Corrine Fowler: My writing on colonialism made me a hate figure – so I replied to my trolls

[NonLinguisticRhetoricIsMyKryptonite]

Corrine Fowler is a brave woman, the author of the National Trust report that scarcely anyone read but generated a lot of heat and light. Considering other newsworthy stories at the moment and women unders similar pressure, this is inspirational.

Could this happen with Cass and on other issues?

During the first few months of controversy and coverage, I was rarely given a right of reply. Instead, I watched with mounting dismay as I was presented as an enemy of the British people. Embroiled in a culture war, I encountered opinions I’d never heard before. But the experience unexpectedly transformed the way I relate to people who aren’t like me.

When people heard politicians denouncing the Trust report, or saw me characterised as politically “biased”, finger-wagging, or generally doing down Britain (often a combination of all three), it’s hardly surprising that they felt wronged. The actual content of the Trust report and the evidence it presented was rarely discussed.
…
For over a year, there was little respite from the frequent articles and the angry messages that came in their wake. These were variations on a theme: “one really needs a no-platforming rule for pushy academics”; “I’m not sure you should be allowed anywhere near a university building” and, “presumably you obtained the professor bit out of a Christmas cracker”. There are many more like that.
There was also far worse: I received threats which were obscene and violent…
…
One day, when a stranger wrote, “your willingness to make yourself a laughing stock is appreciated and hilarious”, I hit the reply button. “Dear __,” I began, and pointed out all the inaccuracies in the article that he’d read. Perhaps surprised at my conciliatory response, he replied, “Oh. In that case, I must have added to your woes.”
To another emailer, who wrote that I had “slandered a race on the grounds of the alleged misdeeds of their ancestors” and was therefore “guilty of racism by deliberately stirring racial hatred,” I detailed my own ancestors’ involvement with slavery in Haiti and set out my case that, since formerly colonised people and their descendants had been greatly impacted by colonial history, I thought it better to bring this information into the public domain than to conceal it for fear of giving offence. To my surprise, I got a short reply: “You’re obviously not a bad person, you have my respect for answering.”
…
Reflecting back on the whole experience, focusing on critical, often hostile, voices was like turning the radio dial after years of having had it tuned to my favourite station. It revealed a world of parallel perspectives. My work has always been borne out of a desire to understand our shared history. But the fierce response to that work, while unsettling, prompted me to go much further in listening to people from across political and generational divides. We’re limited by what we know: the more diverse our thinking the more insightful the conversations we can potentially have.
Being under so much fire turned out to be a blessing in disguise. When I became a hate figure, I suffered at first. But I came to realise that, since they’d never met me, people didn’t actually hate me as a person. And when I reached out to the writers of those letters, their response was amazing. It’s been stimulating to interact with people who think radically differently from me: everyone deserves to be taken seriously. Now I’m a happier and more confident person. After everything that happened during that long year, there’s not much left to be afraid of.

https://archive.is/jJQ9M

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/22/corrine-fowler-national-trust-report-on-colonialism-trolls/

I think the problem with this sort of attempt is the assumption that there is some deep nefarious intent on the part of such people.
But gods, if we banged on about it every time we wanted to have a conversation about architecture or melons or something, how dreary would it be..

I entirely agree with you. But since apparently every fortune in the past depended on exploitation, does Corinne Fowler and others who wrote about this consider this applies to today's fortunes - and if not, why not?
Maybe she’s not prepared to argue the point with Elon Musk etc in print, whereas long dead toffs aren’t going to fight back.

Your point about electronic devices and exploitation is a very good one.

