The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside
We know that enslaved Africans and their descendants suffered in the distant colonies of empire. But, as Corinne Fowler explains, the colonial system also led to significant changes for the countryside and its people of the ‘motherland’
For an encounter with one of the most eye-opening legacies of Britain’s colonial projects, take a drive along the A31 in southern Dorset. On the stretch between the delightfully named villages of Winterborne Zelston and Sturminster Marshall, the road kinks nearly 90 degrees; lining the verge here you’ll notice a wall – not hugely tall, but impressively long.
Reputedly stretching for 3 miles and comprising nearly 2 million bricks, it was almost certainly built with profits from slavery.
This is the so-called ‘great wall of Dorset’ – one of England’s longest, built around 1841 to encircle the vast Dorset estate of Charborough Park. It belongs to the Drax family, an old propertied clan who owned tobacco and sugar plantations in Barbados – and who massively increased their wealth by boosting profits through the use of slave labour.
It is easy to forget that colonial governors, slave-owners and East India Company employees and their heirs commonly became rural magistrates, customs officials, industrialists and politicians in Britain. The newly acquired land and social networks of these men allowed them to hold sway over other Britons in countryside regions.
So it’s important to understand that, when it comes to exploring rural history, it’s not enough to ask where the money came from to buy country houses or fund village schools. What also matters is how these figures and their descendants exercised their power, wealth and influence in such areas.
Back in 2020, I undertook an audit of published academic research about National Trust properties and their colonial links. So I already knew that country estates such as Basildon Park in Berkshire and Harewood House in Yorkshire were built and landscaped with colonial profits, and that Speke Hall near Liverpool was bought and restored with money from Jamaican slavery.
I’d found, too, other architectural stories of places not managed by the National Trust that are also linked to Britain’s colonial projects – including that statement wall around Charborough Park. These all highlighted the point that many of the ubiquitous colonial links in our countryside have been overlooked or forgotten.
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British rural history is invariably depicted as a domestic affair that has very little to do with the empire. You don’t find many references to colonial history in local history pamphlets, for example, nor in the nature writing of many popular authors.
To address this oversight, I set out to research a book of walks through regions with less-familiar histories of empire. As I ventured deeper into the countryside, empire’s impact on rural Britons was revealed in all its nuance and variety. My aim was to identify connections that were genuinely consequential to Britons who lived and worked in these places during four centuries of colonial activity.
From servants to slavery
That search led me, among other things, to revisit the Drax story – and I began to wonder about the family’s relationship with the ordinary inhabitants of Dorset.
In the early 17th century, people from that county were shipped to Barbados plantations to work as indentured labourers, selling their employers a set number of labour years and receiving at the end of their contract a lump sum or its equivalent in sugar or land. By the middle of that century, such indentured servants were being replaced by enslaved African labourers – a system ‘pioneered’ by the Draxes.
Notably, one member of the Drax family pops up in the historian EP Thompson’s account of the 1830s Swing Riots – protests by agricultural workers against poor pay, working conditions and mechanisation that threatened their jobs.
In the early 17th century, people from Dorset were shipped to Barbados plantations to work as indentured labourers... By the middle of that century, they were being replaced by enslaved African labourers – a system ‘pioneered’ by the Draxes
In 1830, the average farm worker’s weekly wage of somewhere between seven and nine shillings was nowhere near enough to cover rent and the purchase of basics – tea and sugar, bread, potatoes, butter and cheese, candles, soap and wood – which typically came to around 13 shillings. During this period of recession and depressed wages, the Swing Riots spread west from Hampshire, and agricultural labourers in Dorset then rose up in protest.
John Samuel Wanley Sawbridge Erle-Drax (1800–87) boosted his wealth by marrying into the family, and received compensation for the loss of slave labour after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. He met protesting labourers with beer, and offered to raise their wages – then reneged on that promise. He led an armed group of landed proprietors to quell the resultant protests and to ensure that his labourers felt the full force of the law.
That episode recalls the actions of people elsewhere in Dorset who also campaigned for fairer conditions – notably the villagers from Tolpuddle, whose story became one of the most celebrated in British labour history. These six men, known today as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, started the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers – in effect, a union fighting wage cuts – led by Methodist lay preacher George Loveless.
Under an obscure law prohibiting the swearing of secret oaths, they were unjustly found guilty of sedition in 1834 and sent to some of the furthest reaches of the British empire: the penal colonies in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).
