History Was Never Subject to Democratic Control
Edward Colston is lying down. Last summer, in the raging days after the murder of George Floyd, protesters dragged a 19th-century bronze statue of this 17th-century philanthropist from its plinth near the docks of Bristol, England, and dumped it into the harbor. Having been pulled out again, the statue currently rests—on its side—a few hundred yards away in an exhibition hall at M Shed, a historical museum. The bronze figure still carries the protesters’ daubs of paint. Its hands are red.
Colston’s statue was dumped in the water because in 1689, he became deputy governor of the Royal African Company, which held the monopoly on the British slave trade. His dethronement last year was one of the most visible symbols of British solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Unlike in the United States, slavery was never permitted on British soil—although it was enthusiastically embraced in its colonies—and so this country’s reckoning with the past has been slower to arrive. The statue’s fall forced Bristol to confront how much of its growth and prosperity was built on the buying and selling of human lives.
[Graeme Wood: A solution to the Confederate-monument problem]
However, the controversy over Colston did not end with the statue’s removal. The must now decide Colston’s
