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/

@Barbadossunset not sure - I don't think about it on a personal level - I work with people across all 'classes' and many nationalities - I don't ask them about their class or family money! It shouldn't matter.

It is more the exclusive social structures and spheres in which the upper classes operate that are a major problem for me. And the collective blaming of a whole people for the actions of a powerful few.

I'm sure that persisted well into the 19th century, because I've read about miners being obliged to use the mine-owner's "tommy shop".

I wonder what I can find about when that was abolished.

So I've learned the more official term was "truck shop" and the laws to ban that form of exploitation were called the Truck Acts. Wikipedia has a page on the legal reforms required. A cursory reading suggests much of the 19th century was a convoluted fight between Parliament trying to suppress the practice and employers who had spotted loopholes in the most recent piece of legislation.

wikipedia

The Truck Acts were passed in the mid-nineteenth century in the UK, and outlawed payment in tokens, which could only be spent in the company shop, which would also give credit against the next payment in tokens. Acts also freed Scottish miners who had been held in bondage since the 1790s. The Crofting Acts removed the abuses of crofters in the north of Scotland, who were exploited by their landlords. The abuses included rape and making widows pay for the shipwrecks their husbands had died in. Most of this used to be taught in economic and social history, which traced the rise of rights for workers, the anti-slavery movement, the sources, causes and outcomes of the agrarian and industrial revolutions, the effects of the Napoleonic Wars - and included domestic political history of the last three centuries, including the suffrage movement, the move to state universal education and the introduction of the welfare state. Now it is mostly WWI and WWII, which gives little perspective on how we got where we are. (My DD, having had WWII for her GCSE opted to stay at her own school rather than take up a sixth form college place simply because her school did not do the world wars for A level, but nineteenth century political history, which was far more interesting.)
Can I recommend The History of British Trade Unionism by H. Pelling? It is fairly out of date in that it must be 60 years old, but does give a clear explanation of how workers' rights were won and why trades unions are important.

Forgotten? I remember watching a programme on 'apprentices' from the workhouse about ten years ago. It's a history certainly in the public domain. How things do disappear.

It is more the exclusive social structures and spheres in which the upper classes operate that are a major problem for me.

Mytholmroyd.
That’s interesting. Are you talking about today’s upper classes? What about people who don’t have aristocratic forebears but have made a fortune and live in a similar way?
Tony Blair is an example of this - a big house in London with its own mews; a house in the country with staff; holidays with European nobility in their castles; dinner with the Rothschilds and so on
Ok, he didn’t take part in bloodsports and nor were his children privately educated, but there are other similarities.

Blair, himself, of course went to Fettes College in Edinburgh (current boarding fees £14,700 per term). And it is no coincidence his children went to the best performing comprehensive in the UK (supplemented by private tutoring which caused a bit of a fuss).

I could not agree more with that. Afaik cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by workers (adults and children) who are to all intents and purposes tied to the job - no protection from harm from the mining, either.

I think the thing also missed is that serfs had rights, and were the bottom of a social pyramid which was headed by the only truly free person in the state: the king or other sovereign. Everyone else was bound by duties to the leige lord above them and obligations to those below them, e.g. serfs had to pay similar fines on entry into a holding as people we would think of as 'free' for example a knight. Serfs could be sold with the land but they could not themselves personally be sold - they were tied to the land not the landowner. The landowner had obligations to his serfs of giving justice, and also protection in disturbed times. The serfs owed boon work to the lord, which was rent for the land they farmed and which was as inheritable as any other land, and inherited in the same way e.g. a son would follow his father, a daughter would inherit if there was no son, a widow could take over the holding and employ others to farm it for her and do the boon work. A complex system of obligation, which included military service, though the feudal host pretty soon gave place to trained soldiers below the rank of knight, armed men who were not serfs. It was also possible to rise out of serfdom to nobility, over several generations. Serfdom did die out in the fourteenth century, because of the Black Death, which raised wages because of a scarcity of labour. By that time also a middling sort of farmer, the yeoman, had arisen, and it was these men (and artisans from the towns) who rose during the Peasants' Revolt, led by the men of Kent who very much seem to be a bellwether for the rest of the country.

