Learning about our past and how it affects the present

In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Britons under lockdown are witness to the toppling of one statue, the removal of another and local councils across the country promising a review of how history is publicly represented.

In Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston – a slave-trader who sat on the board of the Royal African Company – was toppled and dumped in the river (close to the dock from which his ships sailed). A statue of Robert Milligan – another slave trader and owner – was taken down from the West India Quay in London. In Belgium, a statue of King Leopold has also been removed and statues of Christopher Columbus in the United States have been attacked.

Sense of self under threat

These events have provoked a number of commentators to warn against the erasure of history. They also argue that calls to decolonise the curriculum, with which such actions are associated, must be stemmed, suggesting that the very foundations of Western civilisation and its institutions are at issue.

The sense of self of those objecting to the removal of statues seems to be intimately tied to the idea of Empire having been a force for good in the world. They are profoundly unsettled by arguments to the contrary.

On being confronted by the trade in human beings, for example, such commentators respond by saying, yes that was bad, but we did abolish the trade and did so on the basis of our ‘universalist’ values.

It is correct that Britain abolished the trade, after over 200 years of profiting from it, but this is not the only thing that was done. As Catherine Hall and Nicholas Draper have made publicly known, Britain also paid compensation of £20 million – or £65 billion (US$82 billion) in today’s money, or the equivalent of 40% of GDP – to those people who had lost property in the process.

Just to be clear, enslaved people were not compensated for their loss of liberty; rather the people who had owned other people as property were compensated for their loss. This money was used to fuel the industrial revolution, build country houses and endow public schools, Oxford and Cambridge colleges and art institutions, among other things.

In February 2018, the Treasury rather ineptly tweeted that ‘we’ – that is British taxpayers – did not finish paying off the bond that had been raised to pay out this compensation until 2015. Yes, current taxpayers and their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents – not just in the British national state, but across its colonial territories – paid through taxes to compensate British slave-owners and their descendants for ending the abomination that was slavery.

Reparations

This fact either rarely makes it into standard discussions of abolition or, if it does, there’s usually some muttering about the rule of law and the necessity to compensate for the loss of property, however distasteful we might find the fact that people – in a different time, with different moralities – regarded it as legitimate to own other people. Here, universalism allows an element of moral relativism.

This claim, however, is not then followed by agreement with the idea of more general reparations to compensate those across the colonial empire who had lost property. That is, those who were dispossessed from their lands, whose right to property in themselves was taken from them, or those whose resources were extracted – to the tune of US$45 trillion from India alone, as the economist Utsa Patnaik has calculated.

Nineteenth-century discussions

When contesting the idea of our history being represented, even glorified, by statues to figures such as Colston, Cecil Rhodes, Henry Dundas and others, a common response as mentioned above is, ‘but they lived in different times, the mores were different then’.

Those who avow their conservatism now might recall that their hero, Edmund Burke, castigated colonialism and hoped Europe might one day recover its civilisation. This is something which it could only do by remembering what it had done through its colonial endeavours.

In the early 19th century, there was a public discussion over the commissioning of a statue of Warren Hastings. Hastings had become Governor General of Bengal in 1772 in the midst of a famine exacerbated by East India Company practices which, by his own account, had led to the deaths of over a third of the population, that is, of over 10 million people. Burke, at the time, had sought his impeachment and 30 years on, a number of notable figures argued against his memorialisation.

Jeremy Bentham, the leading utilitarian thinker of the time, proposed that any statue to Hastings should include an account of his flagrant misdeeds, including the charges of bribery and corruption which had contributed to his (failed) impeachment.

Indeed, Bentham suggested, as Nick Robins notes in his book The Corporation that Changed the World: How the East India Company shaped the modern multinational, that the statue be inscribed with the following words: ‘Let it but put money into our pockets, no tyranny too flagitious to be worshipped by us.’

Instead, when erected, the inscription to the statue commended his ‘integrity’.

A failure to recognise contestations in the past contributes to the politics of selective memory that is reproduced every time we evade our past instead of confronting it directly and truthfully. Toppling statues, unsettling histories, can transform the ‘common-sense’ narratives we have about how the present world was configured. It can open the way for more productive conversations about how we address the ongoing inequalities and injustices that mark that world.

Gurminder K Bhambra is professor of postcolonial and decolonial studies at the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.