Bristol
In 1680 he joined the Royal African Company/RAC company, formally headed by the Duke of York/later King James II, that had a monopoly on the west African slave trade. RAC branded all the slaves’ chests, even the children, with the RAC initials. Colston apparently sold c100,000 West Africans in the Caribbean and Americas between 1672-89, and it was through this London Co that Colston became very rich.
Colston used the enormous slave profits to move into money lending and mercantile businesses. He must have known that slavery was an abomination, because he sold his company shares to William Prince of Orange in 1689, after the latter led the Glorious Revolution and took the throne.
Colston developed his fame as a philanthropist who donated to charitable causes like schools and hospitals in Bristol and London. He even served as a Tory MP for Bristol. He died in 1721 and was respectfully buried in All Saints Church Bristol.
Colston developed his fame as a philanthropist who donated to charitable causes like schools and hospitals in Bristol and London. He even served as a Tory MP for Bristol. He died in 1721 and was respectfully buried in All Saints Church Bristol.
To honour the great philanthropist, Colston’s name permeated Bristol. Note independent Colston school, Colston Concert Hall, two Colston streets and the high-rise office block Colston Tower. And the 5.5-metre bronze Colston statue has stood as a memorial on Colston Ave since 1895.
But modern campaigners vigorously argued that the hideous slavery business mean his contribution to Bristol had to be reassessed. They decided in 2018 to change the statue’s plaque to describe his slave-trading, but a final wording was never agreed upon.
Bristol slave trader Edward Colston's statue in Bristol
Dropped into docks, to cheers all around.
In 2020 a petition with thousands of signatures said that whilst history shouldn’t be forgotten, these people who benefited from the enslavement of individuals do not deserve the honour of a statue. This should be reserved for those who bring about positive change and who fight for peace, equality and social unity. We hereby encourage Bristol city council to remove the Edward Colston statue. Bristol Museum said Colston’s statue was remaining because he never traded in enslaved Africans, on his own account.
Eventually, during Black Lives Matters protests, frustrated protesters toppled the statue of Edward Colston from its plinth, graffitied it and threw it into the docks. Bristol Council quickly retrieved it, then asked conservators to stabilise the statue’s condition.
Protesters across the US tore down and vandalised statues and memorials of Confederate soldiers and generals, following George Floyd's death in Minneapolis in 2020. As long the offensive statues etc are removed to a museum and preserved for history, I would be perfectly happy not to see Colston. But no permanent destruction, please.
In 1768, when Capt James Cook (1728–79) set sail on the first of 3 voyages to the South Seas, he’d been ordered by the British Admiralty to seek a continent and take possession of it for the British King. Cook reached the southern coast of N.S.W in 1770 and sailed north, charting Australia’s coast and claiming the land for Britain in 1770. Cook transformed the way Europeans viewed the Pacific Ocean and its lands, dying for Britain in a Hawaiian Islands battle in 1779. His maps, journals, log books and paintings from Cook’s travels are preserved in NSW’s State Library.
A sculpture of Cook was erected in Catani Gardens in St Kilda, opposite the beach in Melbourne in 1914. And in 1973, a life-size bronze statue of Cook was sculpted and installed near Cook's Cottage, in beautiful Fitzroy Gardens.
Vandals poured paint on the Cook sculpture on Australia Day in 2018, scribbling the words No Pride beneath the feet, along with the Aboriginal flag. Then it was re-vandalised in 2019. That statue was covered with graffiti in 2020 when the words Destroy White Supremacy were scrawled on the stone. Similarly a statue of Captain Cook in Sydney was defaced.
unveiled to the public, 1879.
It seemed that historical monuments around the world have been broken or dyed as Black Lives Matter protesters marched through the streets. In Australia the protesters called out Cook over his links to colonialism in a nation built on Aboriginal genocide.
