LIKE GENERATIONS before them, the grey-haired men of the Colston Society processed into a church in Bristol in 2017 for their annual service in memory of Edward Colston, 296 years after he died. Prayers were said, hymns sung, “Colston buns” gobbled down. But, as the Bristol Post reported at the time, the service wasn’t advertised on the church’s website. An opaque reference by the vicar helped explain why. Colston was, he said, a man who “like all of us, with the benefit of hindsight, may have done things differently”.
On June 7th Colston drew a crowd again. These particular Bristolians, though, had less need of such understatement. They knew that the man long venerated as “one of the most virtuous and wise sons” of the city gave huge sums of money to charity. They also knew that he made much of it by trading slaves. As part of the global protests against racism triggered by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25th, they toppled the city’s statue of Colston and dumped it in the harbour.
Like the statue’s subject, its self-appointed removers were saluted as heroes by some and castigated as criminals by others. Priti Patel, the home secretary, wants them prosecuted for criminal damage.
Other historical figures were soon under attack. The authorities removed the statue of Robert Milligan, another slaver, from London’s docklands. Graffiti on Winston Churchill’s plinth in Parliament Square accused him of being a racist. The long-running campaign to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from outside Oriel College, Oxford, roared back to life. The Labour Party announced on June 9th that the councils it controls in England and Wales will reassess the “appropriateness” of their monuments.
But the Colston saga is especially interesting for the story it tells about Britain’s selective historical memory. The statue was not put up until 1895, a century and a half after his death and long after Britain had abolished the slave trade in its colonies. Yet Colston was revered; the plaque fixed to the plinth made no mention of slavery. On annual memorial days throughout the century that followed, Bristol’s schoolchildren remembered Colston as a philanthropist not a slaver. “It’s a city where it’s easy to forget,” says Richard Stone, a historian at Bristol University.
This collective amnesia is not confined to Colston. As Olivette Otele, the university’s first professor of slavery, points out, it is symptomatic of a wider neglect of Britain’s prominent role in the slave trade, in favour of celebrating later abolitionists such as William Wilberforce. “It is a very partial story,” she says. “We often talk about abolition, but it was 300 years of slavery and abolition came at the end.”
Distance partly explains it. Much of the human suffering took place thousands of miles from the merchants’ smart houses in Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol. In what historians term “the triangular trade”, the same ships ferried goods to Africa, trafficked slaves from there to the Americas and returned laden with commodities.
At least 2,000 slave-trading voyages left Bristol, which dominated the trade in the early 18th century before it was eclipsed by Liverpool. Even then, it continued to grow rich on the proceeds of tobacco and sugar harvested by slaves. In the city today, physical evidence of the trade is abundant, but obscured. For instance, the first generation of grand townhouses on Queen Square was built during—and financed by—the city’s slave-trading boom. “What does slavery look like in Bristol?” asks Mr Stone, pointing at the tree-lined cobbled streets. “It looks like this. Look at a lot of the city and that’s what you’ll be seeing.” Ms Otele is leading a project to unearth how the proceeds of the trade were spent in the city.
Even after a new biography of Colston was published in 1920, restating the extent of his culpability as deputy governor of the Royal African Company, which trafficked 84,000 people to slavery during his tenure, the city’s annual festivities continued to focus exclusively on his philanthropy. Generations of children attended schools named after him or went on trips to Colston Hall, a music venue that will soon be renamed. “You know the name before you know what it means,” says Marvin Rees, the city’s mixed-race mayor. “In my time growing up here, it’s not something you learned about...Politicians didn’t talk about it. Journalists didn’t talk about it. And between the two, they undermined people’s ability to talk about it.”
That began to change only in 1996, when Bristol hosted a “festival of the sea” that failed to acknowledge the city’s role in the slave trade. Following an outcry, a group of academics and activists set up a walking trail of slavery sites; the council named a bridge after a slave, Pero Jones. Yet plenty of Bristolians resisted removing Colston’s statue. Richard Eddy, a Tory councillor, even opposed adding a second, more balanced, plaque as a “slap in the face for true Bristolians”. Many white residents, in particular, struggled to cast aside the idea of a beneficent father figure they learned about at school. “I don’t think it’s quite Stockholm syndrome, but they were taught to revere this man,” says Mr Stone. “It’s unsettling for them to find out he isn’t saintly.”
But, as the activists proved this week, history is never over. The empty plinth already attracts crowds; the absence of a memorial is itself a memorial. Spurred on by the protest, Colston’s Girls School took down its own statue of the slaver and is considering changing its name. Activists hope a new slavery museum and a broader school curriculum will follow. For his part, Mr Rees’s priority remains dealing with the city’s present-day racial inequalities. As he puts it, “guilt don’t feed people, it doesn’t give people jobs.”
In the early hours of June 11th, the authorities winched Colston’s statue from the harbour, feet first. Soon, it will be on display again—in a museum, adorned not with hagiography but with the placards the protesters left behind. ■
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Pillaried"