As Wikipedia noted:
Edward Colston (2 November 1636 — 11 October 1721) was a Bristol-born English merchant, philanthropist, slave trader, and Member of Parliament. He supported and endowed schools, almshouses, hospitals and churches in Bristol, London, and elsewhere, and his name is commemorated in several Bristol landmarks, streets, three schools, and the Colston bun. Many of his charitable foundations still survive. A significant part of his wealth was acquired through the trade and exploitation of slaves
Until this afternoon a statue to his memory stood, quite extraordinarily, in Bristol.
It does not any more:
https://twitter.com/bristol247/status/1269662519280402433?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
The statue ended up in the river:
#Bristol statue of Edward Colston has been pulled down and pushed into the harbour during the #BlackLivesMattter march pic.twitter.com/ME1yxAhw7G
— BBC Radio Bristol (@BBCRB) June 7, 2020
Such symbolic actions are, of course, known during revolutions. They are not too common otherwise. But the time for a revolution on the issue of racial discrimination has arrived. The symbolism of what happened is appropriate.
I would also add something else. This morning I mentioned that we are now in the next stage of a phoney war and that we may well be in a lull before a storm. I mentioned the reasons why this storm might break. Economically I am sorry that Black Lives Matter campaigns will probably not have a significant short term impact, although in the longer term I hope the changes will be substantial. But what actions like this one suggest is that the mood in the country is far from quiet. If it's a hot summer for the government to keep public order in the face of mass disquiet on a great many issues may be very hard.
PS at 17.40pm: I also note this tweet posted in reaction by eminent legal commentator David Allen Green:
https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1269659426593681416?s=20
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Yes, I expect the Daily Mail with have a field day over Colston statue disposal as they did over the police horse affair in Whitehall yesterday. Certainly there is a change of mood in the country with heightened awareness after George Floyd’s murder and increasing precarity amongst the most disadvantaged world wide. The Tories may well find they have more on their plate than a simple barbaric imposition of lawn and order a la USA in what could be a pre-revolutionary situation.
I tend to agree with you. A long, hot summer with a lot of discontented, economically disadvantaged and out-of-work people could easily fuel extensive social unrest, acting also as a broader catalyst for other issues, as you say (such as the environment). Which in turn offers some excitement to those (probably mainly young men) simply bored & frustrated as a result of 3 months of restrictions. And so the snowball starts rolling. The government will be well aware of such latent danger. With Priti Patel resolutely at the helm, it will have the military on stand-by. Could get very ugly.
Richard Wolffe had this to say which rather endorses David Allen Green’s judgement – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc5xbUvljZM.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men …”.
Wolff not Wolffe. My typos are (almost) as frequent as yours 😉
Moi? 🙂
Agreed
Heartening to see. When will we pull down the statues of Gladstone? I ask since his family were big slave owners and he personally made sure they were compensated & then some when the british Empire (as was) abolished slavery in circa 1830. On a related note & by extension – it is worth keeping in mind that most of the compo paid by Uk gov for slaves was used to fund……..UK railways – with most UK track being built between 1830 and 1850ish. & a final mention has to go to the statue in Plymouth of that well known slaver…….Sir Francis Drake. British history – makes you proud – not.
On the other side you can place the West Africa Squadron, as well as the various bits of international strong-arming by the British Government that supported the RN actions against the slave trade.
I’ve also seen a strong argument by a legal friend that the compensation in the 1833 act was intended to save lives – slave traders and owners had a history of doing things like killing their slaves and claiming insurance (he referenced the Zong massacre,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre), legislated compensation being a way to minimise the risk of that.
I guess the point I’m making is that British history (like all history) is complex and full of shades of grey. Recognising the horrible parts doesn’t mean the good parts didn’t happen, any more than the good outweighs the horrible – the most important thing is to understand as much as possible, and to make sure that understanding is applied to our current lives. Particularly when that understanding can feed into addressing things like current racial discrimination.
The irony is that you and your ilk who offer nothing but cod intellectualism, truly believe that applauding those who seek to subvert history will somehow provide you with immunity from the rule of thuggery ? Your ignorance of history is merely one of your delusions
You think this is thuggery?