In rebellion against Australia Day, called Invasion Day by the protesters, a group doused the Catani monument depicting Captain Cook in red paint. The statue was defaced and its base was papered with flyers proposing the abolition of Australia Day celebrations. The vandalism attracted curious locals, before the paint was hosed off by council workers.
In rebellion against Australia Day, called Invasion Day by the protesters, a group doused the Catani monument depicting Captain Cook in red paint. The statue was defaced and its base was papered with flyers proposing the abolition of Australia Day celebrations. The vandalism attracted curious locals, before the paint was hosed off by council workers.
covered in red paint.
But the authorities were unhappy. Port Phillip’s mayor said they had had “a very beautiful, fitting and respectful service with our traditional landowners this morning”. Minister for Multicultural Affairs said “Vandals are trashing our national heritage and should be prosecuted. Australia Day should be a great unifying day for our country, as it has been for decades." But then why didn't the protesters send a petition from every citizen in Port Phillip area? Or negotiate through the local Council?
But the authorities were unhappy. Port Phillip’s mayor said they had had “a very beautiful, fitting and respectful service with our traditional landowners this morning”. Minister for Multicultural Affairs said “Vandals are trashing our national heritage and should be prosecuted. Australia Day should be a great unifying day for our country, as it has been for decades." But then why didn't the protesters send a petition from every citizen in Port Phillip area? Or negotiate through the local Council?
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31 comments:
The reevaluation of figures like Edward Colston and Captain Cook, once honored but now criticised for ties to slavery and colonialism, reflects a global push for historical accountability and more inclusive public memory.
Hi Hels,
The attempt to impose contemporary political and moral standards to an earlier historical context is always fraught with difficulties, nuances and, in my view, liable to "correct" one wrong with an even greater one.
Slavery during the C17th century was a common occurrence. Not only in Bristol but within Africa itself, the Middle East and many parts of Asia as well as in the Americas. In Russia, the peasantry were still made up of indentured serfs, a situation that persisted well into the C19th. Prior to the French revolution, most of Europe was run under a feudal regime. Witches were burnt at the stake and the Inquisition had only just begun to moderate its methods and practices. People were dispatched to Asutralia for simply stealing a loaf of bread.
Most of the founders of the USA were slave owners. And in the following 200 years, some part of humanity continued to perform acts of barbarity and depravity on the other part. Luckily today, in the West, many of the worst slavery-related abuses have been eradicated and the US is fortunate enough to have had a first black US President.
The correct way to think about this is to judge a person by the standards of their own historical era and not between today and other historical periods. People vandalising these statues aren't doing history. Or the attempt to understand within a proper historical context.
There are endless efforts to discredit Sir Winston Churchill because (being born prior to 1945) he held views consistent with someone born in a different era in human history. The problem is virtually everyone in the world, prior to 1945, would - by today's standards - be considered a racist. Either you simply dump all statues and monuments and historically important people born before 1945, or you assess each person as a flawed individual with both shades of light and dark -- like all of us.
One has the feeling, particularly in the identity-politics zetigesit of our times and the racial overtones applied to all contexts, that history is being used for an overtly political agenda.
I regard the mob who threw Colston statute into the river as a nasty human impulse to trash history and culture for a political cause - like the bonfire of vanities.
So, it should not go into a museum at all. But it should stay exactly where it was.
Otherwise we should move any and all historical monuments to museums. The Ancient Egyptian dynasties had slaves for centuries. Dismantle the Pyramids and the Sphynx and put it into a building. We can have museum staff with megaphones reminding everyone about the "slaves" … "don't forget the slaves". St Peter’s basilica should also be in a museum because it was a symbol of the Holy Inquisition, and on and on etc.
Thanks for the great blog post.
Big topic, the delivery of justice...
Thank you for making us think!!
All these statues are part of history no matter what country and it annoys me when people try to ruin them. As for Australia Day let it be the day Captain Cook landed in Botany Bay 29, April 1770.