This has been an interesting discussion, thank you.
From my POV, as soon as someone refers to people who disagree with them as 'trolls' I stop listening.
The National Trust (like the CofE) should really be a lot more careful in how they approach these issues, as they are both propped up by people whose views they give a strong impression of despising.
A slight detour, but referring to the comment that we all act withing the framework of our times, Orwell, in his wonderful essay on Dickens said that, in Dickens time, society would not have functioned without servants. So Dickens creates servant/employer relationships in his books that are impossibly feudal, but accepted on both sides (like Sam Weller and Pickwick for one)

'copper bottoming' ships was done to all ships i.e. the RN ships which made up the West Africa squadron (and all RN ships, of course); it was about keeping the keel as free as possible of barnacles etc to reduce the need to scrape them in dry-dock. The accretions of barnacles etc reduced speed - nothing especially to do with tropical waters. Not everything is to do with slavery. Historians who have little understanding of context irritate the hell out of me. And there is a wealth of literature on the lives of the poor in Victorian Britain e.g. Mayhew on London, Flora Thompsom's autobiographical books etc. You need to be pretty blinkered not to come across it somewhere - even on TV.

Most sensible comment here, I think.

The National Trust are evidently keen to point out the historical atrocities carried out by of the owners of these houses now in their, the NT’s, charge, but do they ever point out any good these families may have done such as philanthropy or improving the lot of their workforces?
Or is it a case of wickedness is news and virtue isn’t?

Sometimes it seems a bit like a game of 6 degrees of separation. For any given object or endeavour from the early modern period, how many degrees of separation before you can find some link to slavery?

IMO the NT will take a single theme/individual from a property and interpret it throught that lens.
I can see why they do it, as it makes the property more accessible, but it also flattens it out, as many properties have more than one facet, which gets ignored.

do they ever point out any good these families may have done such as philanthropy or improving the lot of their workforces?

There are lots of testimonies from survivors who have to leave the room or exert supreme self-control whenever the person who abused them is lauded for some good deed or other. Street angel, house devil describes this on a small scale.

There are philanthropists who may well have been adjacent to what are now understood as major human rights abuses.

I can think of Quaker philanthropists who improved the lot of their workforces.

I certainly don't know enough to act as a moral arbiter about the ends justified the means.

NT information displays have always had a lot in them about good deeds, but that's probably because the good deeds were local whilst the atrocities were off-stage (eg in the West Indies). Also the good deeds resulted in stuff you could go and look at (workers' housing/art galleries/lending libraries/whatever) so entertainment in themselves. It wasn't a conspiracy to persuade us the aristocracy are all good eggs.

Yes, that’s interesting.
I wonder in 100 years how and for what people will be judged.

It does seem to me that Corinne Fowler and the NT have cast their net so wide that anything can be colonial and anything can be connected to, or about the Atlantic Slave Trade and slavery in the West Indies, Americas etc (no mention of slavery in connection with e.g. Anglo-Saxon or Viking sites - where slaves certainly existed). The Atlantic Slave trade and its products (sugar and rum, mainly) were a small percentage of the trade carried out by Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example in 1792, 204 vessesl out of over 14,000 ships registered in Britain were slavers. In relation to Lundy Island, a mention of the Barbary Pirates' occupation of it in the seventeenth century when they were slaving all round Europe, is merited. As to people's opinions on eg. dominion status for India (which was intended to happen by 1918 but WWI got in the way), that Churchill disagreed with the measure has nothing whatsoever to do with his house, any more than his oppionion on Richard III (with which I happen to disagree) has.

I noted that there was an influx of new students joining Fowlers Futurelearn course this week, so I'll try and set aside some time to study with them.When I joined a few weeks ago, there wasn't anyone currently studying. Maybe Prof Fowler will drop in? She did on the first round.

My view is that we can't change the past , we move forward from where we are and we create narratives that allow us to do that.

Octavia Hill's vision for the National Trust was born of philanthropy (She helped the National Trust to buy and protect its first land and houses and campaigned for the preservation of footpaths to ensure everyone had right of access to the land.)

She was an interesting lady https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/people/octavia-hill-her-life-and-legacy. As with everything the nature of the trust has changed with the people who manage it, I love to be informed, I don't enjoy being preached at and guilt tripped.

