The Peace Indaba with the Matopo Rebels, featuring Cecil Rhodes (centre). From Robert Baden Powell’s The Matabele Campaign: being a narrative of the campaign in suppressing the native rising in Matabeleland and Mashonal
This is not the first time statues have fallen, of course, nor is it the first time their removal has caused anxiety. The twentieth-century collapse of the world’s empires saw imperial iconography hauled down on a massive scale, but the story is not straightforward. In 1945, statues of German rulers were quickly pulled down and replaced by Polish cultural figures in the parts of Poland that had recently been part of the German empire. In Indonesia, statues of Dutch Governor-Generals were dismantled within months of independence in 1949. In India, the great fall took longer. One of the first statues to come down was a figure commemorating the death of Britons during the ‘mutiny’ of 1857 in Kanpur, but it was moved by the city’s remaining British residents to protect it from Indians let into the previously white-only park where it had been housed. But by the 1960s, Indian state governments were pulling down imperial statues in the hundreds to articulate a more confident sense of cultural nationalism, causing diplomatic protests from Harold Wilson’s government in the London.
More recently, statues of Lenin in Eastern Europe were targeted as the Soviet empire collapsed. Liberal leaders like Árpád Göncz in Hungary and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia removed statues to symbolise the break with the past and the emergence of a new, free and democratic public space. More recently, Lenin has been a political football in Ukraine, with pro-Russian governments trying to prosecute anyone removing his statues, but pro-Western leaders pulling them down with zeal. During the Euromaidan revolution of February 2014, it was ‘raining Lenins’, and only two were left in the country, both in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
The removal of statues to the slavers Edward Colston and Robert Milligan, and the decision to remove figures of Robert Clayton, Thomas Guy, Robert Baden-Powell, and most famously the imperialist, Cecil Rhodes has elicited a frenzy of anxiety from observers on the right, including a series of eight tweets from the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. With rhetoric about ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘revolution’, the more apoplectic among these conservative critics imagine this wave of anti-imperial iconoclasm marks the onset of a new regime. Those asking questions about statues are ‘playing an irresponsible and dangerous game’, pushing us down a ‘slippery slope’. For Peter Hitchens, they do indeed mark regime change, indicating the end of easy-going liberal-conservative Britain. They fear its replacement with an aggressively egalitarian, ethnically diverse but intellectually monolithic social order which has no time for free speech.
Regimes never break cleanly. Hitchens and his allies are right that the removal of statues to slavers and imperialists marks an end. But their timing is badly out of kilter. Like the fall of Lenin in Kiev in 2014, the dismantling of statues now marks the end of a regime which fell a long time ago, the statues are shards of an older social and political order protruding into a world now governed by very different ideologies and principles.
The world the statues evoked ended in the decade or two which followed World War II. Britain’s empire collapsed then, along with all conceivable rational, intellectually coherent reasons to defend it. But the statues are of older vintage still, for it would have been difficult to put up such statues at any times after 1918.
The statues now under scrutiny were put up predominantly between the Indian uprising of 1857 and the end of the First World War; a remarkable period of domestic institution-building which overlapped with a conservative culture celebrating hierarchy, conquest and the violent spread of British rule overseas. They emanate from a moment in which intelligent commentators thought the world should be classified not into equal self-governing nations, but onto an evolutionary scale of superior and inferior races, progressive and stationary, civilised and savage, organised into empires. Many (Robert Baden-Powell and Cecil Rhodes were certainly two) thought conquest and war would allow the better societies to thrive, and the weaker ones to die out. They thought institutions were needed to instil discipline and martial virtue to ensure Britain (and “Britain” here included people of British descent in British-ruled territories throughout the world) would dominate and not slip back.
That imperial moment led many local worthies to plant imperial heroes on plinths throughout the towns of the UK. This imperial mindset had its critics, of course. Every imperialist statue was, then as now, the subject of controversy. When Lord Curzon tried to have his statue of Robert Clive in a pose of violence placed in King Charles Street at the end of the First World War, he was opposed by the liberal Secretary of State for India, John Morley, who thought it was inappropriate to celebrate a conqueror of India when he was trying to negotiate some kind of power-sharing in the subcontinent. Morley wanted Garibaldi placed there instead.
But as their counterparts were pulled down across from Africa and Asia, since the 1950s and 1960s these fragments of Britain’s imperial past have been forgotten and ignored, until recently more likely the repository for bird-shit than political rage. Britain since the middle of the twentieth century has been a post-imperial nation, trying to make its way in a world that, with a few exceptions, has abandoned empire. Political dominance over other peoples, with the full trappings of union flags, governor generals and red uniforms, came to an end dramatically in the two decades after Lord Mountbatten stage-managed the pretence that Britain left India peacefully and gracefully in August 1947. Politically and constitutionally, the world decolonised more than half a century ago. Today words like ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’ are flung about in a loose way on both the left and the right. US actions in Iraq have been described as ‘American empire’, or the economic dominance of multinationals an instance of ‘neocolonialism’. But the political reality which late nineteenth and early twentieth century statues celebrated ended long ago.
