As Seymour Drescher has remarked, ‘monuments alone will not, in themselves, stimulate a constant rethinking of the past. Such links need to be unearthed, contextualized and made explicit. Yet, as this article will first demonstrate, a significant proportion of the individuals commemorated by public statues in London during the long eighteenth century had important links with the slave-trade or plantation slavery. Despite this, London's public monuments and their connections with slavery have remained curiously under-researched. London was the largest slaving port in late Stuart times, and the City remained the commercial centre of what was, by the Georgian era, the world's premier slaving nation. With these thoughts in mind, it seems fitting to consider how far statues and public memorials in the nation's capital represent Britain's involvement in both transatlantic slavery and its abolition. Even dead statues have the power to provoke.
Subsequent vandalization of the statue occasioned a furious public row and revealed deep local divisions about multiculturalism and civic identity. This representation of Colston as a saintly benefactor only began to be challenged in the late 1990s when his slaving connections were publicly revealed. The late Victorian statue of the merchant Edward Colston (1636–1721) in Bristol aptly illustrates the point.
1 The resurrection of ‘dead’ statues into living popular memory is dependent then on the specific historical and political context. Certainly recent scholarship around Holocaust and slavery commemoration attest the deeper socio-political and cultural tensions such monuments can continue to evoke. This derivation, she argues, shows that the type of memory intrinsic to the concept of the monument is not neutral but has the power ‘to stir emotions’. Should there, for example, be a public monument marking the slave-trade's abolition? Are monuments impediments rather than incitements to public memory? Or are they a means by which a group or community attempts to establish its collective memory and thereby affirm its very identity? As Françoise Choay reminds us the word monument comes from the Latin ‘monumentum’, itself based on the word, ‘monere’, meaning to warn or recall. After the Emancipation Act, Britons would discover that their interactions with other nations uncovered more and more anti-slavery problems foreign and imperial policy hence became enveloped by these dilemmas.In the run-up to the two-hundredth anniversary of Parliament's abolition of the British slave-trade debates have raged over what form such celebrations should take, whether apologies or reparations should be made and who precisely should be commemorated. However, British anti-slavery politics had never existed independently of imperial and foreign policy anxieties or of the perceived and suspected actions of other countries. What united differing Victorian views were was the presumption that the British state should give powerful consideration to the nation's impact on slavery and the slave trade abroad. Among abolitionist campaigners, within the British public, and throughout government and the state, there remained great divisions over the best tactics-and sometimes over the right strategy too. However, her reign would see a further institutionalization. It shows that Britain had been developing anti-slavery state action for the fifty years before Victoria's accession. This chapter considers the evolution of Britain's anti-slavery policy.