Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 121

South Carolina indigo planter Peter Gaillard saw his fortunes revive thanks to the cotton boom … a crop so profitable that … in 1803 [he] constructed a new mansion on this property … Fortified by their wealth, confident of their slave-aided ability to squeeze ever more cotton from the land, American cotton planters came to dominate British markets by 1802. This passage comes not from Slavery and the British

country house but from Sven Beckert’s Empire of cotton (2014). This probably appears a strange way to begin a review about British country houses, but being an American I unavoidably see the world from an American perspective. Please indulge me a little.

My work examines plantation museums in the United States, and during my fieldwork in South Carolina I was struck by planters’ attempts to recreate Britain in the American South. Photographs of their homes could be placed in Slavery and the British country house without anyone being the wiser. On deeper thought this makes sense: these planters were Englishmen and the sons and grandsons of Englishmen who came to the Americas seeking their fortune. And as Beckert’s passage alludes, there were Englishmen on the other side of the Atlantic making their fortune from raw materials from the Americas, materials gotten through enslaved Black labour.

Slavery and the British country house deals with material culture, here in the form of mansions on the British side of the Atlantic. The editors of this volume state that it seeks to trace and interrogate the links ‘between the wealth derived from slavery and the British country house’ and the ‘implications such links have for the way … [these] properties are represented to the public today’. The volume largely succeeds. Traces of the enslaved are made visible through the use of the Slave Compensation database (Nicholas Draper), spatial analysis (Madge Dresser), personal histories (Jane Longmore), archaeology (Roger H. Leech), archives (Simon D. Smith), forensic accounting (Nuala Zahedieh), and landscape aesthetics (Victoria Perry).

I found the chapters enlightening. Of particular interest was Sheryllynne Haggerty and Susanne Seymour’s chapter on ‘Property, Power and Authority’, in which they describe how property, power, and authority were lost on Grenada during Fedon’s slave rebellion (1795–96). The rebellion resulted in the burning of a hundred plantations, the death of approximately one quarter of the island’s enslaved population and the execution of 41 white British subjects by the insurgents. Slave rebellions were common in the Americas, but, with the exception of the Haitian Rebellion they tend to be underexamined.

I also found intriguing, for a completely different reason, Laurence Brown’s chapter on Marble Hill and Northington Grange. It is principally the story of the owner of Marble Hill, George II’s mistress Henrietta Howard. While a fine piece of academic research, it reads a bit like a soap opera or telenovela. I do not say this to belittle: I would have liked to have learned more about the personal lives of the owners of these estates.

One chapter that does offer a more personal view is Natalie Zacek’s. Her chapter addresses Dodington House, but I would argue that the chapter concerns someone who rarely resided there: Christopher Codrington. Codrington was an American in the continental sense: he was born in Barbados in 1668, the son of the captain-general who at the time was one of the wealthiest sugar cane plantation owners on the island. He attended Oxford and was elected a fellow of All Souls College, and was described by his peers as being a scholar and a gentleman ‘worthy of the highest respect’, a description today not usually associated with slave owners.

Two of the best chapters are Caroline Bressey’s on Kenwood House and Osborne House and Cliff Pereira’s on the London Borough of Bexley. What I enjoyed most about Bressey’s chapter was the depth she went into reanimating – that is, bringing back into existence – the people of colour who resided at Kenwood and Osborne. Here we learn about Dido Elizabeth Bell, Abdul Karim, Maharajah Duleep Singh, and Victoria Randle, who were not enslaved people but rather, in varying senses, dark-skinned English aristocrats. Their early presence in Britain, along with that of many other unnamed people of colour, calls into question the very whiteness of the nation. Pereira’s chapter is the one in the book most concerned with how these ‘properties are represented to the public today’. His chapter examines how Bexley’s communities – particularly its minority communities – engage with heritage sites in the borough, tracing how places that were perceived as ‘white only’ spaces have been transformed into spaces for everyone.

I was intrigued and edified by this volume. If I have a criticism, it is that I would have liked to have learned more about the people, especially the people of colour, who both resided in and made these homes possible.