Now, contemporary Tories celebrate values directly in opposition to those upon which their ancestors based their defence of empire. The implicit discrimination of the Windrush scandal and the ‘hostile environment’ notwithstanding, the Conservative party is of course explicitly anti-racist, desperate to emphasize the multi-ethnicity of its cabinet. The early twentieth century conservative party was protectionist, championing tariffs to protect national and imperial trade sometimes at the expense of electoral victory; contemporary Tories are free traders and economic liberals to a man and woman. Perhaps most importantly, the modern, anti-EU Conservative Party believes in the sovereignty of the nation-state, and imagines the world to consist of independent, self-governing societies that have a right to resist the encroachment of external forces on national life. Tory imperialists (Curzon was a good example of this thinking) believed the opposite, in the agglomeration of societies into large multi-national units. They used arguments about the need for big states in a competitive world familiar to present-day supporters of the European Union. Many wanted what they called imperial federation: an imperial single market and customs union.
Until 1945, Conservative-voting intellectuals often told celebratory stories about empire, articulating coherent ideological statements in its defence, and, as it looked increasingly endangered, publicly lamented its probable decline. But regime change occurred quickly after the end of World War II, when the brief belief that global conflict had proven the value of imperial unity was dashed first with the collapse of British rule in India, then recognition that holding on to imperial territories elsewhere was impossible. Just as importantly, the dominions were moving out of the British and into the US orbit. By 1960, empire had been so fundamentally abandoned that Harold Macmillan could stand before the South African parliament and celebrate Black African nationalism in his ‘Winds of Change’ speech. His motive, of course, was that winning the Cold War in Africa required empire to be jettisoned or else the Soviet Union would gain ground. But the shift from empire to the nation state was striking.
As also was the absence of rival voices. By the mid-1950s, the most articulate Conservative intellectuals had either become committed anti-imperialists (for example Enoch Powell) or simply remained silent on the subject. There was no unambiguously celebratory (big C or little c) history of the British empire written by a Conservative-voting writer until 2003 and Niall Ferguson’s Empire, and that celebrates empire as something it was not: a vehicle for diffusing free trade. Until Iraq, even for Tories, empire was consigned to the irrelevant past. The useful, celebrated past consisted instead of the moderate, decent, down-to-earth lessons learnt from the supposedly continuous history of an insular, island nation state over many generations.
Of course empire survived, in a complex and fragmentary but usually hidden and often unspoken way: in the portraits and toasts of almost entirely Conservative-voting army officers’ messes; in the racially-inflected sociability of elite provincial Britain; in the assumptions behind a number of sectors of the British economy, the City of London perhaps, mineral extraction maybe, and potentially also in gentlemanly ethos of the Civil Service. Empire was long a connecting thread for much of the British establishment if only because so many of the British elite were involved in running it. But it survived as networks and connections, as a culture or as a sensibility largely at odds with the official, public discourse of post-war Britain, which, even on the right, championed freedom, political equality, and the sovereignty of the nation state. Racism survived too, of course, but didn’t overlap neatly with this hidden culture of empire. Post-war racism was as much about how Britain responded to life after empire as it emanated from it.
My point here is to highlight the strange predicament of those protesting against the downfall of statues. They defend statues which celebrate figures they don’t particular care for – Hitchens is clear how little he cares for Rhodes - who symbolise values they have no interest in defending, but to whom they have a vague sense of emotional affinity. They talk of a ‘cultural revolution’, but don’t defend the order the supposed revolutionaries are trying to replace. Their worry is not that anything specific which the statues stand for might be dethroned; it is with the act of dethroning, and the idea of conscious change in our public realm itself.
Here, for all the talk of statue protestors’ dislike of free speech, the defenders’ distrust of public conversation is striking. If we begin to review statues, as Sadiq Khan has proposed, how will we decide who should stay or who should go? How can ‘we’ possibly agree, both on who comes down and who replaces them? What moral criteria should be applied? The statue defenders believe none of these questions can be answered within public debate. The public, they think, can be mobilised to vote in plebiscites or elections, or to express its views in opinion polls, but it cannot be trusted to engage in reasoned dialogue. The argument betrays an incredible lack of faith in the democratic capacity of this society and a fear of debate.
The argument for reviewing statues is this: these celebratory figures are part of our public realm. They should reflect our collective sense of what we as a society value, our sense of the common good. Statues are not just history. They are part of the present. They were, after all, put up to draw a connection between the actions of people in their past to their present. Their placement was contested then, just as it is now. The balance of arguments about what we care about changes through time, and so the figures whom we celebrate in the public realm should change too, just like our buildings do.
We, the citizens of the polities of Britain, England, or our towns and cities, are capable of a mature and sustained debate about what and who we value in our history, about the goods we share in common, about which elements of the past we can celebrate and which move beyond or challenge. We are capable of reaching a consensus about who should stay and who should go which doesn’t fall prey to either a moral absolutism which condemns everything or a denial of the evils of the past which condemns nothing. The question is not whether each individual was morally pure, but whether they connect with what we want to celebrate now. My guess is we’d keep Churchill and Gladstone, but remove Robert Clive and Baden-Powell. The empty plinths which will emerge are an opportunity for a national conversation about the relationship between the past and present which is long overdue.
Professor Jon Wilson is Professor in Modern History and Vice-Dean at King’s College London. His most recent book, India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, was shortlisted for the Longman-History Today prize. He is currently working on a multi-national history of everyday concepts of government from the 1945 to the present.