The Guardian view on Colston's statue: a long time in going

Bristol made a fortune out of the slavery business. For a century and a half, from the late 17th century until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, its merchants, ships and warehouses played a key role in the extraordinarily cruel system that saw men, women and children taken from West Africa to British colonies in the Americas, where they were forced to provide free labour to sugar growers and rum distillers. Edward Colston, whose statue in Bristol’s centre was pulled down by Black Lives Matter protesters on Sunday afternoon and dumped in the river, was a leading figure in the slave-trading Royal African Company. He shared responsibility for the transportation of an estimated 84,000 Africans, around 19,000 of whom are thought to have died at sea.

Bristol is not unique in owing much of its 18th-century wealth to slavery. The docks of Liverpool and Glasgow were two more hubs of the system. London was its financial and political centre. But the extent of Colston’s philanthropy in his home city, as well as the decision to erect a statue of him there in 1895, have made the local arguments about slavery’s legacy there particularly fraught. Had the city council been able to broker an agreement on the wording of a new plaque that was due to be appended to the statue, acknowledging Colston’s crimes and victims, it may never have been so spectacularly toppled.

With a police investigation under way and the eventual fate of the statue to be determined, the struggle over Colston’s posthumous reputation is far from over. Already, the weekend’s events have accelerated moves to rename Bristol’s biggest music venue, Colston Hall. In a city that is already deeply divided along racial lines, and where inequality was found by recent research to be growing, the challenge for local politicians and others in favour of change is to carry as large as possible a segment of public opinion with them.

It will never be possible to draw a neat line between public symbols such as statues or street names and the systemic inequality and prejudice that blight so many lives in Britain. Many of the problems of minority communities are closely tied to poverty and the low-quality housing and health that go with it. But it was not a coincidence that the city where the monument was targeted is well known for being poorly integrated and for its troubling history. Bristol’s mayor, Marvin Rees, who is of African-Caribbean descent, said on Monday that he had found the statue “an affront to me and people like me”.

The built environment in the UK is chock-full of statues. Conversations about these objects, the spaces they command and the messages they send should be part of a much bigger discussion of our nation’s history. How to remember the vicious business of slavery, and the imperial project that carried on long after it was abolished in 1833, is not just a challenge for Bristol.