The Interim Report on colonialism and slavery
‘These places are, and were always intended to be, a veneer, an idyllic facade. And we have fallen for it.’
Corinne Fowler, co-author of the report
Background
The National Trust has recently been awarded Independent Research Organization status. It should have the necessary expertise available, therefore, to produce research of high quality. In that respect, this report has been a disappointment.
While there is much of interest, the findings are presented selectively, and the largely negative picture which is painted of the country houses in the care of the National Trust is not always a balanced one. It is unfairly implied that some aspects of history related to these houses have until now been ‘suppressed’ or ‘hidden.’
The account of research into Britain’s imperial past and its role in the Translatlantic slave trade draws on published work which presents a strongly negative view of Britain, and which does not properly represent the scholarly consensus.
The Charity Commission’s findings
The Charity Commission opened a regulatory compliance case after the publication of the interim report in September 2020. Concerns were raised about whether the National Trust had ‘acted outside its charitable purposes.’ There was a risk of damage to the charity’s reputation and to confidence in charities more widely.
‘The Charity Commission has found that the National Trust was able to justify the publication of this report as being in line with its charitable objectives, but did not give sufficient thought to the effect it would have on the charity’s members and supporters.’
The National Trust was able to argue that the report furthered its charitable objectives. However, despite an initial consultation which found a favourable response among members for the project, the risk to the charity’s reputation was not properly managed:
‘Publication of the report did generate strongly held and divided views, and in light of this, it is reasonable to conclude that the Trust’s planning and approach did not fully pre-empt or manage the potential risks to the charity. Specifically, the Commission says the charity could have done more to clearly explain the link between the report and the Trust’s purpose.’
The Director General’s response
In her statement in response, Hilary McGrady, the Director General of the National Trust said:
‘Having lived all of my life in Northern Ireland I know only too well the impact of allowing cultural identity to become a source of division. I want the Trust to be dedicated to finding ways of making the arts, culture and heritage a vehicle for bringing people together, for shared acknowledgement, respect and understanding.
The National Trust must continue to take a wide-ranging and evidence-based approach to history. We have been reminded that we must work hard to place particular themes such as historic slavery and colonialism in a broad context at the places in our care. These are places that should help curious people come face to face with history and feel they can arrive at their own views. For these reasons, we support a ‘retain and explain’ approach to history, and will work with government and other organisations in culture and heritage as they develop their own thinking.’
The authors
Corinne Fowler, professor of English in the University of Leicester is among the editors of the report. Prof. Fowler held the position of Global Connections Fellow at the National Trust from 2019 until 2020.
The other editors, and all the contributors, are curators at the National Trust. No professional historian wrote any part of the report, nor, despite the prominence of economic history, did any economic historian.
Specialists such as Prof. Kenneth Morgan, a recognized authority on the Atlantic slave trade, Prof. Tirthankar Roy, the leading researcher on the economic history of South Asia and India, and Prof. Nigel Biggar, who is well known for his work on the ethics of empire, are conspicuous by their absence from the project, and are not cited in the bibliography.
With academics writing on areas of expertise, the report could have been subjected to a process of peer-review, and this would have inspired confidence in its findings.
The writers have not consulted the full range of research, and this has led to a shallow and often one-sided treatment of the topics concerned.
The purpose of the report and ‘suppressed’ history
The report contains much of interest, not least the cumulative picture that emerges from the Gazetteer of how many members of the British landed class made long and hazardous journeys overseas, of plantations in the West Indies as a source of wealth, of relationships across cultures and of the diverse and evolving attitudes towards slavery.
However, it is not clear that the report is an effort to promote better understanding of country houses in their context rather than an attempt to portray country houses and the families associated with them in a negative light. In presenting research selectively there is a risk that the Trust can be seen to give country house visits a political and racial dimension. A study conducted in good faith would choose its subject for sound and well-defined reasons and research it in a scholarly manner, always keeping in mind the context of what is being discussed.
“In presenting research selectively there is a risk that the Trust can be seen to give country house visits a political and racial dimension.”
No explanation is given for the combined focus on slavery and colonialism in the title of the report. Slavery is narrowly defined as it was practised in the Caribbean and the United States. However, the Gazetteer documents, among other things, ‘The African, Asian and Chinese presence in National Trust places from Tudor times to the present, as well as key collections that indicate their presence’, a much broader project. There is, however, no mention of links which continue to the present time, for instance, through food and goods sold at National Trust properties which are produced overseas, often by enslaved or exploited workers.
