New Book | Green Unpleasant Land
From Peepal Tree Press:
Corinne Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2021), 324 pages, ISBN: 978-1845234829, £20 / $30.
Green Unpleasant Land explores the countryside’s repressed colonial past and demonstrates its importance as a source of ideas about Englishness. The book presents historical evidence to show that rural England was a place of conflict and global expansion. It also examines four centuries of literary response to explore how race, class, and gender have both created and deconstructed England’s pastoral mythologies. In particular, the book argues that Black and British Asian writers have challenged narrow, nostalgic views of rural England but also expressed attachment to English landscapes and the natural world.
The book questions the countryside’s reputation as a retreat from urban life. It interrogates the idea that country houses are models for civilised living or that moorlands are places of freedom. It presents new perspectives on the ‘English’ flora and fauna that feature in literature, parks, allotments, and suburban gardens. The book reconsiders a range of rural locations through the lens of British colonial involvement, including East India Company activity and the slavery business. The book connects England’s outward-reaching histories to what was happening in the countryside: the enclosure of common land, the beginnings of industrial mass farming, and the reshaping of landownership through imperial profits. In bringing together histories usually separated by the Atlantic, Green Unpleasant Land makes connections, for instance, between the rebellion of enslaved people for their freedom in Jamaica in 1831, and the struggles of English agricultural workers in the Captain Swing uprising of the same year.
But Green Unpleasant Land is more than an academic study—accessibly written as it is—because it contains a section of Corinne Fowler’s own stories and poems written in response to the research she has undertaken and the material objects she has encountered. It is a personal story, too, of her own family relationship to transatlantic enslavement.
Green Unpleasant Land should make uncomfortable reading for anyone who wants to uphold nostalgic views of rural England. The heatedness of the recent media response to such work shows just what is at stake: a selective vision of nation that underplays the impact of four colonial centuries, or a vision that embraces, as Paul Gilroy expresses it, a post-imperial “convivial culture.”
Corinne Fowler is a research expert at the University of Leicester, and is Director of Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. Professor Fowler is an expert in the legacies of colonialism and postcolonialism to literature, heritage, and representations of British history. She co-founded and led the Centre for New Writing for six years, where she bought together writers and researchers to commission over 100 creative works.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Preface
Part I. Empire, Literature, and Rural England
1 Nation at the Crossroads
2 Green Unpleasant Land
3 Pastoral
4 Country Houses
5 Moorlands
6 Plants, Gardens, and Empire
Part II. Creative Responses: The Colonial Countryside
Fields Strawberries
Gardens Azaleas
Graveyards Myrtilla
Hills Cotswolds
Maypoles Green and Pleasant Land
Moorlands Heathcliff
Parks Kings Heath Park
Pastoral A New Chronology
Pubs Public Houses of Britain
Seeds William Blathwayt of Dyrham Park
Woodlands An Escaped Slave from Yorkshire, 1789
Epilogue
Further Reading
Index
Addressing Colonialism and Historic Slavery at the National Trust
Illustration by Michael Kennedy for Sam Knight’s article in The New Yorker (23 August 2021), p. 31
The National Trust released its Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties Now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery in September 2020. Sam Knight’s recent article, “Britain’s Idyllic Country Houses Reveal a Darker History” from The New Yorker (23 August 2021), pp. 30–41, explores the wider context of the report along with its British reception.*
The article is, to my thinking, immensely instructive, usefully framing the scale of the problem (historically) and the magnitude of work now to be done (both professionally and societally). As Knight writes, “The National Trust, more than any other institution, helped to create the idealized version of the English country house. Almost every historian I spoke to supported the charity’s decision to reinterpret its properties, but many also observed that it did not have a choice. . . . Given Britain’s changing demographics and the weight of recent decades of colonial history, the elisions of the past were no longer tenable. The National Trust has been forced to explode a myth of its own making. But many English people preferred the myth as it was” (34).
As for the report itself, much of the attention has been directed to its listing of National Trust properties. In fact, taken as a whole, it provides an excellent guide to crucial historic institutions—with essays ranging from compensation for slave-ownership to the East India Company—along with relevant bibliographies (I can imagine lots of useful teaching applications). –CH
* In the same issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes of ‘What the French Make of Lafayette,” pp. 66–70, observations occasioned by two recent biographies Mike Duncan’s Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution (Public Affairs, 2021) and Laurent Zecchini’s Lafayette: héraut de la liberté (Fayard, 2019).
Penrhyn Castle in Wales, Clandon Park Gardens in Surrey, Speke Hall in Liverpool, and Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire (National Trust); all four properties are included in the report’s “Gazetteer.”
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From the NT:
The National Trust cares for places and collections on behalf of the nation, and many have direct and indirect links to colonialism and historic slavery. We’ve released a report examining these connections as part of our broader commitment to ensure that these links are properly represented, shared and interpreted.
The buildings in our care reflect many different periods and a range of British and global histories—social, industrial, political and cultural. As a heritage charity, it’s our responsibility to make sure we are historically accurate and academically robust when we communicate about the places and collections in our care.
The Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties Now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery details the connections 93 historic places in our care have with colonialism and historic slavery. This includes the global slave trades, goods and products of enslaved labour, abolition and protest, and the East India Company.
It draws on recent evidence including the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project and the Trust’s own sources. It also documents the way that significant Trust buildings are linked to the abolition of slavery and campaigns against colonial oppression.
It has been edited by Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable (National Trust Head Curator), Professor Corinne Fowler (University of Leicester), Dr Christo Kefalas (National Trust World Cultures Curator), and Emma Slocombe (National Trust Textiles Curator), with contributions from other National Trust curators and researchers around the country. Some of the research has already been used to update our digital content and supports visitor information and interpretation at relevant places.
Sally-Anne Huxtable, Corinne Fowler, Christo Kefalas, and Emma Slocombe, eds., Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties Now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery (Swindon: National Trust, 2020).
C O N T E N T S
Authorship and Acknowledgements
Foreword, Gus Casely-Hayford
Introduction — Sally-Anne Huxtable, Tarnya Cooper, and John Orna-Ornstein
1. Wealth, Power, and the Global Country House — Sally-Anne Huxtable
2 Trade in Enslaved People — Jane Gallagher
3 Abolition, Resistance and Protest — Christo Kefalas
4 Compensation for Slave-ownership — Elizabeth Green, Christo Kefalas, and Emma Slocombe
5 Merchant Companies — Rupert Goulding
6 The East India Company — Lucy Porten
7 Banking and Bankers — Frances Bailey
8 The British Raj in India after 1857 — Rachel Conroy
9 Industrialisation and the Import of Cotton — Emma Slocombe
10 Research — Sophie Chessum
Gazetteer of National Trust Properties
Appendix: Next Steps
Bibliography
Further Reading
Enfilade 
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