Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

by Caroline Elkins

Edward Colston’s statue became the target of protesters’ fury, and it’s 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 Britain’s empire—an empire that, in its heyday, covered over a quarter of the world’s landmass and claimed 700 million people as its subjects. The