Caroline Elkins - Legacy of Violence : A History of the British Empire

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

On the overcast afternoon of June 7, 2020, thousands of protesters flooded Londons streets where their presence threw into relief an emptiness that the global pandemic had brought to Britains capital. The void of pedestrian and traffic hum amplified the demonstrators voices as they reverberated through the citys edifices dedicated to the empire. Indeed, it was the empire and its conflicted past that fueled the crowds demands. They marched to Westminster, where an oversize statue of Winston Churchill beckoned Parliament to take care of the liberal order that he had so valiantly championed and protected during the high noon of Britains empire. In death as in life, Churchill was a figure of outsize proportions, and his often-repeated quotes have stood the test of time. Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, he famously intoned in 1941 to a cadre of impressionable young men at his exclusive alma mater, Harrow School.

Statue of Winston Churchill, Parliament Square, London, June 7, 2020

Demands for racial justice swept through Britain at a time when COVID-19 struck its Black population with the same disproportion already evident in prison populations and police violence. Churchill was not the only historic figure now held to account. Around the time his statue was defaced, another physical testament to empire also went the way of history. In Bristol, a city built on profits gained from the trade and labor of enslaved people, Black Lives Matter demonstrations ignited from backdrafts across the Atlantic. Edward Colstons statue became the target of protesters fury, and its not difficult to understand why. Colston was director of the Royal African Company when it forcibly transported around eighty-five thousand African men, women, and children, in conditions so inhumane that nearly a quarter of them perished before they reached the Americas. For over a century, his statue was a monument, for some, to the extraordinary beneficence that Colston bestowed on the city. For others, it represented a nation that still boasted an imperial pride built not only on shameless racial assumptions but also on the backs of countless enslaved and colonized peoples across Britains empirean empire that, in its heyday, covered over a quarter of the worlds landmass and claimed 700 million people as its subjects. The protesters rendered their judgment when they toppled Colstons statue and launched it into the River Avon.

The silence of Colstons final resting place stood in stark contrast to the debates over the past that haunted and divided the nation. In the eyes of many, Britain had been the purveyor of a benign imperialism that was the standard-bearer for all other empires. For certain, there were blots, like the trade in enslaved peoples, but on historys balance sheet, any ill-begotten wealth had been more than atoned for through Britains largesse. When empires aperture widened to the postemancipation nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the narrative persisted and produced imperial icons like Cecil John Rhodes. Founder of the British South African Company, Rhodes enacted a grandiose Cape to Cairo vision with an oppressive hand of economic extraction. He was, according to Oxfords Oriel College, a businessman and a political deal-maker who prosecuted wars in pursuit of his goals. Upon his death in 1902, he bequeathed 100,000 to Oriel College, though the bulk of his money went to the Rhodes Trust and its scholarships for students from the British colonies, the United States, and Germany. For more than a century, Rhodess statue has gazed at Oxford studentsa select few of whom hold the mineral magnates prestigious fellowshipas they walk past Oriels north side. This, despite vehement calls for its removal.