Posted by Minifuma on 11/6/2020, 11:10 am, in reply to "Historic England"
I'm a historian by trade so I can't resist this one
Statues are not 'history' as such: if you take one down, the past - and its ramifications in the present - does not disappear. It's more useful to think about statues as representing the public image of a society at any given time. In the case of the Colston statue, it was put up in the late 19th century - a period when Britain still wanted to celebrate its imperial power, and when it was still generally believed (certainly among the ruling class) that the British were racially superior to other peoples. Colston was an example of a 'great man' from the past who generated wealth (in reality, through the subjugation of other people) as the Empire expanded.
Most right-thinking people don't believe in racial superiority anymore, nor that Britain should celebrate slavery, so that statue does not do a very good job of portraying Britain today - and it certainly isn't doing any 'teaching' of history. If it was a great work of art, a particularly notable sculpture, there might be some logic for keeping it on that basis (a claim to 'historical importance'). But it's not; it's a ten-a-penny late-Victorian bronze statue. If people in Bristol strongly feel that it no longer represents the society they want it to, removing it makes total sense (whether the means justify the end in this case, though, is a different debate!). Physical aspects of the past are removed all the time. How many towns and cities look the same today as they did even twenty years ago? Let alone 120, like when the Colston statue was put up. Time can move on without history being 'erased'.
Like David Olosuga puts it, taking down the Colston statue does not erase history, it is history. Colston will remain a topic in the history books and in museums, like slavery will more generally, but the act of removing a reminder of him in the landscape is a way of marking a new stage of what we think is worth celebrating. In future years, I am almost certain that historians will write about the taking down of the statue - so by no means will any history at all have been 'removed'!