Loveless and his fellow ‘martyrs’ were among 4,000 British political prisoners and social protesters who, between 1787 and 1868, were transported to penal colonies as punishment for fighting for their rights. Loveless wrote about his experience in Van Diemen’s Land, and his words represent a powerful indictment of the colonial system.
Working on menial tasks throughout daylight hours, convicts were inadequately clothed and often stripped to the waist. Punishments were severe – 50 lashes for attempting to escape, for example. Unsurprisingly, most prisoners’ health deteriorated, and suicide attempts were common. One of Loveless’s observations was that penal colonies exposed the dangers of unfettered power wielded by the British authorities.
Enslavement and enclosure
The system of forced labour that caused the suffering of so many enslaved people in Britain’s colonies was also linked with hardship at home. With this in mind, I planned a walk along the Norfolk–Suffolk border. I call this route my ‘enclosure walk’, because it reveals the intertwined history of land ownership and slavery wealth.
For centuries, people grazed livestock amid the water meadows and lowland lakes of the East Anglian fens, and fished the wetlands that teem with fish and eels. The names on old maps reflect the management of these landscapes: First Fen, Second Fen, the Thirteen Acres. Others, such as Bullock Shed Close and Duck Lands Lane, suggest how land was used.
Names convey observations of the natural world, too: Toads Lane, Birds Hill, Thistly Close. All of these reveal people’s intimate relationship with land that was known and loved long before it was enclosed with hedges.
Enclosure – private landowners erecting barriers to deny local people access to formerly common land – is massively significant to British rural history. Over the centuries, it effected a slow transformation from peasant husbandry to capitalist farming.
Enclosure was responsible for removing landless people’s right to graze livestock, catch rabbits and collect firewood on the commons. Instead, the land was allocated to a proprietor who controlled its use. This process accelerated rapidly in the 18th century: between 1750 and 1820, over 21 per cent of England was enclosed by parliamentary decree.
East Anglican injustice
It is no coincidence that this period coincided with the era of transatlantic slavery. A vast amount of land was purchased or enclosed using wealth from the West Indies or investments in the slavery businesses. Enclosure is not just of local and national significance – it is a global story.
My enclosure walk began in the north-east Suffolk town of Bungay, from where I ambled along waterways and quiet lanes to Earsham Hall, a red-brick residence once home to Sir William Windham Dalling, an absentee slave-owner.
Between 1799 and 1840, Donnington Castle, the Jamaican plantation inherited by Sir William, produced a staggering £150,000 (equivalent to well over £10m today). Together with two neighbours – George Sandby and George Day, also absentee slave-owners – he dominated the lives of 811 enslaved people. But these men’s dominance did not begin and end on their Caribbean plantations.
Local Norfolk enclosure maps show that Sir William used his slavery-derived profits to consolidate and expand his East Anglian estate. He was a petitioner on the 1812 ‘Act for Inclosing Lands in the Parishes of Earsham, Ditchingham, and Hedenham, in the County of Norfolk’.
The lands to be enclosed under this act included Outney Common and Dole Meadow, where the word ‘dole’ suggested lands that had been habitually given over to people without a stable income as an act of charity. With distinctly colonial overtones, and in keeping with enclosure rhetoric throughout England, Sir William and the other petitioners argued that this was “uncultivated… wasteland” that would be “improved” through enclosure.
That claim is undermined by their promise to award appropriate costs to displaced land users. Compensation would, the petition stated, be awarded to the owners of cottages or buildings who could provide evidence of ongoing land use.
Between 1799 and 1840, Donnington Castle, the Jamaican plantation inherited by Sir William, produced a staggering £150,000 (equivalent to well over £10m today). Together with two neighbours – George Sandby and George Day, also absentee slave-owners – he dominated the lives of 811 enslaved people
Any objectors were instructed to employ an attorney – which was, of course, beyond the means of most ordinary country folk. Commissioners’ judgements were always final in the enclosure process, and any who disputed an unsuccessful appeal outcome would be evicted.
The 1812 enclosures were, indeed, contested by locals after notices were placed on church doors and printed in the Norfolk Chronicle. A public meeting was held to hear any objections put by an attorney – but only a handful of complainants could afford such legal representation.