Dr Gus Casely-Heyford, a former trustee, writes in the foreword of Octavia Hill’s wish that the National Trust should serve everyone:
‘This is not just about serving a broad constituency, it is about recognising that, in part, our role is to constantly push at boundaries, to never become complacent, but to have a conscious aim to be ever more inclusive; to see the ongoing diversification, the broadening of those we serve, as being a core, consistent and unending goal. As Hill intimated, she did not want to feel satisfied serving a loyal minority – her goal was to sincerely drive to engage, to touch us all. This means reflecting ‘changing demographies’ and paying attention to the ‘curatorial narratives’ accompanying the collections.’
In the Introduction to the report Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Dr Tarnya Cooper and John Orna-Ornstein write:
‘The National Trust has made a commitment to research, interpret and share the histories of slavery and the legacies of colonialism at the places we care for. Those histories are deeply interwoven into the material fabric of the British Isles; a significant number of the collections, houses, gardens and parklands in our care were created or remodelled as expressions of the taste and wealth, as well as power and privilege, that derived from colonial connections and in some cases from the trade in enslaved people. We believe that only by honestly and openly acknowledging and sharing those stories can we do justice to the true complexity of past, present and future, and the sometimes-uncomfortable role that Britain, and Britons, have played in global history since the sixteenth century or even earlier.’
They acknowledge that the report is ‘by no means comprehensive’, but believe that the research ‘will help us to create strong foundations of knowledge upon which to build.’
Then we learn more about the purpose of the project. The ‘histories’ presented in the report ‘challenge the familiar, received histories, which both exclude the vital role that people of colour have played in our national story and overlook the central role that the oppression and violence of the slave trade and the legacies of colonialism have played in the making of modern Britain.’
No evidence is presented to support the suggestion that such history has been suppressed or that a vital element of it has been excluded. The economic ramifications of the slave trade and the Empire were never in doubt, nor the importance of the abolition process and events in the wider Empire in the development of Britain’s moral outlook. However, the statement that the slave trade played a ‘central’ role in the making of modern Britain fails to take account of the role of the British peasantry and working class which have created wealth through agriculture, and then by mining coal and metals and manning the factories of the Industrial Revolution, or, indeed, of the essential role of innovation and technology. It is also well understood by visitors that large numbers of diligent servants working for low pay in hard conditions made the glamorous country houses function.
Next: an independent external advisory group with ‘lived experience’
As a next step, ‘the National Trust is in the process of setting up an independent external advisory group of heritage and academic experts, many with lived experience, to guide how we continue to explore the histories and legacies of colonialism and slavery at our places.’
The composition of this group has not been made public. Since the editors said in an earlier paragraph, ‘no one alive today is responsible for the iniquities of the period in question’ it is not clear what the relevance of ‘lived experience is.’ The statement that ‘these histories are sometimes difficult to read and to consider. They make us question our assumptions about the past’ is itself based on assumptions.
It would be reasonable to assume that, as slavery was widespread from the dawn of time until the 19th century, the violence and unfairness of life in the past is a given for anyone with any acquaintance with history.
The country house, Britishness and slavery
In the first chapter, ‘Wealth, Power and the Global Country House’ Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Head Curator, National Trust writes:
‘Although the idea of the global country house – as both a site of cultural influence and political power – may initially appear at odds with the more traditional notion of the stately home as the epitome of Britishness, research led by historians and heritage organisations is increasingly uncovering the part these houses and estates played globally.’
There is no contradiction between a politically connected trophy house at the centre of a great estate and the bucolic atmosphere of its parkland. The British aristocrats of the 18th century spent far more time and resources on their country estates than their French counterparts, and, thanks to the National Trust, among others, country house visiting is a pastime far more accessible to Britons than to other Europeans. Nevertheless, outside the confines of architectural history, it is not obvious that the country house rather than, say, the village church or open countryside, would be the ‘epitome’ of an historic ‘Britishness.’ Most people today would probably define ‘Britishness’ in entirely different terms (popular imagery includes tea, rain, telephone booths, Big Ben, the Royal Family, fish and chips, cricket, the Union Flag, and so on, but country houses do not feature prominently).
The book Capitalism and Slavery of 1944 by the historian, later the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams (1911–81) is described as ‘particularly influential on the studies of enslavement.’ Williams’ argument that abolition was primarily driven by economic, and not religious or moral concerns, is not widely accepted, and is seen as politically motivated. It is misleading to say that ‘although historians have interrogated almost every aspect of Williams’s thesis, it remains the foundational text on the economic history of Caribbean slavery and its abolition,’ as many historians do not accept its conclusions and argue that long-term public hostility to the slave trade was a significant factor resulting in abolition (among others, Seymour Drescher, author of Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition and From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery and Stanley Engerman, in his article ‘The Slave Trade and British Capital Formation in the Eighteenth Century: A Comment on the Williams Thesis’, The Business History Review Vol. 46, No. 4 [1972] 430-443). In fact, the small number of MPs who voted against abolition in 1806 did so on practical and economic grounds. Since the publication of the interim report, a balanced reappraisal has appeared in Gavin Wright’s article ‘Slavery and Anglo‐American Capitalism Revisited’ (Economic History Review 73, no. 2 (2020) 353-83).
