The Fetish of History

History is a social science. It studies people, their attitudes and their motivations. Because the people are often dead, and first-hand testimony is lacking or unreliable, it is a subject that must be approached obliquely. This is mainly done through source documents, but the built environment and cultural artefacts are also important, increasingly so the further back in time you go. All of these media are subject to propaganda and ideology in their manufacture, so their multiple layers of meaning must be interpreted. This obliqueness entails a risk of fetishisation, particularly in respect of artefacts. In part this is a result of the desire to make the artefact "truthful", to suggest that it is imbued with an essence that can be elicited by examination. Thus the artefact reflects both the prejudices of its maker and those of later generations that have sought to interpret it. In theory, this fetishisation should reduce over time as documentary evidence becomes more plentiful and varied, thus relegating artefacts in importance. But the human desire to make history tangible means that artefacts remain central to popular understanding, hence we must put up with BBC4 history "documentaries" in which some nitwit gets out her dressing-up box to explain the Tudors.

A related problem is that where written records are scanty or absent our understanding of an ancient people may be over-dependent on physical remains, which introduces an obvious structural bias: we see the villa but not the villein. Even where written records exist, the dominance of architecture and works of art in the material record will inevitably colour our understanding. The statue of Ozymandias may be a "colossal wreck", but the point is that "nothing beside remains". Despite the rich documentary evidence and the detailed archaeology of urban life, the Classical era is still essentially an imaginary landscape of nobles and slaves, which was created by antiquarians and collectors (themselves often aristocrats who had invested in the Atlantic slave trade) between the Rennaisance and the 18th century. It was their interpretation of "civilisation" that led to the vogue for statuary in public spaces as a medium of remembrance and collective honour. Prior to that, in the Medieval era, statuary had much the same role as it had in the Classical era, being mainly religious in nature and housed in religious buildings, rather than the public square. This continuity was ignored in an attempt to emulate a Classical past that was largely a fiction.

Most statues in the Classical era would have been hidden from general public view in temples and shrines, or in the private homes and tombs of the rich (particularly the portraiture of ancestors). The statues of deities would have been painted and they would have been regularly dressed and adorned as part of religious ceremonies (the protestors who gave the Churchill statue in Parliament Square a "mohican" a few years ago were unwittingly echoing this practice). Honorific statues of historic figures, such as Greek politicians or Roman emperors, would have been erected in a city's agora or forum, but these were spaces of defined civic function, often tightly controlled by religious custom. Likewise, the siting of statues at city gateways or in cemeteries reflected an invisible network of the sacred, rather than the choice of a location convenient for public regard. While such public spaces can be seen as lieux de mémoire, having the function of preserving civic memory beyond any single lifespan, it is anachronistic to see them as binding the separate spheres of the public and the private, which remained quite distinct in the Classical era. The elevated statue of the monarch or military commander in the quotidian market square, reflecting the power of the state over commerce, is a post-Medieval development. 

Professional historians are generally not fetishists, though archaeologists too often are, hence on the question of pulling down statues they really aren't as evenly divided as the media reports might suggest. In the world of the historian, statues are trivial unless (irony alert) they were the focal point of historical events, as Edward Colston's recently was (if we adopt a Classical attitude and imagine his statue embodied his lasting spirit, then "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it"). The ultimate historical significance of many monuments is in their destruction, such as the pulling down of the Berlin Wall or the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad. Many of those decrying the removal of Colston's statue in Bristol would have been cheering when Ronald Reagan demanded in West Berlin in 1987, "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall". In other cases, the significance of a monument is wholly to do with the intention of its erection rather than its realisation, such as the plaster elephant that mouldered on the site of the Bastille between 1814 and 1846, memorably described by Simon Schama in Citizens, or that terrifying bust of Cristiano Ronaldo that (in two versions to date) adorns Madeira Airport.

The claim that statues are invaluable teaching aids is bunk. If Churchill were to be removed from Parliament Square we wouldn't suddenly develop amnesia about his contribution to the Second World War. His boarding-up this week, to prevent further assaults upon his posthumous dignity, is not the equivalent of historical occlusion, let alone Stalinist airbrushing. Since 1989 we have managed to study and develop new understandings of the Bolshevik Revolution without the need for identikit statues of Lenin dotted all over Eastern Europe. The reason why so many statues to objectionable men (it is usually men) remain in situ is not because protestors are too weak or the authorities too strong but because most people have no idea who they are and little interest in finding out. They are simply part of the street furniture. It's also worth noting that the cult of the public statue has led to the misunderstanding of its own history as a form, not just the misremembering of those memorialised. Because the paint on polychromatic Greek and Roman statues and buildings didn't survive, antiquarians and art historians assumed they were intentionally unpainted, thereby inventing a misleading "Classical aesthetic" that remains dominant to this day.

