Who cares if this UCL academic ‘undermined’ Britain’s history?

There’s a long list of academics, some of whom are on the right, who have had their lives made difficult by fellow academics. Now, for a change, a left-wing academic is feeling the heat. 

Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a history lecturer at University College London (UCL), has been accused of ‘undermining the history of Britain’ without evidence. The allegation came after Bulstrode claimed in a paper that an English ironware maker, Henry Cort, stole his invention from slaves. Before conservatives engage in too much self-congratulation, however, they should stop and think carefully about whether this attack against Bulstrode is really something to celebrate. 

History and Technology, where Bulstrode’s article appeared in June, is a fairly typical abstruse academic journal of the kind you don’t normally expect to hit the headlines. But Bulstrode’s article has done just that. The gist of the piece is that Cort, an eighteenth-century ironmaster seen as pivotal to the Industrial Revolution because he developed a revolutionary and efficient means of turning scrap metal into pig-iron, had pilfered the whole idea.