Legacy or Residue?

Rethinking
Imperial and Colonial History during a
Racial Crisis
Posted: June 15, 2020
By Henry Irving
Weiao Xing, University of Cambridge

• @WeiaoX

While statues are being discussed and changes blocked, black people
have to pass them daily, seeing the congratulation of slave trading, their
horror and pain.”
Kate Williams, Professor of Public Engagement with History, University of Reading

The plinth that previously displayed the statute

of Edward Colston
In a long thread on Twitter, Kate Williams elucidated the convoluted (and unavailing)
discussions surrounding attempts to amend the plaque on the statue of Edward Colston
in Bristol. She argued that attempts to remove the sculpture through consensus had
proven impossible. On 7 June 2020, the statue was torn down and thrown into River
Avon.
Edward Colston, well-known in Bristol and an acquaintance of early modernists working
on imperial and colonial history, has hit top trending searches as a consequence of
George Floyd’s death. Although his statute has been debated for decades, its
significance was magnified by the current racial crisis.
Likewise, in early June, many Belgian colonial-era statues were vandalised in protest.
Amongst them are icons of King Leopold II, who was infamous for his bloodcurdling
oppression in nineteenth-century Congo. As memorials, these statues are symbolic of
powers in the colonial past, and such valorous or extreme behaviours reveal the
eagerness to break away from the definition from imperial and colonial history.
In the meantime, a calmer revolution has occurred at Imperial College London. Dating
from the mid-nineteenth century, the college unquestionably reflects the ‘glory’ of the
British Empire. Its Latin motto, coined in 1908, recognises these imperial and colonial
legacies – ‘Scientia imperii decus et tutamen’ which can be translated as ‘Scientific
knowledge, the crowning glory and the safeguard of the empire’. The College recently
decided to remove this motto from its coats of arms. As it officially confessed, ‘we choose
not to deny that history but not to be defined by it either’.
This decision is reflective of laudable anti-racism, but such actions raise further questions
given the importance of ‘empires’ that shaped the early modern and modern world.
‘Should the Rhodes Scholarship be renamed as well?’, one of my friends commented on
this literal avoidance of imperialism. This is far from a joke. Cecil John Rhodes, the
founder of the prestigious scholarship, accumulated his treasure from Africa at the same
time Imperial College burgeoned in the nineteenth century. Appeals to remove the statue
of Rhodes from Oriel College have been re-ignited after the protest in Bristol.
Imperial legacies reside and matter in higher education. From Oxford to SOAS, oriental
studies have long served as a way of perceiving the wider world, as well as a means to
train numerous colonial administrators, civil servants, and translators. Students and
scholars now scrutinise this history in their own research, sometimes tracing the lives of
earlier generations who studied in the same institution and casting their personal stories
into the history of the expanding British Empire. For example, Rhodes’ personal papers,
which are preserved at the Weston Library in Oxford, now shed light on Commonwealth
and African history. Based on similar sources, Sze Pui Kwan, who received her doctorate
from SOAS, illuminates British translators in nineteenth-century Hong Kong and their
agentive roles in the Empire’s knowledge circulation.
In the past few decades, post-colonialism has given rise to transformations in academia.
The rise of global history and the cutting-edge ‘oceanic turn’ also offer historians fresh
impetus to interactively re-examine the past that has been usually written in colonial
narratives. A glimpse of current senior chair professors of imperial and Commonwealth
history partially denotes historiographical changes in the United Kingdom. Born in
Guyana and raised in Barbados, Richard Drayton, a former Rhodes scholar, is a leading
historian of imperial history. Other experts, including Samita Sen, Saul Dubow,
and James Belich have similar postcolonial backgrounds. It is noteworthy that the
professorship Belich holds has itself been renamed – the Beit Professor of Imperial and
Commonwealth History was established in 1905 as the Beit Professor of Colonial History.
Nevertheless, much more work needs to be done to reinterpret imperial and colonial
history, and this work is in many ways harder than pulling down a statue or erasing a
motto. Returning to the case of Edward Colston, we might now expect an updated entry
in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the current version, modified in 2008,
Colston is introduced as a ‘merchant and philanthropist’, but in the whole piece, his role
as a slave trader is only disclosed in a brief and caveated sentence – ‘much of his wealth
is thought to have been made in buying and selling slaves’. Our comprehension of and
attitudes towards imperialism and colonialism are also critical. Indeed, I am astonished to
see the anachronistic term ‘suzerainty’ offensively used in relation to the crisis and
tension in Hong Kong in personal conversations and a few media reports.
The current anti-racial movement compels us to critically reflect upon imperial and
colonial history. The removal of statues and imperial mottos plays a part in this, but we
must be careful not to radically terminate discussions regarding their existence, as it may
result in an enormous loss of heritage and opportunities to comprehend the history.
Protests cannot wipe out dark pages of the past, and we should rationally face up to their
historical significance whilst participating in the history of our epoch. A series of conflicts
define this time of global crisis, from ‘Black Lives Matter’ to discrimination against East
Asians and female medical workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this sense, a more
diversified and decentralised understanding of imperial legacies needs to be encouraged
inside and outside academia.

About the author: Weiao Xing is a second-year PhD in history at the University of
Cambridge. His current research is concerned with cross-cultural encounters in the early
modern North Atlantic world, particularly in previous English and French colonies along
the eastern seaboard of America. He is enthusiastic about interdisciplinary approaches in
social and cultural history.
Special thanks go to Dr Henry Irving and Chen Zhang for their suggestions on this piece
of writing.
Tags: black history, Edward Colston, imperial history

Accessed on April 28th https://socialhistory.org.uk/shs_exchange/rethinking-imperial-and-

colonial-history-during-a-racial-crisis/