HISTORY, ETC: CHUCK 'EM ALL IN THE RIVER, AND SEE WHO SWIMS
A British jury has decided that attacking old statues is fine, so long as you're on the right side of history. But who decides what that means?
Early in the autumn last year I sat at a waterfront bar in Bristol and drank a few beers with my friend Matt. It was a trendy bar, the sort of place that had a particular glass for each type of beer, and a complex cocktail list that made for slow service.
Matt is a musician. He has lived in and around Bristol for a lot of his life. So he knows the place, in a way I don’t. As we sank our pints, he pointed to a spot a hundred yards or so away.
‘That was where they chucked the Edward Colston statue in the river.’
I rolled my eyes. Made a start on a historian’s diatribe about the ethics of statue-hunting, taking in examples from Ancient Rome to the modern United States and setting out a reasoned argument for sensitive conservation over wanton, crowd-led vandalism.
But as I did so, I was surprised by the energy with which my old friend defended the Colston-topplers. His argument wasn’t about grand philosophical positions on public art. It was about the city of Bristol itself.
‘People here wanted it gone,’ he said. In other words, the fall of a statue depicting a slaver-philanthropist was something Bristolians had decided for themselves, albeit through the rough justice of a mob rather than the sensible deliberations of public authority.
That thought stuck with me. And it returned this week, when four of the crowd involved in hauling down the Colston statue and throwing it in the river were acquitted of criminal damage by a jury.
The essence of the argument is: sometimes in history, you just had to be there. But is that right? And what are the consequences of the Colston jury’s decision?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to History, Etc to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.