As the Black Lives Matter movement reignited in the United States after the brutal police killing of George Floyd in May 2020, protests spread across the world, with public ire often targeting statues and busts of individuals who were involved in slave trade, imperial war crimes and racist conduct. Racial polarisation in the US sparked debates around the British history of colonialism and slavery, and a demand for confronting unpalatable aspects of colonialism has gained momentum. As statues fell—such as that of Edward Colston in the English city of Bristol, a seventeenth-century officer of the slave-trading Royal African Company—the task of finding them a new home began. In November, the mayor of Bristol announced that Colston’s statue would be placed in a museum alongside placards from the Black Lives Matter protest that toppled the statute, by “early next year.”
Two months earlier, William Dalrymple, an author of several books on the history of British colonialism in India, suggested that the United Kingdom should place its statues of imperial heroes in a museum of British colonialism. He proposed that the British government, in order to confront the sins of its past, should build a museum of colonialism with these expelled statues. Dalrymple suggested that the museum could be modelled after the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a museum dedicated to narrating the story of a marginalised ethnic and racial group in the US.
Dalrymple was speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival London. He admitted to a cultural amnesia of colonial violence in the UK. History in British schools gives students the impression that “the British empire was always about liberating slaves and always about anti-racism,” he said. In fact, for many years, British colonialism in the UK has been viewed as a largely peaceful undertaking with hugely beneficial outcomes for the colonies such as railways, English education, and dissemination of democratic and liberal values. In 2004, the historian Niall Ferguson declared in a provocative book on the Empire, “The world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire.” He added, “Without the British Empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras.”
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