Empire, the West Country and Thomas Hardy | Corinne Fowler and Rena Jackson
With extensive reference to Museum displays, this joint talk explores the histories and heritages of the British Empire in the West Country, as well as considering creative and critical responses to its legacies. Professor Corinne Fowler’s talk covers the bewildering variety of Dorset’s colonial connections from transatlantic slavery and indentured labour to the African historical presence and penal colonies in modern day Australia and Tasmania. It will also show how Dorset’s agricultural history, particularly enclosure, the loss of common land and agricultural labour, is linked to the influx of imperial wealth during the colonial period. Dr Rena Jackson’s talk considers literary responses to the Empire from a major Victorian West Country writer. The global flows of people and commodities in Thomas Hardy’s rural imaginary, Wessex, show how the region was entwined with the Empire through colonial adventure and exploration, finance capital, wars (land and sea), emigration and transportation, the East India Company and the Indian Civil Service.
About the speakers
Corinne Fowler is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. In 2020 Corinne co-authored an audit of peer-reviewed research about National Trust properties’ connections to empire, which galvanized the heritage sector to address its colonial stories and became a major media story. The report won the Museums and Heritage Special Recognition Award, 2022 and an Eastern Eye Award 2023. Before this, Corinne directed Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted, a child-led history and writing project (2018-2022), resulting in a book of commissioned writing called Colonial Countryside (Peepal Tree Press, July 2024) which was funded by Arts Council England. Corinne’s new book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain was published on 2 May 2024 by Penguin Allen Lane.
Rena Jackson is a long-time member of the Thomas Hardy Society and serves on the editorial advisory board for the Society’s journals (Hardy Society Journal and Thomas Hardy Journal). Her recent book The Imperial World-System and Cultures of Dissent in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction was published in October 2024 with Palgrave Macmillan. The book is based on her PhD thesis, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and completed at the University of Manchester in 2018. She has taught and trained students at all degree levels in higher education, and co-organised major public-facing events themed around asylum, refuge and migration. Her many publications have appeared in postcolonial and Hardy journals, as well as in the volume of essays Thomas Hardy in Context (Cambridge UP, 2013).