Other research has been done on ‘the consumption of colonial and imperial goods in the British country house.’ Given that the residents of any suburban dwelling in Britain today consume tea and coffee produced under very poor working conditions and cocoa and cotton which can often involve actual slavery, let alone all the other exotic products, it cannot be considered remarkable that some luxury goods in the 18th century were imported from overseas. Although working conditions today are at least as problematic as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries it is also as true today as it was then that international trade encourages industry and drives prosperity.
A worrying implication of the discussion in ‘Historic Black Presence in Britain’ is that black or mixed-race Britons of the past should be singled out on account of their race and treated as different, when they were not necessarily treated as such at the time. The idea put forward by Peter Fryer that the history of African and black presence in Britain since the Tudor period was ‘forgotten or erased’ implies unfairly that there was a desire to distort the facts.
Abolition and compensation
The fourth chapter, ‘Compensation’ begins with the heading ‘Hidden Histories – Legacy’:
‘It is inevitable that such a considerable and precipitous transfer of money from the Treasury into private hands will have manifested itself in various forms of reinvestment and spending, thereby concealing the source of this wealth and the history of slavery embedded in our cultural, political, social and material heritage. These legacies are still writ large on the British landscape. Civic and private building investment; towns and cities whose streets bear the names of beneficiaries; private country houses and public monuments; charitable institutions, churches and schools.’
The report claims that the £20 million which was set aside to be paid in compensation to the owners was ‘equivalent to approximately 40 per cent of the government’s total annual expenditure at the time, which, if applied today, would equate to well over £100 billion.’ Government spending as a proportion of GDP at the time was far lower than it is today, and the per capita economy was smaller. According to other estimates the sum of £20 million amounted to around 5% of GDP and would be worth between £1.25 billion and £5 billion today, depending on how it is calculated. That is not a sum that would have changed the face of Britain or made any discernible difference to the lifestyle of the upper class in the longer term. The National Trust itself will have received many donations from wealth generated through exploitative or unethical means, money previously invested in producers of tobacco and arms or held in tax havens, and yet it would not be meaningful to say that exploitation is a central part of the National Trust. The implication that the proceeds of slavery are present all around us and taint us with guilt is not borne out by the facts.
To put the compensation payments into context, they enabled the government to achieve consensus and to press ahead with the total abolition of slavery in 1834. The alternative would have been a gradual process. It was felt at the time that it was a price worth paying to secure the immediate emancipation of 800,000 slaves.
In most of the examples given compensation money made up a small part of the wealth that built or furnished the country houses concerned. This does not make it unproblematic, but it is important to present an accurate overall picture. A similar part of our own pension funds could well be invested in arms and other dubious industries, or businesses which use slave labour or have links to the Kremlin or the Chinese Communist Party. As our forebears in 1833 would have understood, it is necessary to put these things right, but it is also very difficult.
The proportion of country houses affected is small, as the report tells us: ‘Compensation records indicate that 5–10 per cent of national elites in British society can be connected to slavery, and the same percentage can be linked to the built heritage of country houses.’
The chapter ends:
‘The legacies of wealth connected to slavery and the compensation scheme became integrated into the society we know today. By examining the great variety of commercial, cultural, political and physical impacts connected to the compensation scheme we can create greater understanding about this entangled period of history and remember the human lives behind the prosperity seen in Great Britain today.’
The vast majority of human lives behind Britain’s prosperity today belonged to the peasantry and working class. The implication that the beautiful country houses and their fine furniture would not be here today but for the slave trade is not accurate. The chapter does not mention the long-running and expensive suppression of the slave trade which followed abolition, in the face of fierce opposition from slave-owners in Europe, America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia
The East India Company
In Chapter Six, on the East India Company, the report states that ‘[t]he EIC set about stripping India of its assets, thereby becoming the richest institution in Europe.’ The fact is that the overall picture is nuanced, and does not amount to ‘asset-stripping.’ Even in the 18th century the presence of the Company also benefited the Indian economy by stimulating the expansion of cotton textile weaving and carrying Indian goods to new markets, and great Orientalists like Sir William Jones and James Prinsep began to rediscover India’s classical heritage and to restore historic sites while working for the East India Company. By the early 19th century it had evolved into a more regulated and less exploitative form of governance. The Company can also not fairly be described as outstandingly rich, as it came close to bankruptcy several times. Parliament was able to gain increasing control of it in return for bailouts. On the other hand, individual Company servants became fabulously rich, often at the expense of the Company’s shareholders, through corruption, private trade in Indian goods, and sometimes straightforward looting.
