A Statue Records the Year It Went Up

Edward Colston was born in Bristol in 1636 and made his fortune in London as a merchant. Part of that fortune came from the Royal African Company, which held the English monopoly on trade with West Africa and carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Colston was involved with the company through the 1680s and early 1690s and served as its deputy governor. In those years it shipped something over eighty thousand people, of whom many thousands died on the voyage. He gave large sums to Bristol for schools, almshouses and churches, and died in 1721.

The statue went up in 1895.

That gap, a hundred and seventy-four years, is the most important fact in the whole argument, and it is usually left out. The bronze was not put up by people who knew Colston, or by a city recording its history as it happened. It was raised by late Victorian Bristol, at the end of a century in which the city had built a cult around its benefactor: schools named after him, societies dining in his honour, a Colston Day. The inscription on the plinth called him one of the most virtuous and wise sons of the city. The statue is a document, and what it documents is the judgement of 1895.

For decades people asked for that judgement to be revisited. In 2018 the council agreed to add a second plaque setting out his part in the slave trade. The wording was argued over, revised and cast in bronze, and in March 2019 the mayor halted its installation because he judged the revised text had been watered down. Retain and explain had been tried in Bristol, and the city could not agree what to explain.

On 7 June 2020, during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in the United States, a crowd pulled the statue down, dragged it to the waterside and rolled it into the harbour. It was pulled out four days later. Four people were charged with criminal damage, and in January 2022 a jury acquitted them.

Now the argument everyone has met: removing statues erases history.

It does not, and it is worth being precise about why. The history of the Royal African Company is in its ledgers, its ships' records, its correspondence, and in the scholarship built on them. None of that was in the harbour. What went into the harbour was a public honour, a decision by one generation that a particular man deserved to stand above a street in bronze. A statue is not a history book. It is closer to a medal, and a medal is the kind of thing a later generation is entitled to reconsider.

That disposes of the erasure argument. It does not dispose of the serious one, which is about process. A city has councils, consultations and courts precisely so that contested decisions are not made by whoever is in the square on a given afternoon, and an honest defence of what happened in Bristol has to answer that. The strongest answer available is the one the plaque supplies: the slower route had been tried for years and had stalled. Whether that justifies what followed is a real question, and it is not the same question as whether history was erased.

What happened next is the most interesting part. The statue was not melted down and not returned to its plinth. It went into the city's museum collection and was shown at the M Shed lying on its back, the graffiti and the damage left as they were, beside placards from the protest. A consultation drew nearly fourteen thousand responses, and most of those who answered wanted it kept in a museum.

Lying there, the object records three dates rather than one: a life that ended in 1721, the decision of 1895 to honour it, and the decision of 2020 to stop. That is more history than it carried when it stood upright, not less.

The British government's policy, announced in 2021, is retain and explain: keep contested monuments and add context. There are other models. Budapest's Memento Park, opened in 1993, gathered the city's communist-era statues in a park on the outskirts, where they are visited as history rather than honour. Each of the options, leave, explain, move or destroy, has a case. The one claim none of them can rest on is that a statue was ever a neutral record of the past.