to buy land in the Scottish Highlands. So much land was bought that it led to a new chapter in the “Clearances” – when Scots were cleared from the land to allow for the grazing of sheep.

If Brexit Britain was an inflamed appendix, Eurosceptic France would be a malignant cancer

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A truth and reconciliation commission in Northern Ireland would require a high level of mutual trust

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In the face of pushback, historian Corinne Fowler is trying to open minds to Britain’s legacy of slavery

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In all, land purchases in the Highlands doubled in the years after the slavery compensation. Over half of all of the Highlands – over 1.8 million acres – was bought by slave-owners, changing its face forever.

The life of Baillie and scores like him form the spine of Prof Corinne Fowler’s new book, Our Island Stories, which traces the imprint left by empire, colonisation and slavery across the rural face of Britain.

It is a controversial story in the culture wars that so often now mark British public debate, and Fowler has been targeted, often viciously, by those who argue that she is “woke”, intent on destroying Britain’s global reputation.

Speaking from her garden shed in Birmingham, Fowler makes for an unlikely destroyer of anything, one who speaks softly and is intent on seeking grounds for debate, not division, but who is nevertheless determined to defend her own arguments.

She is both optimistic and despairing about the discourse taking place on the British Empire: “I’d say that we’re in both a better position than we were at the start of the culture wars, but also in a worse position.

“Public knowledge about colonial history is improving all the time. The public is more aware than they’ve been before,” she says, though they face “a clear disinformation campaign”, led “by quite prominent figures”.

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Fowler became a hate figure for some after she co-edited a report for the UK’s National Trust which traced the connections some of the estates and houses now run by the Trust have with empire, colonisation and/or slavery.

What was the East India Company? How did the slavery system operate in its fullest sense? What was the Royal African Company? These things we did not learn

—  Corinne Fowler, historian

Her roundly well-reviewed latest work, said one critic, is “bad, moralising history”, while Lord Charles Moore, former Daily Telegraph editor, and a long-standing critic, includes her in his list of historians “who want Britons to feel bad about Britain”.

Her new book is formed around 10 walks across Britain that explore the influence of empire, including the East India Company, the dealings in slave-produced sugar, tobacco, or cotton, or the lucrative outward trade in wool, cloth, copper and other goods.

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In style, it frequently feels like a book about nature as much as empire, revelling in wildflowers and insects, as much as in history. This is deliberate: “It’s quite a gentle way into empire, and the way it was written is as important as the content,” she says.

Nevertheless, there are hard lessons, too.

One of her main arguments is that those who profited from empire, colonisation and slavery abroad were able to use their profits and influence to dominate at home just as effectively, if differently.

Equally, her work shows how the influence of slavery percolated to Britain’s poorest districts, such as Dolgellau in North Wales, where local merchants thrived, a few craftsmen prospered and the poorest survived selling cloth to the slave plantations.

“We can’t address this history, or even acknowledge it, without knowing more what it is. I’m hoping that my book will make its contribution to the history of empire and rural Britain – the parts of Britain that we think have nothing to do with colonialism,” she says.

Fowler, professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester, has sought to engage with critics where she can – most recently with a man in the audience at the Sheffield Festival of Debate.

“He was shouting, he was angry,” she says. “He said that I’m deliberately going out of my way to offend and insult patriots in the UK, and that, you know, would I consider myself woke, et cetera, et cetera,” she adds.

The audience looked on, horrified, or expectant, depending on their attitudes. Then the exchange mellowed: “We had a calmer and calmer conversation, and the audience applauded. That’s what I want. I want to quieten things down.”

Unlike some with a similar reading of the British Empire, Fowler insists she is not interested “in calling people out”, especially since the British education system has not given the British public the tools to understand their own past.

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“You can’t expect people who are not experts in colonial history to feel that that history is familiar, or even to expect them to know the basics, because school for most of us did not even provide the basics about, actually, well, even Ireland.

“What was the East India Company? How did the slavery system operate in its fullest sense? What was the Royal African Company? These things we did not learn. Why should I expect other people to know that?”

Fowler’s attitude stands in contrast to those of many other increasingly vitriolic British academics: “I have seen some experts weaponise their own knowledge against people and show contempt for people who don’t know [it] and who feel threatened by it.

Culture wars are divisive and completely unnecessary. We need to be bigger than that and to connect with each other. That’s why I write in the way that I do

—  Corinne Fowler

“I don’t think that that is a good thing to do at all. I think that academics or researchers are a public resource, and their role is to serve by providing evidence-based, robust, rigorous research.”

She bridles at the quality of some of her own critics.

Replying to her own hate mail, however, offered her a masterclass in understanding, she said: “It was an education for me, because I realised that people are people. You only know what you know. Judgment is absolutely inappropriate.

“Culture wars are divisive and completely unnecessary. We need to be bigger than that and to connect with each other. That’s why I write in the way that I do, because it’s helpful to have constructive, mutually respectful conversations.”

However, culture wars are not an accident of history. They are created by opinion leaders “who do think that the end is justified by the means in trying to weaponise colonial history and the way in which we tell it”.

This right-leaning/right-wing group, one that is particularly influential and well-funded in the UK, has brought a far larger number of people to become angered about the idea that a different lens could be placed over the country’s past.

“These were people who felt that this history was unfamiliar, who wondered if it had been made up, and who didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t true,” she says.

They were “persuaded” that she, and others, were “anti-patriotic ideologues who were enemies of the people”, she said: “They felt there was a threat, a kind of existential threat to the reputation of our nation as a civilised nation.”

Her book is disliked by others because the people she chose to take her 10 walks with her all tell stories of how black and Caribbean people were, or are, treated in today’s Britain, and, especially, made to feel unwelcome in rural Britain.

Telling the story of an Asian colleague, she said he went to Haworth in Yorkshire to visit the home of the Brontë sisters, where he was “greeted at the pub door with racial slurs and a knife, and somebody telling him he didn’t belong there”.

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Such an experience may be extreme, but not being made welcome is common, Fowler argues, though critics will reject such arguments, declaring “‘that that didn’t happen, that you’re making it up’, or ‘Are the trees racist?’, ‘Are the fields racist?’”

Insisting that the experience is genuine, she says that walking groups such as Black Girls Hike and Muslims Hike are determined to go “out there despite the feeling of discomfort, so I think things have shifted a little bit, which is great, you know?”

Equally, a broader telling of the story of houses such as Sezincote in the Cotswolds, built on East India Company profits made by John Cockerell, would bring more of Britain’s inhabitants today into contact with their past, regardless of where they came from.

For a book that focuses on how large parts of British history are unknown to Britain’s people, Fowler’s book is silent on the subject of Ireland, bar a mention of coal being shipped from Whitehaven in Cumbria. Was there no walk that would have told the story of Ireland?

Sitting in her simply-appointed shed, Fowler accepts the criticism with a degree of embarrassment when asked to explain its absence: “You’re right. I think that this is a gap in my knowledge, a legacy of the British education system.

“I know there’s no excuse. It’s just shocking that I could grow up in a British education system alongside almost everybody else, and not really know much about Ireland,” she accepts. She would, she said, do better.