Edward Colston

For the BBC, it couldn't have come at a worse time.

After BLM protesters tore down a statue of 17th century merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020, problematic monuments were, at the time, if you all remember, were a hot topic in the UK.

And soon more were joining beanie vigilante David Chick in his efforts to get Gill's masterpiece removed from the Beeb's HQ, but with online petitions instead of hammers.

And it's not exactly hard to see why people hate this piece.

Um, and at the same time, Black Lives Matter in 2020, I think was a crucial moment.

It meant that a lot of the hidden parts of empire came to light because the activists who toppled Edward Colston's statue into Bristol Harbour were choosing a symbol that really crystallized these continuities between past and present.

The fact that Colston was a slave trader who trafficked 30,000 people, um, when he was deputy director of the African, Royal African Company, that he'd been at least partly responsible for 19,000 deaths in the holds of those trafficking ships, and yet he was still venerated, still on a statue in Bristol when I think to my mind, quite obviously, had he been any other, you know, white figure who had killed white people, 19,000 white people, they would have taken that statue down a long time ago.

So it brought to light these ongoing racial disparities.

And I mean, looking at it from the British point of view, the entire city of Bristol in itself was built off the back of the Transatlantic slave trade.

The major benefactor there was Edward Colston.

In fact, his name is plastered on everything within Bristol.

And that's a signifier to the contributions he made to the city of Bristol.

From the United States and the United Kingdom to the rest of the world, Black Lives Matter protest defaced and hauled down statues of slaveholders, confederates and imperialists.

Edward Colston was hurled into the harbour in Bristol.

Robert E. Lee was covered in graffiti.

Christopher Columbus was toppled in Minnesota, beheaded in Massachusetts and thrown into a lake in Virginia.

So We go through a couple of hundred years of history, looking at these movements to represent history through statues or challenge that.

What was the statue that was the catalyst for the book?

It was really the Colston statue, the Edward Colston statue in Bristol that was pulled down.

A lot of people will remember kind of during the pandemic that was pulled down and thrown into Bristol Harbour.

Ooh

... a statue of Edward Colston I can sell him.

[laughs]

[laughs]

I mean, I would maybe contend that the $20 group as well is...

Well, so the important thing that you said there is... like manipulate manipulating oneself successfully or not and i think the 20 group in this example that we're using um what's important to me is as long as they are not manipulating themselves into saying that that it you know that it's not immoral right which i i still contend the important part to me is that they know it's wrong right the interesting thing in in my book in this thesis that i'm going for and i just have to sort of bite the philosophical bullet is i'm like if we take this to like history if i'm like did people in the you know edward colston is someone i write about he's a slave trader whose stature was torn down during uh covid in bristol did he know or think that slavery was immoral deep deep deep down and my argument is actually yes right my argument is actually like Yeah, he did.

And when we do things like history will judge us, like history will invoke, will somehow reveal this to us somewhere in the future that we always knew it was wrong at some point.

That sounds like a kind of crazy thing for me to say, right? Because he was a slave trader.

I think we deep, deep down want to be good.

We want to know what's good and we want to do what's good.

Even Edward Colston, even Edward Colston, a slave trader.

So I don't know.

So this philanthropy was one way of perhaps easing an element of what they were aware of they were doing, but also really contributing to this social mobility, this upwards mobility.

I guess one of the most famous, again, I'm in Bristol, Edward Colston's plinth, where he once stood the statue, is right outside my office.

He is one of the most well-known slave traders of this particular era.

But how can Colston and his like, just to further the point you've already made, how can Colston and his like sometimes obscure the way this story could be seen?