I suggest you look at universal credit to find that being institutionalised
Sorry, although it is hardly great art and the man certainly does not deserve it, I am not going to celebrate or condone wanton vandalism to a Grade II listed structure. (Extraordinary that the police seem to have let them get on with it. Brings to mind the 1831 Bristol riots.) Hardly anyone thinks Colston was any kind of hero any more, but many will be aware of his slave trading precisely because of this statue and other things in Bristol with his name on them. Whereas they are not aware of the many other wealthy slave traders (not to mention the people who funded their activities) whose legacy is perpetuated more quietly.
What was absolutely needed was something providing some context, making it clear that the statue was unveiled in the late 19th century to commemorate the philanthropy of Colson in his home city, but that he made most of his money from the misery of black Africans transported to a brutish life of slavery in the Caribbean and America.
What we also need greater recognition that the wealth of Bristol, and Liverpool, and Manchester, and London, and in fact the whole of the UK, has been built on the blood and tears of peoples subjugated by the British Empire in Africa and Asia and elsewhere. We celebrate our role in the abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade, while forgetting that we profited from it for centuries. Strangely, something not included in “Our Island Story” or taught at Eton to our lords and masters.
I’m not convinced that pulling down one statue goes very far with any of that.
The very fact that the matter is being discussed is the issue
It worked for that very reason
And it was very wise policing by Bristol
How could they have been used to defend the statue of a slave trader?
No, it is not a good thing that the media spotlight is on the pulling down of Colston’s statue; this “discussion” is taking attention away from the real problems of racial discrimination and modern slaving, which has been said to be at greater levels today than it was in history.
The symbolism of that statue falling will last a long time
Don’t ignore the power of symbols
And no one will put it back even although local Tories have fought very hard for a long time to keep it
These very matters – the narrow ones of the statue, Colston, and the legacy of the slave trade, and the wider one of institutional racism – have been under active discussion for years. Now the discussion is mainly about the vandalism instead.
Probably the statue should have been removed to a museum several years ago, and I dare say it will be once it is recovered.
What should the police have done in Bristol? Perhaps there was nothing much they could realistically have done, given their paucity of numbers, to deal with civil disorder involving thousands of people putting themselves and others at risk during a pandemic.
Black Lives Matter, including those at risk from coronavirus.
I’ve noticed much outrage over the event. Calls of criminals, scum, etc, who should be imprisoned.
I suspect many of the same people were amongst the global applause when the statue of Saddam Hussein was felled by a similar sort of angry mob.
Maybe this one was simply too close to home for them.
We are a divided society
Ministers will seek to exploit that
Just an aside that might interest some. Colston was involved with the Royal African Company. It was set up by the Duke of York. One of the people also deeply involved was John Locke, the philosopher whose work has informed the ‘moral’ justification for neo-liberal ideology.
Locke was happy to invest in the Royal African Company set up by the Stuart family and
run by the King’s brother James, Duke of York. The primary goods traded were 5,000
slaves a year and each of these unfortunates were branded DY (Duke of York) to indicate
whose property they were.
Locke’s central argument is given in sections 26 & 27 of Two Treatises of Government.
“Sect. 26. God, who hath given the world to men in common, hath also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life, and convenience….”
Perhaps realising this rework of Psalm 158 did not give quite the result he wanted he added
“Sect. 27. Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself.”
So there is the mindset, people of colour were abused, enslaved, tortured and murdered ergo they cannot belong to the set ‘men in common’ so they must belong to the set ‘inferior creatures’. The same justification was used in the Americas and India. It is the logic being used today. It lends validity to the inscription on Niemoller’s grave that ends
“One day they came for me and there was no-one left to speak for me.”
Thanks
Locke also inspired the Declaration of Independence. He wrote about the right to life, liberty and property. Jefferson changed the third to the “pursuit of happiness in” the preamble to the Declaration. He was also a slave owner and it is unlikely they would have felt inspired by that sentence.
Human beings are complex creatures and their effects, often not what they intended, are likewise. Trying to sort them into heroes and villains may be emotionally satisfying but often distorts reality to do so.
