In view of recent events statues of royalty will be the next target of those whose disaffection with the world they live in will see them attacking Queen Victoria et al. Plenty of choice.

Very interesting, Cherry. I should think the producers did want to make clear points about Bristol’s role in slavery, which is still relatively unknown (I would say) to the rest of the nation. I am finding this history extremely fascinating, and quite different from the static stuff we were taught in schools: I’m not sure those cold images of serried rows of African people packed into in slave ships were helpful – not without accompanying images of all the rebellions and resistance. And as David Olusoga says, it’s the story of the cover-up and its consequences which is more relevant and intriguing.

People often don’t know who the people memorialised are, and they are overwhelmingly men. Who are all the men on horses in Central London? I think this is a very useful debate to be having, and museums can contextualise monuments better than plaques out in the open. I reckon statues are better in museums because otherwise “Don’t speak ill of the dead” starts to apply; we don’t usually list people’s crimes on gravestones.

I feel that there are two separate strands here: the first is the mindset of the slave owners and to me it is a bit like what we said about getting into the religious mindset of the people at the time. Things which seem so obvious to us now, for example the terrible cruelty evident in the graphic comments in the log of The Black Prince, did not presumably seem so gratuitously cruel to Laroche. It indicates the very sad attitude to other human beings that were current at the time. You only have to read about the very religious Dutch Reformists in the Cape when they settled there and lasting well into the twentieth century to understand that attitude.

The second point is about the statuary. To me that is a much more tricky and sticky point. I can see why people object to statues but I can also understand the difficulties it raises. Where do we stop? Can we ever please everyone? We must not hero worship these people but we also need not to forget them and what they did. Maybe they do belong in a museum. Statues of the ‘great’ in public places have always made me uneasy.

It’s a brilliantly rich can of worms you have opened there…

I’m planning a future blogpost on the etymology of the word “mob” – so watch this space!

David Olusoga is a hero. I have recorded those programmes and will certainly catch up with them.

Yes, Huguenots were certainly active in the abolitionist campaign, and I had better blog about that pretty soon, to balance this out! The Doddington Church which has the Good Samaritan window is in Lincolnshire, but the Kent church looks fascinating. Of course the Puritans who tore down medieval art from churches passionately believed such things were idolatrous – the work of the AntiChrist – so they had to be destroyed before the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Again, fascinating to think about that mindset.

You make some great points, Hephzi, and I’ll follow up those links; the Cabinet really does need to up its game on black history.

I am so fascinated by the mindset of religious people in the seventeenth century, and how they got their heads around slave-owning, and even slave-trading, is a mighty question.

Your final sentence says it all, Lyn. How interesting this all is! These men were glorified even though they were known as scoundrels in their own time.

I think the Laroche family lost that estate in Antigua due to James’ bankruptcy, so they won’t have got compensation; but I’m not absolutely sure.

I note that LaRoche’s wife owned an estate in Antigua. I wonder whether the family were compensated when slavery was abolished there in 1833?

It is also interesting that Colston’s statue was not erected until 1895 (I think), over 170 years after his death. And so the erection of that state involves a rewriting of history at a particular time in the history of empire. Likewise Clive of India’s statue was not erected until 1905, almost 150 years after the Battle of Plassey. In his time he was regarded as an out and out scoundrel. But in 1905 Britain wanted to assert a particular view of Empire and imperial history.

Boris Johnson’s comment that removing statues of controversial figures is “to lie about our history” is a poor response to the situation. In order to justify the capture and owning of human beings as slaves, the very identiies and history of those people were stolen from them and suppressed by the Europeans who transported and disenfranchised them. In so doing, these Europeans also denied the roots of their own culture, attempting to cut off the knowledge that the civilisation of Ancient Greece, which they saw as the proud cradle of their own, was in fact founded on the earlier great civilisations of Africa – Egypt – and the Near East.**

Even now, with the injustices of the Windrush scandal, we hear this month that the “hostile environment” of the Home Office has partly been caused by simple ignorance of Britain’s colonial history, and that of our own country, where those people now being harmed and disrespected were first invited to come and settle here to help us at the end of the second world war.***

* https://www.virgin-islands-history.org/en/history/colonial-power/the-moravians-missionaries-in-the-west-indies/

** https://www.dukeupress.edu/black-athena-writes-back

*** https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/19/windrush-report-condemns-home-office-ignorance-and-thoughtlessness

Yes, both those things are true of Quakers, but it’s also true that some Quakers were involved in the slave trade, and more were slave owners. That doesn’t negate the abolition work they did, particularly the risky work of the underground railroad.