We can't remove history as if it never happened. I think all statues and anything else pertaining to "dark" history should be moved to museums and used as learning opportunities, pointing out the wrongs that were done so that history shouldn't be repeated.
I understand very well the people of Africa who destroy statues and monuments of former slave owners. But this is our history, there is no escape from it. All these monuments can be removed from the streets and squares and placed in museums.
I think Liam's assessment, above, suggests a sensible way to consider history and its monuments. Every hero can be shown to have had feet of clay at one time or another.
roentare
just as peoples' views of history change from one generation to another, so does the attendant honour or criticism attached to events/people from earlier times.
Sometimes it is a shock. eg Welcome to Country by Bunurong man at the Melbourne Shrine yesterday (for ANZAC Day remembrances) was met with boos by neo-Nazi men and counter-responded by those "normals" who wanted to thank aboriginal soldiers in war. I was horrified by the neo-Nazis.
Liam
Thank you for a thoughtful anwer.
I agree that the correct way is to judge persons by the standards of their own historical era and not by the eras between their historical periods and today. But that leaves today's populations with dilemmas. What happens to those who run into celebrations of slavery, and feel sick to the stomach. Stay away from all public parks and avoid being confronted?
I was born after WW2 but if I ran into swastikas and sieg heils in a public park now, I would possibly have a heart attack.
Katrina
this is a problem for most nations and from most past eras. But the thing about the 19th and 20th centuries is that many of the memorials remain intact. So if the Roman gladiators had to slaughter each other for public amusement of the nobility etc, we would hardly know about it today.
Margaret
agreed. Noone has the right to vandalise statues and other relics that were loved by our ancestors.
So if we want to include those old statues, reflecting history then and history now, we have to add a plaque with the new evidence. Or we have to put the statues into context, inside a slavery museum.
River
I am currently writing a blog post on the commander's house/learning centre in Auschwitz whose glass windows still face the last standing gas chamber. The architect Daniel Liebskind agrees with everything you said, but those who supported Auschwitz's killing operations will use the new learning centre to honour the "true history of WW2".
Irina
it is very true that we have to acknowledge our own history, both honourable and particularly dishonourable contributions. And it is also true that modern people tend to discount their ancestors' lives.
In Australia, European colonisation from 1788 changed and ruined Indigenous Australians' traditional lives and territories, and took away their rights. Yet I learned nothing about this history in 12 years of schooling :(
jabblog
it is not difficult accepting that old history and its monuments were perfectly valid at the time. And old history can not be rewritten or ignored today.
But I think we need meaningful discussions, in schools and newspapers, about how to display events that would not be tolerated today. Public hangings, with the audiences cheering, were abolished in most Australian states in the 1850s. [Mind you, private executions within prisons continued until 1967]. And the last public execution in Saudi Arabia happed in 2022 :(
Since learning about King Leopold II of Belgium and his crimes against humanity and the millions murdered and tortured in the Congo I firmly believe his statues in Belgium and France should be destroyed. We don't have statues to Hitler, we should not have statues to King Leopold II. He was a wicked, evil man.
Rachel
whenever there was brutal colonisation in Africa etc, it was specifically carried out to create riches for the Europeans, not to wipe out the colonised nations' populations. But Europeans didn't ignore or deny the mass murders... that was simply history as it happened.
Now it is totally different. I remember a few years ago when protesters wanted the statue honouring Leopold II ahorseback at the gates of the Royal Palace removed. What did the City of Brussels do? What about in the rest of Belgium?
Olá boa tarde. Passando para desejar um excelente sábado, com muita paz e saúde. Passamos pela mesma reavaliação no Brasil. Com os personagens que trouxeram negros escravizados da África e escravizaram os povos originários (indígenas) no Brasil. O Brasil não foi descoberto pelos portugueses. Já tínhamos povos originários (indígenas) que moravam aqui, muito antes de portugueses, franceses ou espanhóis aparecem por aqui e em toda América Latina. Dizem que até os fenícios vieram bem antes. Sobre a Fábrica Bhering, qualquer pessoa pode visitar e conhecer cada lugar, claro que tem o dia e a hora certa. Grande abraço carioca.