I hold to my view. Locke was an academic, a philosopher. More than that he lectured on morals. He wrote that slavery was abhorrent but chose to profit from it, not a moral or logical position. He argued that absolute power over another being (as in the divine right of Kings) was wrong but chose to make an income drafting the Constitution of the Carolinas that legitimised slavery. Morally ambivalent? For a philosopher that is a hypocritical stance to take regardless of contemporary attitudes. An unschooled peasant one might allow to escape such harsh judgement but Locke? He argued for Empiricism and claimed to espouse introspection but continued to work for the likes of the Lords Proprietors. He took the comfortable path not the moral one. I’m more of a Tom Paine man who did indeed shape the Declaration of Independence and earned himself a funeral with just 6 mourners. A common reward for holding to principle then and now.
Jefferson once said “I tremble when I think that my God is just.” He wrote to Governor Harrison of Indiana explaining that his strategy of trading with the Muscogee Creek nation was intended to drive them into debt and ‘negotiate’ a settlement coercing them out of their lands. He wrote “As to their fear, [the Indians] we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them”. Andrew Jackson ‘protected’ the negotiations by surrounding the tribe with 7000 troops. The Muscogee lost millions of acres of forest homeland and were expelled to a few thousand acres of prairie that fitted neither their lifestyle, skills or experience. No wonder Jefferson trembled.
I’m definitely with Paine…..
Colston was one end of a chain. At the other were the slave owners whose demand for slaves drove the trade. Their plantations needed slaves to make them economic. A constant supply was needed by the slave owners because a slave had a short life. Who were these men? Men who had stolen the land from the indigenous population, drove them out, annihilated them. Men who abused their slaves, who took females as “mistresses”. Men like Washington, Jefferson and many of the other “founding fathers”. Yet these men are above criticism and are celebrated.
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven……so Wordsworth contemplating the early days oif the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille. And bliss it is to be alive, and to be young, contemplating the BLM revolution. Tearing doen the statue of a slave trader is perhaps as symbollically significant as tearing down the Berlin Wall. Perhaps this iconoclastic fervour will be taken up by other groups suffering daily reminders of the gross injustices wrought upon minorities or oppressed peoples. Perhaps Oliver Cromwell’s statue. outside Parliament, he guilty of genocide and war crimes in Ireland, will be ripped from its plinth. And what of Winston Churchill, ordering the bombing of the Kurds in the 20s and refusing to permit famine relief to the Bengalis during the World War 2? But this spirit of revolt must take care that it does not slide into a kind of fundamentalist religious fervour, a puritanically inspired urge to destroy all statuary. paintings, artworks that are deemed sinful and offensive. Unfortunately, righteous fervour is not the monopoly of the righteous of the political left, and there have been groups and movements through history who have embarked on crusades against what they see as offensive public monuments. Remeber the iconoclastic movement of the early Byzantine Empire, Calvinist destruction of papist images in churches, Jansenism, Taliban destruction of Buddhist staues in Afghanistan, US troops pulling down the statues of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, Irish republicans tearing down the Nelson monument in Dublin, the post Gorbachev destruction of statues oif Lenin and Stalin, the Isis destruction of Baalbek amd other ancient ruins. If Cromwell is removed from his plinth, in Parliament Square, erhaps there will be those who, offended by the presence of a monument to Karl Marx , take hammer and chisel into Highgate Cemetery. Bliss it was to be alive, and to be young, very heaven when the Bastille fell – but Wordsworth turned againstt the revolution in France. And Bonaparte followed the revolution. Franco followed the Spanish republic. Has not the Arab Spring passed into winter? I applaud the works of BLM, but I fear there will be little long term achieved.
Echoing David Allen Green:
I think there is a recent precedent that took place in Barnard Castle where the police saw the offence as a minor breach of the law, I hope the Bristol police will be as equally understanding. However, I think there will be pressure from the Home office to crack down hard on those deemed responsible. If so, I hope all of the protesters who cheered them on are willing to support with an “I’m Spartacus” defence.
And a crowd funder will he needed
James O’Brien mentioned today on LBC that the debt accrued through compensation paid out to the owners of slaves had only recently been finally paid off. Is this meaningful? Were special bonds issued at the time? Who decides which chunks of the National Debt to redeem, and when?
I admit I think this meaningless in real terms