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The interesting thing for me about country houses (happy to be corrected, this isn't my field) is the way people want to see them as both 'historic' and timeless /(thread)
People like the stories of olden times, without necessarily wanting these people and places to have actual histories beyond the person who paid for their construction, or wanting to see these buildings as products of their times
Country houses (and castles, to a lesser extent) represent the safe past, the past which was pretty but is now long ago and far away. But the reality is that the past of empire and colonialism is not dead and buried, but still has very real impacts on real people's real lives
What the amazing work of @ColonialCountr1 and others has shown is that these places have histories, not just stories. Once you actually historicise the 'timeless' house, you discover that it was intimately bound up in the networks, economics, society and politics of its time
Country houses don't sit outside of history. Even as much as we'd like to imagine that they represent a bubble outside of the progression of time, that cannot be so. They are products of the societies that built them: cultural constructs in the most physical and literal sense
Country houses don't sit outside of history. They're not passive 'witnesses' to the events and deeds of the past, they are products of them. I'd even go full postmodern and think about them as participants in history, though that's probably too far for most historians
But to actually put this into practise ruffles some feathers. Because once you demonstrate what the timeless past actually involved, you come into contact with our own shameful histories. You open up this shiny time capsule and muck it up with the messy business of history
Country houses, I think, are literally seen as relics, as something transcendental, if not actually holy. They are seen to come down to us from the past without being touched by the past. Just as the body of a saint in uncorrupted by decay, so the house is uncorrupted by time
To contaminate, pollute, the timeless with history seems to be an act of desecration to some people. But to historians, it is a celebration of our ability to understand where we came from, and therefore ourselves
What (I think) this shows is a real tension between the sanitised time capsule approach to the past, where buildings can be timeless, sitting outside of history, relics of a bygone age, and the real, messy business of history, where everything is contingent on other things
Historians (broadly speaking) thrive on these tensions, these differences in approaches to the past. Newspaper columnists, by and large, don't. Their job is to write a neat story in 800 words. But if we want history to matter, we're all gonna have to learn what it really is