The chapter ends with a quotation from William Dalrymple’s book The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, ‘[y]et the conquest of India almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history.’ Prof. Jeremy Black, reviewing this book in the Critic, says that it presents the East India Company in a one-sided manner, omitting much relevant context. It does not place the East India Company in the context of other foreign powers in India, nor of imperial conquest happening at the same time elsewhere in Asia. Such a sweeping statement is also not justified while there is still much debate among historians as to the reasons for India’s relative decline in the nineteenth century. John Keay’s The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company is a comprehensive and balanced account which should have been cited in the bibliography.
The Raj, Lord Curzon and Churchill
In Chapter Eight, on British India after 1857, the account of Lord Curzon’s time as Viceroy is selective and risks giving an unfairly negative impression. For instance, his work in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet is not mentioned, nor the extent of his work restoring historic buildings in India, often at his own expense. (The paragraph is reproduced in the National Trust’s webpage on Kedleston Hall.)
The account of Winston Churchill’s career is also selective and fails to place events in their context. There is no mention of his American background or his early military experience in Cuba, India and Sudan, nor of his eventful time in South Africa during the Second Boer War.
The Bengal famine of 1943 had many complex causes, which are still being debated by historians. Amartya Sen made the case that it could be attributed to the shift in the ‘exchange entitlements’ of the most vulnerable, such as landless labourers and fishermen, as a result of rapid wartime price inflation. Other factors include the loss of Burma, then the world's largest rice exporter, as a result of Japanese invasion, cyclone damage, disease in the rice crop and hoarding by grain merchants in the expectation of further price rises. Churchill made considerable efforts to relieve the suffering, but had to contend with the military threat from Japan against India at the time. Although Churchill was often, and rightly, accused of bias and narrow-mindedness when it came to India, the issue of Indian independence was far from simple, and it would be wrong to suggest that he was not striving for a peaceful and prosperous future for the country.
Cotton
Chapter Nine deals with the import into Britain of slave-cultivated cotton and its processing in mills. The bibliography cites Sven Beckert’s book Empire of Cotton on this subject, which, despite its many merits, advances the thesis that European states were commercially successful because they supported their merchants with arms, an argument which has not been widely accepted and does not adequately explain why something similar did not happen in Asia. For the sake of balance, Beckert’s work should be read alongside Giorgio Riello’s book Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World, which is not cited in the bibliography.
A single National Trust property is mentioned in this chapter, Quarry Bank in Cheshire. Despite the focus on labour and working conditions in cotton production, no mention is made of the large numbers of people working at Quarry Bank, or their conditions. In this context it is also noteworthy that there is no mention of the challenges facing cotton production more recently, such as the resistance to genetically modified cotton in India or the present concerns about cotton being produced by exploited Uighurs in China, and the implications of this for National Trust merchandise and gift shops, where a few products are at least made of organic cotton, but many more are offered for sale with no indication of how they are produced.
Conclusion
The report, which was intended to be updated with a new version at the end of last year, is not thoroughly researched, as we were warned it would not be. This results in conclusions not properly supported by the evidence. Worryingly, the report shows no awareness at all of some of the most important current research on British India and the Translatlantic slave trade. This results in a very partial view of the state of research, and of the history being described. It is also unfortunate that the story of the British Empire is limited to India and Africa. Australia, New Zealand and Canada are each mentioned only once. The attempt to portray the entire British countryside as tainted with the proceeds of slavery is not well founded on evidence.
As this report aims to be, as the foreword had it, ‘ever more inclusive’, it is unfortunate that the considerable Jewish contribution to Britain’s history, embodied in several National Trust properties, goes unmentioned.
The tone of the report is sometimes patronizing. We are told that ‘we believe that only by honestly and openly acknowledging and sharing those stories can we do justice to the true complexity of past, present and future, and the sometimes-uncomfortable role that Britain, and Britons, have played in global history’ and that ‘these histories are sometimes difficult to read and to consider. They make us question our assumptions about the past.’ This ‘complexity’ of the present or future is not addressed in the report.
As for the past, different people are interested in different aspects of history, and to a varying extent, but we all understand that no nation’s history is morally good or bad in its entirety, that values and priorities were different in the past and that people acted as they did for complicated reasons. The authors of the report are setting up an imagined scenario in which the British people on the whole take a rosy view of the Empire, and have to be told things they don’t want to hear. Unfortunately, the effect is that the National Trust comes over as lecturing the public. We hope that Hilary McGrady’s recently expressed aspiration that historic sites will ‘help curious people come face to face with history and feel they can arrive at their own views’ signals a change of tone.
The scope of the report is not well defined. It stops at examining the wealth of those who built, furnished and lived in various houses, but does not hold the National Trust itself up to scrutiny. The authors are happy to rake over the faults of the past; the wrongs of the present may be too ‘uncomfortable’ to face just yet.