Among those who could was a local man called Alexander Adair, who claimed 2 acres (less than a hectare) in the Dole Meadows as his by right; his claim was overruled. The enclosures went ahead, and the commissioners allocated just 5 acres (2 hectares) as “poor allotments”. These small plots were to be leased to tenants who would now be required to pay rent twice a year, having previously paid nothing.
Hand-drawn enclosure maps showing Sir William’s new land resemble dense webs. Spindly demarcation lines show the proposed new plots – numbered in red – and existing buildings shaded in dark pink. Within these plots, the names of the new and former landowners are written in tiny, immaculate letters.
The 1812 map shows that Sir William bought – using wealth derived from slavery – 280 acres (113 hectares) around the perimeter of his estate, gobbling up tracts around Earsham Hall that were deemed by the commissioners to have “unfixed and uncertain” boundaries. The map shows two private roads for the use of Sir William, his heirs, and two other landowners.
Walking along the old Norwich Road today, thin hedges mark the edges of the Earsham estate, with its flowerless meadows and gigantic oaks. In the 18th century you could have used more direct footpaths across fields, but these were blocked during Sir William’s enclosures.
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Five public lanes and footpaths that previously passed through the estate were rendered off-limits to locals, who were then forced into time-consuming detours as they walked the long way round. To this day, you still have to take longer, indirect routes.
Clearly, such inconveniences can’t be compared to the horrors of chattel slavery, but Sir William’s Jamaican profits were used to set in motion a series of smaller injustices in Norfolk. Thanks to that wealth, formerly common land became strictly off limits, and people could be prosecuted or fined for using it. Anybody caught fishing with nets in the broads, cutting turf or carrying off rocks or flagstones would be in trouble.
Non-payment of fines would result in bailiffs recovering the full amount. Sir William also claimed exclusive rights to all timber, standing or fallen, on the enclosed commons. This was a blow for anyone who had previously collected firewood there, or used logs for building or furniture-making.
Sugar and slate
Another story linking slavery-derived profits with labour history can be found at Penrhyn Castle near Bangor, north-west Wales. Now owned by the National Trust, its interconnected histories of sugar and slate are persistently told as separate stories.
As soon as Richard Pennant inherited his Jamaican sugar wealth in 1781, he turned local slate producers off his land and, the following year, opened Penrhyn slate quarry. Within a decade, 500 men were employed there, and it became one of the world’s largest slate quarries.
In a sinister echo of conditions in Jamaica, the quarry-workers’ barracks were modelled on huts built for enslaved people on the family plantations; we know this from the work of historian Marian Gwyn, who studied regular letters that Richard Pennant received from the manager of his West Indian estates.
In 2022, the BBC Radio 4 series The Museums That Make Us stated that Penrhyn Castle was “built on money from slavery, the abolition of slavery and then the slate quarry nearby”. That wording is misleading, because it implies two distinct, unconnected phases of money-making – yet the slate quarry was created with slavery-derived profits in the first place.
The resultant combined sugar and slate wealth funded roads, railways, schools, hotels, workers’ houses and the local port.
Bitter dispute
The Pennants’ slate mines were at the centre of the great strike of 1900–03 – one of the bitterest disputes in British industrial history – sparked by the family’s opposition to the North Wales Quarrymen’s Union. The strikers lost, and 2,000 hungry, impoverished quarry workers left for south Wales. This mass movement of labour was the long-term outcome of both histories.
I learned of one further local connection not too far from Penrhyn, on the sheep-grazed hillsides of north Wales.
In the old county of Meirionnydd, part of Eryri (Snowdonia), local people produced a rough fabric called woollen plains, which was used to clothe enslaved people in North American and West Indian plantations. In the callous minds of the enslavers, this coarse Welsh textile was desirable because it bolstered productivity: proper clothing prevented enslaved people from becoming ill, and kept them alive for longer.
Far-away transatlantic slavery was thus directly linked to the livelihoods of Welsh sheep-shearers, wool-carders, spinners and weavers. Not that wool-workers were made rich by slavery: on the contrary, their lives were often harsh. The money was being made by people far higher up the economic ladder: wool merchants and landowners with sheep-grazing pasture.
Once again, two unrelated groups of people, separated by heritage and thousands of miles of Atlantic Ocean, were linked by their circumstances – bound within the colonial system of the British empire.
Corinne Fowler is professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester, and founder of the Colonial Countryside research project. Her latest book is Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (Allen Lane, 2024)
This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine