They were beggars and scholars and out-of-work lace makers, dreamers and drunkards, decent farmers and hopelessly bad ones. They were bricklayers, some honest and some exploiting an obscure loophole in brickmaking law to commit tax fraud. They were at odds with the local press, accused of sex scandals, and eternally feuding among themselves. And from 1838 to 1841, they were all stuck there together in the worst little utopia in all of Cambridgeshire, England.
“They paid much more attention to the beer shops and the company of the lowest prostitutes” than to their work, one griped about his neighbors.
“To make a successful Community all parties must be economical and industrious, and must not, like Mr. Kirk, frequently get up after breakfast,” others complained of a comrade in an anonymous collective letter to the commune newspaper.
This was Manea Fen, a short-lived socialist commune scooped out of the wetlands. Staffed by soft-handed idealists rebelling against England’s Industrial Revolution and local laborers seeking more than starvation wages, Manea Fen was a beacon for people chasing a new world. They found it, though not in a way they could have imagined. By its second year, the whole project would become an embarrassing flop that would send its founder into debt and most of its members slinking back into polite society. But as the weeds reclaimed Manea Fen’s homesteads, the commune’s real export would blossom across the country. Up from Manea Fen’s marshy plains rose modern Flat Earth theory, a conspiracy theory so audacious it could eclipse a planet. It was entirely one man’s fault.
Samuel Birley Rowbotham was twenty-two, radical, and, according to a socialist newspaper’s account, occasionally high off his mind on laughing gas when he began imagining a new world in 1838. That year, he was one of the first to answer a local farmer’s call to build the planned utopian society of Manea Fen. Rowbotham and the farmer comrade, William Hodson, were followers of Robert Owen, a utopian socialist who envisioned grand, sweeping paradises made up of cooperative worker communes. (Working before socialist heavy hitters like Karl Marx, Owen argued not for society-wide class struggle and revolution, but for model communes that would show the world how to live peacefully.) The year 1838 was a boom time for English utopians. Workers, dirt-poor and fed up near the end of the First Industrial Revolution, banded together in experimental live-work settlements where they hoped they could break the accelerating wheels of capitalism.
Few photographs exist of Rowbotham. If you ask around at a modern Flat Earth conference, someone might be able to sell you an old pamphlet with a picture of him as a stern, round-faced man of middle age. I like to imagine him in his early years, however, not as an aging man from an old book, but as a young idealist who would have gotten by just fine in the twenty-first century. The young Rowbotham liked to get high and litigate obscure political arguments with other socialists in their niche newspapers. Substitute those newspapers for social media, and he’d be indistinguishable from dozens of people I know in modern life. Rowbotham had one more commonality with contemporary Twitter users: he lived in a moment ripe for conspiracy theories.
Conspiratorial thinking is not a weird pathology, experienced by some and absent in others. It’s part of a mental process hardwired into all of us, from Rowbotham’s era and beforehand and afterward. The same powers of abstraction that make humans good at detecting patterns (like anticipating storms when dark clouds gather) can make us imagine patterns where they don’t exist, especially when we’re feeling stressed or powerless. Rather than languish in the unknown, we tell ourselves stories about the secret causes of our troubles. All of us do this. For instance, after failing my driver’s test three times, an explanation emerged in the back of my mind: maybe the Department of Motor Vehicles secretly had to flunk a certain quota of student drivers. The stress of the situation (being demonstrably bad at driving), coupled with a misunderstood pattern (the apparent impossibility of passing a road test) and a comforting explanation (I wasn’t a traffic hazard; I was being oppressed by the iron boot of the state) turned my botched parallel parking into a conspiracy theory. I passed on round four.
In short, conspiracy theories help us feel safe by providing an explanation for things that feel incomprehensible and beyond our control. This dynamic can influence us in measurably silly ways. Dutch psychologists, for example, found that if students were asked to describe a situation that made them feel powerless, they were more likely to subsequently believe conspiracy theories about a controversial train line near campus.
