SLAVES AND SOURCES

David Starkey’s analysis of the National Trust slavery project (March) makes some good points. But there is a much worse example of a slave project, that of the Welsh government’s Slave Trade and the British Empire: An Audit of Commemoration, published in November 2020. It is littered with errors and, astonishingly for a report written by at least three professors, relies heavily on Wikipedia with more than 50 citations from that source. Doubtless the authors would not recommend it as a model to their students. Professor William Gibson chandler’s ford, hampshire

David Starkey is right to note that “treating the English country house — à la Sir Roy Strong and the rest — simply as an aesthetic phenomenon, or the fragile quintessence of Englishness is not the be-all and end-all”. Studying the houses and writing from a European perspective, the book Empirical Philosophy and the English Country House (Vienna 1992) by Austrian professor Otto Codicil, with Hans Gerstenbacker, supports Starkey’s conclusions that the country houses were consolidations of political power and wealth.

Empirical audits of empire are, in Codicil’s view, crucial to understanding sources of wealth that underpin the power houses.

Starkey, like others, omits a gender dimension, as Codicil points out: the houses and their wealth largely depended on patriarchal primogeniture of inheritance, as the male inheritors were also the exploiters by conflict and speculation. Sally Tomlinson emeritus professor, goldsmiths london university