More on statues and the British empire: 'The sense of self of those objecting to the removal of statues seems to be intimately tied to the idea of Empire having been a force for good in the world. They are profoundly unsettled by arguments to the contrary' ... 1/n
On being confronted by the trade in human beings, the response is usually, 'but we abolished it'. It's correct Britain abolished the trade - after over 200 years of profiting from it - but this is not the only thing that was done ... 2/n
As Catherine Hall & Nicholas Draper have argued, Britain also paid compensation of £20 million – or the equivalent of 40% of GDP – to those people who had lost 'property' (that is, the human beings they owned) in the process ... 3/n ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
Enslaved people were not compensated; rather people who had owned other people were compensated. This money fuelled the industrial rev, built country houses, endowed public schools & art institutions, among other things. See @ColonialCountr1 project: www2.le.ac.uk/departments/en…
In response to the Treasury tweet that British taxpayers only paid off the bond that had been raised to pay this compensation in 2015, it is important to know that it was taxpayers across the colonial territories who also paid - that is, colonised & enslaved subjects ... 5/n
This fact rarely makes it into standard discussions of abolition... Nor does the idea that compensation for loss of property could be generalised, that is, to compensate those who were dispossessed from their lands, whose right to property in themselves was taken from them 6/n
Or to compensate those whose resources were extracted – to the tune of US$45 trillion from India alone, as the economist Utsa Patnaik has calculated. See @jasonhickel's summary here... 7/n aljazeera.com/indepth/opinio…
When contesting the idea of our history being represented, even glorified, by statues to the men of empire, a common response is: ‘but they lived in different times, the mores were different then’ ... 8/n
However as @NVJRobins1 writes, during public discussion over the commissioning of a statue of Warren Hastings - Governor General of Bengal - Jeremy Bentham, leading utilitarian thinker of the time, proposed that any statue should include an account of his flagrant misdeeds 9/n
Indeed, Bentham suggested that the statue be inscribed with the following words: ‘Let it but put money into our pockets, no tyranny too flagitious to be worshipped by us’... Instead, when erected, the inscription commended his ‘integrity’ @NVJRobins1 10/n plutobooks.com/9780745331959/…
A failure to recognise contestations in the past contributes to the politics of selective memory that is reproduced every time we evade our past instead of confronting it directly & truthfully - you can read full piece for @uniworldnews here... /END universityworldnews.com/post.php?story…