No, and NT displays are usually interesting. I have recently visited Agatha Christie's house, Greenway, in Devon, and it is very well done. I don't like being preached at either and I get the feeling from Fowler's study that I am being 'educated' and I do not appreciate that. I am also irritated by a narrative that is so one-sided and which casts its net so wide that anything is about slavery and colonialism, which, in the end, makes the points being put forward meaningless. Also, a lot of ignorance of the past comes through e.g. about ship-building, the origins of the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the Scottish Enlightenment etc.

Hear! Hear! Exactly what she is doing. British history is evil and all about slavery and colonialism and even if you as a copper miner or a servant, or a labourer did not personally gain from it you are still complicit in slavery and everything you did is all about slavery and colonialism. Yuck, I'm afraid. The history of the English (and Scottish) working classes deserve better research than hers, which is entirely biased.

But no modern person has any connection with the Atlantic slave trade (one of many such trades across the world) so no-one can be 'triggered' by showing some other facet of a person who may (like Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park who is held up as an example of virtue but is also a slave owner because he has Jamaican property) be vaguely connected with slavery. They sold rum, they traded in sugar or tobacco. One of my problems with electric cars is that they use batteries manufactured in China, which has no interest in human rights whatsoever, and the lithium and cobalt is mined by children and adults whose working conditions are little short of slavery. I don't get hysterical about electric cars but I am prepared to say why they are not a guiltless solution to changes in climate, however that is caused. The same goes for my appreciation of Hume, Colston etc, one a philosopher who improved the human condition but who somehow or other had income which traces back to slaves, the other on the board of the Africa Company, which does not mean he traded in slaves, his main dealings were in textiles and fruit as far as I can see, who also cared for the people of Bristol and put his money where his mouth was.

Any citizen/subject of a modern country that used to have an Empire and engaged in slavery is obviously not responsible for their country's past, but the whole point of Empires/colonies/slavery etc was to increase the wealth of the central power.
That wealth didn't just disappear when the sun set on the Empire; it originally sloshed around in an unequal way, building trophy houses, but also investments in industry, commerce, hospitals, schools, which formed the basis for the modern economy. So an imperialist past is never really past - the traces, good and bad, are still around, at home and abroad.
I haven't come across a serious historical analysis which actually blames the mistreated workers unloading sugar or working in the cotton mills for the fact that the raw material was produced by slaves. Or copper miners for their output being used to copper-fasten ships hulls, including those used in the slave trade.

Different historians specialise in different aspects of history, some will focus on the history of the British working class, others on the slave trade, others on British rule in Ireland or in India etc. I don't think specialisation means that you are denying other aspects of history.

Empire, colonialism and slavery cast long long shadows which are still around us, whether we are in one of the ex-colonies or the imperial centre. It doesn't help if people discuss those shadows in an accusatory way; but it also doesn't help to claim they aren't there.

No-one is claiming there were no empires and no consequences. I think one point being made is that sometimes the definition of colonial is so wide that it covers everything including the kitchen sink, which makes assertions meaningless. Another is that not everything is about the Atlantic slave trade, which was a small percentage of the GDP of the then UK, for example. Another point (not made but salient) is that only Europeans seem to have been appalled by slavery in all its forms, leading e.g. the British Empire to stamp on slavery wherever it found it, as in Dahomey (war with the kings of Dahomey, which is now Benin, to stop the slaving which was that nation's main economic activity) and in Zanzibar (gave up Heligoland in exchange for Zanzibar to shut the slave markets). A further point is that blame is apportioned to e.g. Britain (but also Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and Belgium) re the Atlantic slave trade, but not to nations such as Dahomey or Burunda (now part of Uganda), and Niger, who based their whole economy on selling slaves (as did many other African nations). This looks like special pleading against European empires with a large get out for African empires. Not every building or every work of art in Europe was paid for by slaving (hard for that to happen given how small a per cent of GDP slaving was). Only Europeans show any shame about slaving, they are also the only people blamed. You can see why a lot of people would be narked.

Didn’t the NT Director General describe the Trust’s country houses as an ‘outdated mansion experience’?
She evidently dislikes the houses and what they stood for but they have to be maintained and kept open so I suppose her way of expressing her dislike is to show the former owners in a bad light.

Exactly this. The impression given is that Europeans stormed into Africa and abducted millions of random people living peaceful lives, when in fact they were trading existing slaves who were already enslaved by fellow Africans!

Europeans were among the first to stop slavery. Britain's national debt for freeing every single slave in its empire was so great, that we only stopped repayments in 2014. So I will not hear anything of British people being "privileged" from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. We've suffered for it.

On the other hand, some Arab countries didn't outlaw it until the 1960's (and slavery of non-Muslims is explicitly permitted in Islam), and pygmy tribes in Africa had to go to the UN in 2016 for help because their average-sized neighbours were enslaving them (who described it as a "time-honoured tradition").

Arab colonialism in Africa violently wiped out indigenous ways of life in almost the whole of north half of the continent. Arabs enslaved four times more African people than Europeans did.

Meanwhile British colonialism is trashed as racist for saying they wanted to stamp out Barbarianism from Africa, leaving modern people with the impression they wanted to do away with harmless local customs. In fact, they were referring explicitly to the endemic trade in slaves.

The word "Barbarianism" refers to the Barbary pirates: Arab pirates and slave raiders who terrorized Europe for centuries, travelling as far north as Iceland to abduct Europeans and sell them into slavery across the Arab world. They massacred entire cities and sold about one million Europeans into slavery. We never hear about this, nor the Ottoman slave trade that went on organised raids into eastern Europe to abduct millions of white Christians, including selling young girls and women into sex slavery.

this is a a great thread and I have learned a great deal. There are so many informed posts and I would expect members of the NT to have some interest in history.

I wonder to what extent a new perspective of colonionism is creeping into school education? There seems to be quite a large chunk of my daughter's year 8 syllabus devoted to slavery and certainly I think is given a disproportionate prominence in terms of British history at the time. British history over that period is vast and nuanced I think she is being given a disservice with quite a wide detour into transatlantic slavery.

There was quite a large essay she had to do which had the aim of her minimising white abolitionist roles in ending slavery and instead focusing on slave revolts identifying the heroes of them. No doubt this is an important subject but so much emphasis was placed on slave revolts that I think an opportunity was missed to educate her in one of the myriad other issues at the time. I also got the impression that she was meant to view famous abolitionists as 'white saviours' and their historical acclaim has been exagerrated.

I can see how the NT is possibly part of a greater trend to maybe a distorted view of our rich historical heritage.

I think anyone entering an NT property (of the majority) know some sort of social exploitation was required to gain the wealth to build the houses. People aren't stupid.

There are other museums that explore the conditions of the working class and they are fascinating as well. Is it a little patronising to expect people to have to be educated when they enter these properties to appreciate their beauty as much as their heritage?

I have always found the NT magazine rather ‘scattered’ in what it communicates, as if it isn’t quite sure what it is or whom it’s talking to:

’Secret letters give new insights into passionate LBTQ+ lives at Toffington Hall’.

‘We examine the restoration of a fascinating treasure trove of Queen Anne chamber pots’

’Member enjoys scone tour of every NT site in England’

’Make this gluten free bird feeder for your garden!’

The NT always seems desperate to show how diverse its membership is in its materials - yet whenever I go to a property it seems to be almost entirely 60+ white couples, pairs of 60+ white women and young families, happily mooching around looking at the place and eating scones.

In terms of exploitation, while the NT are absolutely right to raise the issue of slavery, they might be better off first asking the most basic question - where did the land come from? I suspect a lot of it had to do with the Enclosure Acts and that’s why a lot of people’s ancestors lived rather miserable and precarious lives.

Excellent summary of NT magazine, badskiingmum.
I’ve never read it but your description sounds authentic.