Moments of rapid industrialization and income inequality—like Rowbotham’s and arguably our own—are prime sources of precarity and uncertainty. In the United States, during the Second Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, for example, newspapers logged a spike in conspiracy-minded letters to the editor, which contemporary researchers attribute to laborers’ worries that new technologies would cast them into unemployment. Though newspapers were not yet in widespread circulation during Rowbotham’s youth, the First Industrial Revolution produced many of the same anxieties as the Second, including those that inspired Owen to build worker-friendly communities.
Seeking to build an anti-capitalist utopia in rapidly industrializing England, Rowbotham and Hodson took a tour of existing Owenite communes in an attempt to drum up support for their own efforts in Manea Fen. But while Hodson, a devout socialist who would eventually bankrupt himself for the cause, was focused on earning membership and finding financial backing, Rowbotham might have been hatching a secret plot. It was one, he would later write, that he had fomented since childhood.
Since he was a boy, Rowbotham would later claim, he had always believed he lived on a flat planet. Even in the early 1800s, this was supposedly enough to get the young Rowbotham into trouble at school. Though twenty-first-century Americans love to portray Brits from past centuries as Flat Earthers (for instance, a 2020 Super Bowl commercial depicted English peasants talking about Flat Earth), people have known the planet was round for thousands of years. By Rowbotham’s time, schools had long been teaching a fairly modern model of the solar system.
Rowbotham claimed he never took to his school’s teachings, and that he tried sneaking out of a school astronomy lesson, which he believed was bogus. Those doubts compounded when he searched the Bible for confirmation of his beliefs. He concluded that if Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the solar system—round planets orbiting a round sun—was true, then God was dead. “Again and again, the feeling came over me that as the Newtonian system appeared so plausible and so grand in its extent and comprehensiveness, it might after all be correct,” Rowbotham later wrote of his path to Flat Earth, “and, if so, there could be no heaven for man’s future enjoyment; no higher existence than on this earth; no spiritual and immortal creatures, and therefore no God or Creator.”
Was Rowbotham really a childhood Flat Earther? We only have his questionable word for it. But even before Manea Fen broke ground, Rowbotham had begun shaping it in a way that would doom the commune and put Flat Earth theory on the map.
His early membership in Manea Fen gave the young Rowbotham considerable power over the collective. Hodson named him secretary of the group, and Rowbotham went to work looking for a suitable location for the project. He found it on the shores of Cambridge’s Old Bedford Canal. Rowbotham was adamant about starting the commune on the canal banks. They “would form a beautiful promenade in the summer evening,” Rowbotham told his comrades. When other Owenites panned his choice (not enough winding river bends and birdsong for a paradise), Rowbotham doubled down, his conviction becoming tinged with fanaticism; he had to have his commune there.
Why not, in the spirit of revolutionary harmony, just move Manea Fen to one of swampy Cambridgeshire’s many natural waterways? Rowbotham’s fixation on the Bedford Canal might have been more than socialist devotion. He may have been guided by ulterior motives. Pin-straight and pancake-flat to the untrained eye, the Bedford Canal, nicknamed the Bedford Level, looked rather like a flat line stretching across the visible length of a flat planet. It was a gift to anyone hoping to argue that Earth is not a globe. Early in his work to build the Manea Fen colony, Rowbotham began making repeat trips to the canal to conduct experiments.
Earth curves at approximately eight inches per mile squared. (Real mathematicians use more precise formulas, but for very short experiments like Rowbotham’s, approximations are fine.) If you lie on your stomach and gaze at the horizon from one mile away, a barely perceptible eight inches of Earth will be hidden behind the planet’s curve. If you can see two miles away, thirty-two inches of Earth will have curved out of view. Six miles away, the ground will have dropped twenty-four feet below your line of sight. This has been more or less the established model of the planet since Pythagoras proposed a spherical Earth around 500 BCE.
