Alan Lester and Sunny Colclough Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) is the most famous ‘place-maker’ in British history. He has been called an ‘omnipotent magician’ who ‘swept away’ country houses’ walled gardens and geometrical planting between the 1750s and 1770s, replacing them with ‘open expanses of turf irregularly scattered with individual trees and clumps’, serpentine lakes, temples and other ornamental buildings.[1] ‘No gardener in history’ says one specialist, has ‘been the object of so much varied attention’ with ‘so many places throughout England involved’.[2] Brown’s stated aim was to supply ‘all the elegance and all the comforts which Mankind wants in […]
Supplementary document to Sunny Colclough’s JRA Project: Colonial Influences on the English Countryside: Capability Brown’s Commissions and their Imperial Connections. Spreadsheet of properties and links here Key to the Spreadsheet: Nature of Colonial connection Direct link to property owner This is given if the property owner: Direct political link to property owner This is given if the property owner: Direct military link to property owner This is given if the property owner: Indirect link to property owner This is given if the property owner: Direct family link This is given if the property owner: Indirect family link This is given […]
Alan Lester I’ve been spending a lot of time recently talking about slavery in British history to people who really don’t want to hear it. I don’t mean haranguing shoppers in Oxford Street, but talks to church, community and business groups comprised of small ‘c’ conservative White people who’ve been willing at least to hear me out. I’ve kept it factual and based it on two main databases: https://www.slavevoyages.org/ on British participation in the trans-Atlantic slave ‘trade’ and https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ on slave ownership. On every occasion, there have been the two main objections. In case it’s useful for others, here they […]
Alan Lester* In recent months the Daily Mail and right wing groups have mounted a clamour for a new memorial to be built in Portsmouth. In principle, the proposal seems reasonable, since it is to commemorate a British antislavery initiative. However, given its motivations, the way that it has been promoted and its proposed design, this particular memorial campaign has attracted considerable opposition. In this blog I examine the case for and against it, concluding that the project is an exercise in White virtue signalling, historical falsification and the denial of racism. Four months after Black Lives Matter protestors drowned […]
Response to Nigel Biggar, ‘History lessened: Who gets to decide how we see the past?’ Alan Lester Background The Spectator emailed me this week to ask if I would record a segment for their Edition podcast with Nigel Biggar the next day, about an article of his that they were about to publish. I spent the evening reading the article and preparing to discuss it, only to be told at 10 pm that night that the podcast had been cancelled. I replied saying that I presumed Nigel Biggar had got cold feet. The Spectator did not deny it, but promised […]
Kemi Badenoch, The Institute of Economic Affairs and the Distortion of Colonial History[1] Alan Lester De Beers African Migrant Labour Compound, c.1886 The IEA (Institute for Economic Affairs) was last in the news when its advice informed Liz Truss’ and…
By Alan Lester The Red River Expedition with Colonel Garnet Wolseley’s boat featured flying the ensign at Kakabeka Falls, Frances Anne Hopkins, 1877: https://picturingtheamericas.org/painting/the-red-river-expedition-at-kakabeka-falls/ We understand the British Empire’s military campaigns mainly via the accounts of the officers who led them. These records render the acquisition of territory, the crushing of dissent and the seizing of plunder into honourable enterprises but, when published, they were also about self-promotion. A heroic narrative, leavened with the correct dose of self-deprecation, could launch the career of an ambitious officer with literary flair. The best-known example is probably Winston Churchill, whose talent for burnishing […]
In April 2024, the Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch gave a speech in which she sought to deny the extent to which Britain’s economic trajectory was reliant on colonialism. When criticised by William Dalrymple, Toby Young, responded with this tweet, linking to an article in support of Badenoch by Nigel Biggar. This is my quickfire response to Badenoch’s and Biggar’s case: Biggar makes three historical arguments, each of which is tendentious and based on the construction of straw men: He starts with the economic foundations of the South African War, arguing that the antisemitic Hobson’s thesis that Cecil Rhodes and other […]
Alan Lester In the early stages of World War I, the Raj came to the south coast of England in the form of over 4,000 wounded Indian soldiers. They convalesced in a number of specially constructed hospitals, including in the Brighton Pavilion. Between 1914 and 1916 the former Prince Regent’s Oriental-style palace became charged with the hubris and anxiety of the largest and most diverse Empire the world had ever seen. [1] A Palace Becomes a Hospital In August 1914, the Indian Army was roughly the same size as the regular British Army (around 240,000 men), but their deployment against the […]