Black Death, which raised wages because of a scarcity of labour

Edward III introduced The Statute of Labourers in 1351 to attempt to hold wages at 1346 levels, it also stated that all able bodied persons under 68 year old must work or be imprisoned.

Interesting that the retirement age then is also when the state will allow me to retire.

What was the life expectancy for a serf in 1351? They'd be pretty worn down if they made it to 68 I think.

Well that is the newspaper headline not the title of the paper - I think it is more that they had been forgotten/uncommemorated in the village rather than that the practice of creating and sending them had been forgotten?

True - I have nothing at all against people making money and doing well as long as they treat their workers decently - I am not at all envious of that. But people need opportunity and hope. Not sure there is a lot of that around for the majority at the moment. The Sutton Trust certainly paint a dismal picture - it is not getting better.

And kills the myth that everyone in the middle ages died at 30! The Statute of Labourers was protested against and pretty unenforceable, because of the labour shortage.

Life expectancy was about 70 years - the Biblical 3 score years and ten - and most people worked till they dropped until pensions were introduced by the Liberal government of 1908, under Lloyd George. The infant mortality rate (about 50% before the age of five) always skews life expectancy, once you survived infancy you had a pretty good chance of reaching 70, though many women died in childbirth.

While we're on the subject, I've done a longitudinal study on a rural Gloucestershire parish, starting in the early 19th century. What surprised my was what a large proportion a)didn't marry or b) marry, but had no children

The myth that people didn't live very long is based on life expectancy at birth (and people misunderstanding it) which wasn't good due to high infant and child mortality. There is plenty of skeletal evidence that people lived long past 30 since at least the Mesolithic.

That is interesting - we just assume everyone was breeding before contraception!

In my family childbirth shortened the lives of many of the women, my thoughts are also that manual labour would take it's toll and work related accidents. (We may rail against H&S but we do much better than many countries that we rely on for manufacture - cutting the monetary cost to us but sacrificing people's well being unthinkingly.

Do you know how life expectancy and demographics might correlate historically.
(Interesting thread, I only did economic history to O-level as science was easier. Humanities seemed more subjective in their interpretations but my boys have found some fascinating info. online and revived an interest.)

I enjoy the 'who do you think you are' programmes, they give an insight into what it took for our ancestors to survive to bring us to here.

The rich had doctors - which was often a disadvantage.

I was looking at 300 individuals. One of the interesting things was that the death rate of boys up to puberty was significantly higher than for girls.

Any info. on causes of death?

Beginning to think the response on this thread was not quite what Corinne Fowler was expecting.

I had a student a while back who was looking at evidence for children's accidental deaths in the early medieval period and (from memory) yes, lots more boys and drownings - sometimes just toddlers falling into buckets.

I think that what we often see is that when there is a lot of technological change, or new economic markets open up, you get situations where some people benefit and there is also all kinds of exploitation, as well as social change that causes huge amounts of stress.

It then takes a generation to begin to try and regulate the new way of life with social norms, laws, and the rest.

Often, even when conditions in the past seem alien and bad to us, there was a kind of social good that was served by various customs, and sometimes things we don't see to appreciate had a purpose. The fact that people were tied to the land, for example, seems alien and awful to most people today, but it's also the case that they had a right to live and work on said land, and the lord wasn't allowed to just cut people loose. (Which isn't the case now, it's entirely possible to make people landless, with no resources to create wealth.)

There were, during many periods, obligations also on the aristocracy, not least fighting off raiders and those who would take your land and your wife and your wealth. It created a kind of stability, and it's inaccurate to imagine even they were living a life of what we would consider luxury. Most worked a lot harder than people do today at a desk type job.

All of which is to say, I don't think we can look at history and label people, or even customs and laws, just "bad" or "good." Often conditions were so much differernt it can be difficult to appreciate what certain things actually meant to people concretely.