Finding the connections between colonial slavery and the oppression of workers in Britain
Corinne Fowler introduces her new book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain, published today.
In 2021, having experienced sustained hostility from politicians and tabloid readers for having co-authored the National Trust report on country houses’ historical connections to empire and transatlantic slavery, I was struck by a recurring question: why don’t you talk about the oppression of British labourers in the fields and factories?I was aware that this question might sometimes be asked as a way to shut things down, but it also made me realise that I learned as little in school about labour history as I did about the British Empire.
When I mentioned this to my friend and colleague, the historian Raj Pal, he reached for a book on his shelf and pressed it into my hand. It was The Making of the English Working Class written by E.P. Thompson in 1963. Re-reading this old history classic, I couldn’t help noticing that colonial figures and imperial wars kept cropping up. Raj had really put me onto something: armed with Thompson’s book, I began to research the details. Soon, I discovered the strong connections between imperial wealth and British landownership and saw that many of the colonial governors, East India Company officials and slave-owners mentioned in Thompson’s book were the same figures who were evicting locals from the commons, enclosing land and, in some cases, opening copper mines which once employed a third of Cornwall’s workforce.
There has, I discovered, long been a tension between concern for the plight of colonized people and concern for underpaid and overworked labourers on British soil. This can be seen in the work of William Cobbett, who wrote Rural Rides in 1822, a pioneering work of investigative journalism in which the author journeyed through the Midlands and south-east. In this work, he compared the conditions of England’s factory workers with the plight of enslaved people on cotton plantations. He actually contended that the former suffered more. Such a comparison was of course inaccurate: tied labour, oppressive working conditions and rural poverty came nowhere near the cruelty of chattel slavery. But he was right to see the parallels.
In the course of writing Our Island Stories, my book of country walks through colonial Britain, I found many other such parallels. In Chapter nine of my book, I wander through rural Dorset to explore the colonial dimensions of an iconic part of our unionization history whereby six agricultural labourers, known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, were transported to Australia and Tasmania as punishment for organizing an agricultural workers’ union in 1834. George Loveless was the leading figure. He was one of some 4,000 British political prisoners and social protesters who, between 1787 and 1868, were transported to penal colonies as punishment for fighting for their rights. Sent to the farm of the Governor of Tasmania, Loveless learned of the Governor’s systematic displacement of Aboriginal people, who were being driven off their traditional lands to inhospitable and isolated peninsulas. Placed in internment camps, many of them died of disease, “like rotten sheep”, as Loveless wrote.
While there, Loveless also warned his fellow workers that they were unlikely to escape poverty by settling in the colonies. The only people who could make money there, he wrote, were those who already had it. Above all, Loveless saw the parallels between the oppression of the English labouring classes and the implications of unfettered aristocratic power, seen in the raw during his time in the penal colonies. As other historians have noted, he also compared the fates of enslaved people with the treatment of British labourers, as did many of his contemporaries. This included those who opposed the anti-slavery movement, accusing its supporters of indifference towards ‘their own’. As a nation, this long history of such comparisons has a very particular legacy: that of placing the history of colonized people in competition with Britain’s repressed labour history.
Listening to a recent episode of Kavita Puri’s Three Million, about the role of the British in worsening the Bengal Famine during World War II, I was unsurprised – if saddened – to hear that the starving people of Bengal were put to work in exchange for food. The concept of making people – weak from hunger – work to eat came from workhouses in Britain: ‘the deserving poor’, as Puri explains in her podcast.
This resonates with the histories I explored in the British countryside. In one of the ten walks for my book, I climbed the moors above the cotton town of Darwen in East Lancashire. When the Confederate ports of the United States were blocked in 1860, slave-produced cotton no longer arrived in Lancashire’s factories. The weaving machines of Darwen and other mill towns, ground to a halt. People were laid off during a period known as the Lancashire cotton famine. Again and again, I read accounts of hungry millworkers – their lungs already damaged by hot and fluff-filled factory conditions – being forced to break stones, make footpaths and even build a road to nowhere across Rooley Moor. Local relief committees ensured that they ‘earned’ their poverty relief. This all makes historical sense, given that so many colonial figures were also landowners back home in Britain, people who were centrally involved in local, as well as national and political governance.
Successive British governments of all parties have overlooked the importance of a good education in colonial history, but there is equal neglect of British labour history. In rectifying this, there is no need to debate which history is more important. The two are entwined. Having researched my book, I now realise that our habit of separating these histories actually hampers our understanding of both.
We are living in an age of quarrelsome generations, misinformation and keyboard warriors. We’re also afflicted by longstanding tensions between rural and urban cultures, leaving different sections of society with conflicted feelings about our countryside and rural affairs. Given these adverse conditions, it might be timely to address both these histories at once. These are shared histories which cut across generational and cultural divides. Learning about their interconnection potentially connects those whose family histories sit on either side of the colonial divide as well as revealing the relevance of rural history to those who are descended from colonised people.
Corinne Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester. Her book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain is published by Penguin Allen Lane.
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