Rowbotham, however, saw the world differently. When wading neck-deep in the canal with a telescope, he claimed, he could see the full height of boats sailing at the far end. When the canal froze in winter, his telescope could spot ice-skaters six miles away. Those damp sojourns would go on to haunt the future. One hundred eighty years after Rowbotham’s experiments on the canal, I’ve met dozens of Flat Earthers who have cited the nineteenth-century experiments in their own writings or, despite their internet connections, traveled to the canal themselves to re-create the “Bedford Level test.” These modern Flat Earthers may as well have been citing a fantasy novel. Rowbotham was incorrect (archaeologists who studied Manea Fen are doubtful he even had an adequate telescope) or outright lying (those same archaeologists tried replicating his experiment and found it to show a round earth). For years, he wouldn’t even discuss his findings with the masses, and none of his commune peers appear to have adopted his burgeoning theory.
At the time, however, Rowbotham had other problems on his plate. Manea Fen was, functionally, a mess, and people blamed him. When the colony opened on the canal banks around Christmas 1838, Rowbotham recruited a sordid crew, many of them more interested in drinking than working. Visiting socialists were appalled and accused him of gathering the laziest leftists he could find. (The accusations were a little unfair. The laziest man on the commune was probably not a Rowbotham recruit, but a man named Kirk who moved in of his own accord and immediately demanded the right to build a cave and live in it as a hermit. And even the commune’s most ambitious workers were likely cutting corners: archaeologists who studied the commune suspect the Owenites routinely dodged their taxes by selling bricks mislabeled as “drainage” materials, in what looked pretty clearly like a scheme to cash in on a tax loophole for toilet products.)
Regardless of fault in recruitment strategy, the utopia had other issues. Despite the commune’s socialist mission, some early workers claimed they received no pay for their labor. “I am without home and without bread,” one man complained when he abandoned the commune after three unpaid months. As for Manea Fen’s intellectual aims, its early occupants spent their time “finding fault with one another and with everything about them,” engaging in “useless discussions,” and micromanaging their comrades, member E. Wastney later wrote. Other Owenite communes and newspapers, already suspicious of Rowbotham’s project, latched on to these stories.
The sex scandal made matters worse. Hodson, Manea Fen’s official founder, believed in equality for women. Like so many male feminists of his moment and the future, however, his ideological commitment wavered in practice, and Manea Fen never had any significant female leadership. For some time during Rowbotham’s tenure, though, commune leadership condemned the institution of marriage as oppressive to women and encouraged more independent sexual relationships. At this, all the leading Owenite newspapers pounced. The commune, already unpopular, was now practicing free love and polygamy, they alleged. The scandal spread. Owenite committees across the country held inquiries. Hodson’s and Rowbotham’s names began to float to the top of these investigations, and disillusioned Manea Fen members began quitting the commune en masse. Hodson was ultimately able to shake free of the allegations. But Rowbotham, who had made a name for himself by picking an undesirable plot of land by the canal and staffing it with hard-drinking layabouts, was not so fortunate. In a desperate plea to keep his spot in the commune, he wrote an April 1839 letter to Owen, asking the socialist leader to help resolve “a little confusion in our Society” with regard to whether or not marriage was bad. He did not receive a response.
By summer, the Manea Fen commune had cast him out. Rowbotham “is neither secretary to, nor a member of this society,” a curt article in the commune’s newspaper announced. The whole utopia was bankrupt and abandoned less than two years later.
So there Rowbotham was, drifting around the wetlands with little to his name besides a handful of counterscientific beliefs. For a short time, he tried his hand at social missionary work, but complaints against the argumentative young man piled up. He dropped out in a matter of months, abandoning his efforts and denouncing Owenism. Further fringes were already calling him. Casting off the name that had become associated with a socialist sex scandal, Rowbotham rebranded as “Dr. Birley.” His lack of any doctoral degree was irrelevant. Rowbotham was about to plunge into a career that, to this day, rubs shoulders with the Flat Earth movement and other conspiracy scenes. He was about to become a huckster of miracle cures.
From OFF THE EDGE: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Theories and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Copyright © 2022 by Kelly Weill. All rights reserved.