Most statues aren't contemporaneous with their subject. Many are erected decades or even centuries after the people or events they supposedly honour. This means that they aren't artefacts of the times they represent but of the era of their commissioning, and those attitudes are often political statements, such as the various Confederate generals erected in the southern US states at the turn of the twentieth century. That might appear to contradict the "History is written by the winners" axiom, but that is to forget the Jim Crow laws that their erection actually celebrates. The statue of Edward Colston nominally represented the man, but more significantly it illuminated contemporary attitudes at the time of its erection in 1895. It was a statement made at the apogee of the British Empire that celebrated merchant adventure, the philanthropy of the rich and globalisation (the "first age" of which is now considered to be 1870 to 1914, though arguably the Atlantic slave trade was the first real instance of the global capitalist economy). The marginalisation of his role in the slave trade was quite deliberate: it wasn't a secret, it was merely considered an incidental fact that didn't require attention, much as Colston considered the lives of the Africans he transported to be.

But this disregard didn't reflect a failure to appreciate the crime of trading in slaves, which was controversial long before it was criminalised. There was also a financial calculation at work. Many statues, along with public buildings and schools, are the result of blood money: the expiation of guilt through charity and endowments in the hope of heavenly indulgence, or simply an attempt to buy social status and the tolerance of peers. This can easily become institutionalised, so the death of the benefactor does not result in any less complicity in the preservation of the myth, as was the case with Colston. Down to today, the Society of Merchant Venturers has played a conservative role in limiting criticism of the man, marginalising the documentary evidence of his involvement in the slave trade and elevating the buildings and monuments that his wealth helped fund as the "truth" of his story. As such they are arguing for the innocence of inheritance: that present wealth cannot be held responsible for the sins committed in its accumulation, so reparations would be unjust. But many of Colston's modern critics aren't even arguing for reparations, but simply for well-mannered meritocracy. For example, Keir Starmer's insistence that the statue should have been removed years ago implies not an empty plinth but a more deserving choice.

This illuminates a difference in sentiment between conservatives and liberals. The former are not exclusively antiquarians, who argue for preservation without context, nor are they simply pessimists in awe of a monumental past who can see only decline in the present. As the emblem of contemporary conservativism, Boris Johnson's love of novelty in the built environment (particularly when Mayor of London) and his "boosterism" point to a much more critical and cavalier attitude towards the past. Beneath the different approaches to history theorised by writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche lies a more fundamental attitude to wealth and inheritance. For Conservatives, the theoretical underpinning is Edmund Burke's ideas on intergenerational obligation: we owe a debt of respect to the past but must avoid saddling the future with public debt. For Liberals, it is the ideas of generational justice and intergenerational equity theorised by John Rawls and James Tobin, which assume a balance of interests between the present and the future (an ideal that is becoming increasingly untenable as present private property drives future ecological collapse).

The extension of the statues debate beyond slave traders like Edward Colston and Robert Milligan, and imperial exploiters like Robert Clive and Cecil Rhodes, is regrettable, not because figures such as Churchill, Astor and Baden-Powell are beyond criticism, but because it means that the material basis of racism - the fact that slavery was so profitable and theories of racial difference were developed to justify it - is being occluded by another exercise in liberal virtue. Likewise, the liberal insistence on "due process" and the protection of private property obscures the way that racism persists through the fetish of private property: the young black man stopped for driving a "flash" car or the attempts to link Black Lives Matter protestors with opportunistic looting. You can understand why the Tories are keen to fan the flames of a culture war, making statues the new poppy and decrying the "censorship" of old TV sitcoms, not just to distract from the structural causes of racism but to push their inept handling of the pandemic down the news agenda. But the really depressing response has been the almost comically neoliberal commitment of Labour local authorities to "audits" of statues and artworks, as if these fetishised objects were the cause of racism rather than just the symbols of our institutional complacency.