{"id":12892,"date":"2025-05-27T12:45:21","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T11:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12892"},"modified":"2025-05-27T12:45:21","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T11:45:21","slug":"corinne-fowler-our-island-stories-reviewed-by-paul-anthony-knowles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12892","title":{"rendered":"Corinne Fowler, Our Island Stories, reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Fowler unearths the hidden legacies of slavery, capitalism and exploitation that make up contemporary British relationships with the countryside<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/our-island-stories.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"424\" height=\"650\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Corinne Fowler<\/em> | <em>Our Island Stories: Ten Walks through Rural Britain and its Hidden History of Empire <\/em><\/strong><strong>| Penguin Random House: \u00a310.99<br \/><\/strong><strong>Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Our Island Stories<\/em>, Corrine Fowler\u2019s follow-up to <em>Green Unpleasant Land<\/em> (2020), goes further in uncovering the personal connections that ten people \u2014 from the worlds of politics, art, academia, photography and literature \u2014 have to rural Britain\u2019s colonial past. Fowler sets out on ten walks across Britain\u2019s countryside uncovering how the nation\u2019s collective love for picturesque, pastoral landscapes hides the exploitation and human suffering behind the formation of our treasured \u2018green and pleasant\u2019 land and its iconic country houses. Fowler\u2019s extensive research and observations in the ten walks uncover how the exploitation of enslaved people, the establishment of the Dutch West Indian Company and the East Indian Company, and the slave trade routes between the UK, the Americas and Africa are the forgotten legacies behind Britain\u2019s rural wealth. This was what provided the vast quantities of raw materials needed to power the Industrial Revolution, as Fowler discuss on her visit to cotton mills of Darwen that were dependent on American and Indian cotton.<\/p>\n<p>Each of Fowler\u2019s ten walks focuses on a specific way in which people and landscapes were exploited through colonialism. Fowler\u2019s walks include, but are not limited to, \u2018The Cotton Walk: East Lancashire\u2019; \u2018The Sugar Walk: Jura and Islay\u2019; \u2018The Enclosure Walk: Norfolk and Jamaica\u2019; \u2018The Copper Walk; Cornwall, West Africa and the Americas\u2019. For each\u00a0\u00a0 walk, Fowler is joined by a companion who has a personal family connection to the landscape, from Graham Campbell, the SNP\u2019s first Caribbean heritage councillor, to the writer Louisa Adjoa Parker, who is the child of a Ghanian father and English Mother.<\/p>\n<p>Fowler\u2019s depth of knowledge and research throughout <em>Our Island Stories<\/em> is highly impressive. From her charting the lives of the two brothers John and Charles Cockerell during her \u2018Indian Walk\u2019 in the Cotswolds and how both brothers played integral but different roles in The East Indian company\u2019s exploitation and dismantling of India. Both brothers generated vast personal wealth through their exploits allowing them to build country estates back in the Cotswolds and influence local politics, to explaining on her \u2018Enclosure Walk\u2019, that the enclosure policies formed in the management of the Caribbean plantations were brought back by plantation owners. After they had accrued enormous personal wealth from the exploitation of enslaved people, they applied similar techniques to the estates they built in Norfolk, lobbying parliament to enclose the countryside against Norfolk\u2019s rural communities, turning the commons into private hunting estates. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The poignancy of Fowler\u2019s second book is created through the personal connections and reflections her fellow walkers have to the landscape. It is these personal connections and family histories tied into the land that bring to life the vastness of the colonial system that is rooted in every facet of modern-day-life, which the majority of us are ignorant of or find hard to confront. Three powerful examples of the ways in which colonialism reverberates in the personal everyday lives of Fowler\u2019s companions can firstly be found in Graham Campbell\u2019s personal connection to Finlaggan (an ancestral family seat of the Campbells on Jura before the clearance of crofters). This strand of his family history is intertwined with his inability to find out historical records of his Caribbean family history due to the renaming of enslaved people as Campbell. Secondly, in artist Bharti Parmar\u2019s connection to the cotton mills of Lancashire which her father worked in when he first emigrated from India. Parmar\u2019s pride towards her father is evident through the fabric artwork she is producing, but she also feels pride when she learns about Gandhi\u2019s visit to Darwen to explain the importance of the Swadeshi movement and the sorrow he feels at it causing harm to the lives of the mill workers. Finally, in Raj Pal recounting to Fowler that there was no mention of the Indian Soldiers in the Belgium war museums he visited with his son, which meant that they both felt that the sacrifices his family made to fight for the British Empire in both World Wars had been erased through a lack of remembrance.<\/p>\n<p><em>Our Island Stories<\/em> is an impressive feat of academic research as it uncovers the vastness of the colonial systems of exploitation and power that created the wealth behind the British Empire. What turns Fowler\u2019s <em>Our Island Stories<\/em> from impressive academic research into a compassionate, moving, and unflinching reflection on the lasting legacy of colonialism are the personal reflections of her fellow walkers, and how they fight to carve out a space of belonging in what is still a traditional White-British space. Fowler\u2019s book is essential reading in our current politics of division, fear, and vile inflammatory rhetoric excluding people who do not fit into increasingly narrow definitions of Britishness. Fowler\u2019s book offers us an antidote to the poison of political division by exemplifying how open, honest and respectful conversations between people from different communities, heritages, and backgrounds can lead to greater understanding of our collective past. It is through such methods we can foster new friendships for the future built on mutual respect.<\/p>\n<p><em>Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fowler unearths the hidden legacies of slavery, capitalism and exploitation that make up contemporary British relationships with the countryside Corinne Fowler | Our Island Stories: Ten Walks through Rural Britain and its Hidden History of Empire | Penguin Random House: \u00a310.99Reviewed by Paul Anthony Knowles Our Island Stories, Corrine Fowler\u2019s follow-up to Green Unpleasant Land [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - 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