Its team of nine historians works with 100 primary school children, who are encouraged to produce essays and fiction to be shared with live, print and digital audiences. Academics working in the humanities have begun to be personally targeted, perhaps in the way that climate scientists have been for some time now.”Ĭolonial Countryside, a project funded by the Arts Council and the National Lottery, is investigating the African, Caribbean and Indian connections of 11 country houses the National Trust manages. Photograph: added: “I think we should all be worried when academics are targeted in this way, when the evidence can’t be disputed. Some Tory MPs are unhappy that Churchill’s name has been drawn into the row. The row was reignited last week when Fowler and several other academics working on another trust project, Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted, were accused of holding “biased” views about colonialism.įowler, a historian at the University of Leicester, and author of a new book, Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections, said attempts were being made “to misrepresent, mischaracterise, malign and intimidate academics in clear efforts to damage the professional reputations of people for evidence-based scholarship”.Ĭhartwell House, the family home of Sir Winston Churchill. The historian Andrew Roberts accused the trust of “wokery” and of “trying to imply a moral equivalence between colonialism and slavery”. Many of the MPs and several rightwing historians and newspaper columnists took exception to the report’s references to Winston Churchill’s role in colonial administration and his opposition to Indian independence. The Common Sense Group of more than 50 Tory MPs was angered by a 115-page interim report entitled Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links With Historic Slavery, commissioned by the trust and published in September.Ĭo-edited by Fowler, it highlighted that 93 trust properties, including Clandon Park in Surrey and Hare Hill in Cheshire, were linked to wealth from plantations and the slave trade, while others, such as Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s home in Sussex, were important to understanding Britain’s colonial history. It is also true that the levels of intolerance and hostilities towards outsiders and those we consider as the ‘other’ have risen in the past few years.”

In this fraught environment, it is easy to incite hatred or disdain by misrepresenting the work and motivations of academics and curators.

“We are living in times of upheaval, when life feels fragile and uncertain.

Corinne fowler green unpleasant land