By Corinne Fowler

I’m a historian of the British empire and have a new book out entitled Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain. Eight days before it was published, the Telegraph carried an opinion piece about it. ‘Her work is premised on the suffering of victims overseas,’ it contended, but ‘she overlooks another and much larger group of “victims” in her story, the British agricultural labourers who, through centuries of toil, worked the land …for their weekly shillings.

’I’m all for criticism, but this was strange. Not just for the wildly inaccurate claim that British farm workers outnumbered enslaved Africans and other overseas victims of colonialism, but because the topic I was accused of neglecting happens to be the actual subject of my book: the link between British labour history and colonialism. Whole chapters are devoted to eighteenth-century enclosure and loss of the common land, copper mines, cotton mills and food riots – the bread and butter of working people’s lives. It was almost as if – incredible as it may seem – the Telegraph’s writer had not actually read the book he was criticizing. As if that was not bad enough, just an hour and a half after the Telegraph article appeared online, the Spectator produced its own condemnation of my book. This focused on a chapter that I describe as my ‘copper walk’ through Cornwall – or rather it honed in on a single proposition I made:

‘Copper mines once employed a third of the local population, but … a significant amount of copper was used to sheath slave ships so that they lasted longer in tropical waters. ’The Spectator’s writer took issue with this. ‘To be clear, the copper sheathing of ships was developed by the Royal Navy … and was used by all types of ships, not just those used in the slave trade. ’ What I had written, he went on, was a distortion. ‘The purpose of copper sheathing on ships was to prevent the growth of barnacles.’All well and good, except that this ‘distortion’ was not mine but his. The proposition with which he took issue didn’t actually appear in my book, but in an article I wrote, believe it or not, for the Telegraph (more on that in a moment).

In my book, as it happens, I discuss the matter of copper sheathing at considerable length, including reference to barnacles. It was almost is if – and yes, we have been here before, but no, it can’t possibly be true – the Spectator’s writer had not actually read the book either. There is history here. Three years ago I contacted Hacked Off about my experience of press abuse following the publication of a report I had been commissioned to write for the National Trust. Auditing decades of research in reputable academic journals and databases, the report opened up a sensitive history and became a major media story, heralding one of the first of our modern culture wars.

Publications including the Telegraph and the Spectator denounced me as a denigrator of British history and, after government ministers joined the chorus, two parliamentary debates were held. I received wave upon wave of hate mail and many threats of violence, so that for a while I could not walk anywhere unaccompanied. When my new book was ready for publication, as you might imagine, I foresaw more of the same so I had the idea of trying to head it off. I persuaded the Telegraph to publish an article by me referring to the new book but mainly describing how I had try to deal with the previous online hatred directed against me by seeking dialogue. My effort appears to have been largely wasted, because the 2,000 or so comments that were published below the article mostly said, in more or less abusive terms, that I deserved everything I got.

It was on the same day that my Telegraph article appeared that that the paper published its critique of my book. And just an hour and a half later the Spectator chipped in with its piece. At that stage, my book had not been published, and all the “evidence” cited by both writers happened to appear in the article. Let me put this as generously as I can: nothing about those two articles suggested anything like thoughtful or careful engagement with my work. It looks to me as though they were tossed off in response to my article with little regard for accuracy or an honest representation to their readers of the contents of my book.

I’m an academic. I expect my ideas and my evidence to be tested and scrutinised within academia and beyond it, in the public sphere. But that public debate should be informed and reasoned; knee-jerk responses and personal attacks are no substitute for analysis based on fact.I am pleased to say that the real reviews of my book, the ones dealing with what it actually says, have been universally positive, but I have to add a sorry footnote about the BBC.I gave an interview about my book to the Radio 4’s Today Programme in which, a little to my surprise, presenter Mishal Hussain homed in on that same ‘copper walk’ section that had upset the Spectator. ‘Critics,’ she said, ‘had an issue with’ my work because copper sheathing was used by lots of navy ships and ‘not just the slave ones’.It just shows how mudslinging works. Not only is the BBC ready to rely for its information on one uninformed comment in one uninformed and inaccurate article in the Spectator, but it is also prepared to pass that information off on its listeners as the insight of ‘critics’. So long as the press fails to fact check but rather provides powerful platforms for the uninformed, we cannot have safe and reasonable public conversations.

Corinne Fowler is author of Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain (Penguin Allen Lane, 2024).