Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections

By Corinne Fowler

Selected by Bernardine Evaristo as an Observer Best Books 2021

Green Unpleasant Land explores the repressed history of rural England’s links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company.

Combining essays, poems and stories, it details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. It also explores the links between rural poverty, particularly enclosure, and colonial figures, such as plantation-owners and East India Company nabobs. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain’s cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. This is a shared history: Britons’ ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. Green Unpleasant Land argues that, in response to recent advances in British imperial history, contemporary authors have reshaped the pastoral writing to break the powerful association between the countryside and Englishness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peepal Tree Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781845234836

Corinne Fowler

Corinne Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. In 2020, Corinne coauthored an audit of peer-reviewed research about the National Trust, which cares for over 300 stately homes, a third of which have multiple connections to the British empire. The report became a major media story and won the 2022 Museums and Heritage Judges’ Special Recognition Award and an Eastern Eye Award in 2023. Corinne directed Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted (2017–2022), a child-led history and writing project, with the commissioned photographer and Turner Prize shortlisted artist, Ingrid Pollard (2018–2022). Her most recent book is Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections (2020, Peepal Tree Press).