Violence shows we haven’t moved on

SLAVERY was abolished in the UK in 1833, some 200 years after Edward Colston was born. Colston was part of a society which took the notion of slavery in its stride and in which it was not regarded with the moral repugnance of the past two centuries. Indeed, the Slavery Abolition Act included compensation for those deprived of the services of their slaves. That it was racist is undeniable (the traders did not enslave Britons).

That it was heinous is undeniable but it was still accepted by large swathes of the world as were other atrocities we shudder at today.

A hundred years before the birth of Colston Henry VIII was boiling traitors in oil. Hanging, drawing and quartering was still going on for many years after Colston’s death.

That was the society in which he lived and the values upheld by its law. Yet he was miles ahead of his time in philanthropy, spending his vast fortune on schools, almshouses, hospitals and churches. He had a social conscience.

HIS association with the slave trade was through the Royal African Company, set up by Charles II and James II, which traded in gold, silver and ivory as well as slaves so it is not possible to estimate how much of Colston’s wealth came from the slave trade itself. Not only was the company founded by Kings but investors included Samuel Pepys and John Locke, often called the father of English liberalism. In short it was highly respectable in the Britain of its day.

It is about as logical to tear down Colston’s statue as it would be to hold ceremonial burnings of Pepys’s diaries. History is not merely a procession of people in fancy dress fighting wars. It is crucially the story of man’s evolution from grunting cave dweller to serious thinker, from cruelly retributive law to merciful law, from casual barbarism to care and compassion. The fools who vandalised statues last weekend have no more grasp of that than the ISIS barbarians who vandalised historic sites in Syria.