The Common Sense Group of more than 50 Tory MPs was angered by a 115-page interim report entitled "Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links With Historic Slavery," commissioned by the trust and published in September.
Co-edited by Fowler, it highlighted that 93 trust properties, including Clandon Park in Surrey and Hare Hill in Cheshire, were linked to wealth from plantations and the slave trade, while others, such as Bateman’s, Rudyard Kipling’s home in Sussex, were important to understanding Britain’s colonial history.
Many of the MPs and several rightwing historians and newspaper columnists took exception to the report’s references to Winston Churchill’s role in colonial administration and his opposition to Indian independence. The historian Andrew Roberts accused the trust of “wokery” and of “trying to imply a moral equivalence between colonialism and slavery”.
The row was reignited last week when Fowler and several other academics working on another trust project, Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted, were accused of holding “biased” views about colonialism.
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