It's a touchy subject. I don't think dubious (that's being nice) historical practices should be celebrated, but then, forgetting history is just as bad. I think it was a good idea to take the statue down, but there has to be another way to remember history. The good and the bad of people I guess.
Definitely you already had indigenous peoples living there long before the Portuguese, French or Spanish arrived in Brasil and throughout Latin America. As the New World did.
When the first European colonists arrived in 1500, Brasil had 11 million Indigenous people, living in tribes. Within 1 century, 90% were wiped out, via diseases imported by the colonists. Then enslaved in the rubber and sugar cane plantations. (https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/brazilian).
The question is: how are those centuries represented now?
Erika
Correct. Not only should dubious historical practices not be celebrated.. they should not be deleted from historical records.
Government apologies to oppressed communities sometimes come 200 years later, and sometimes the Stolen Generation (as the great grandchildren are called here) are helped with education and housing costs. But I think we need to be careful of destroying artefacts.
It is a complicated issue. The problem is that our values have changed over the centuries.
I remember the time when the Colston statue hit the water and the joy the crowds felt. But of course it was history and you can't swing history to represent what one feels in our time. I thought the best solution, was the 'truth' written in a plaque alongside the statue.
diane
everything changes.... our values, politics, religious views, government secrecy, inter-ethnic relations, corporal punishment, women's rights, distribution of food etc. If changes continue, this issue will continue to be complicated *nod*
thelma
thank you... I only wish more people understood that we cannot swing history to represent what we feel today. In any case, there is no unanimity on any moral issue, even today. eg in some Islamic countries, domestic murder is not a serious crime.
Yes, a museum is okay. By the way, I read that Joseph Banks, so long honoured, was okay with slavery, while his mother was involved with the anti slavery movement!
Sue
great example, thank you! Joseph Banks was definitely a man of his time. Whether he personally loved slavery or not, he supported the British Empire's growing wealth and power, and saw slavery as central to the Empire's booming economy.
In this role, Banks fostered good relations between scientists everywhere, and strongly supported scientific exploration for botanists. No wonder he was appointed President of the Royal Society for decades, a trustee of the British Museum and King George III's advisor for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. And in Australia, I expect his scientific excellence is still greatly valued today.
With respect to Bristol, I don't agree that it is "random vandalism". It was a very specific response to a lack of action by the council and was very symbolic.
Perhaps if answer is to keep these statues in place, they need to start being accompanied by plaques and displays detailing these people's crimes and why they are controversial. That way we don't erase history but highlight it
Mandy
I am so sorry about that expression. The statues MUST be saved, with explanatory plaques accurately describing the history for all visitors to the galleries. The decisions taken by Councils etc to remove the public objects might have been controversial, but those decisions were urgently needed.
I actually think that Cook should be honored a the worlds greatest mariner . What happened as a result of his exploration and "discovery" certainly needs to be examined. As for those in the slave trade there is nothing that can redeem them in my eyes however I think they should be collected together into a slavery park and each of them should be exposed in detail for the crimes they were involved in . If we wipe them out then their crimes will be forgotten . Just as keeping places like Auschwitz open to visitors is very powerful so is reading and understanding the horrors of the slave trade important . We also need to understand how much of our current prosperity is based on the labor of those enslaved
queen Victoria's favorite Uncle
mem
Cook's career years might have coincided with the peak of the slavery industry, but I haven't read any of his writings suggesting that he approved of, or profited from slavery.
Instead critics concentrate on his exploring Australia's east coast and paving the way for British settlement. Certainly his actions LED to the colonisation of the country, including violence against aboriginal populations and the loss of their cultures. Even if that was not true, he was of course a man of his time.
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