eople are suddenly very concerned about the perils of rewriting history. We must be vigilant, apparently, to the possibility that great swaths of the past will be forgotten or, worse, “erased”. We must remain alert to the risk that our history will be “whitewashed” – as if there were enough whitewash in the world – with the difficult, complex bits disappeared. Meanwhile, unaware of all the controversy he has caused, Edward Colston’s statue lies peacefully at the bottom of Bristol harbour. Historians are not too worried at the threat posed by “rewriting history”. This is because rewriting history is our occupation, our professional endeavour. We are constantly engaged in a process of re-evaluating the past and reinterpreting stories that we thought we knew. Despite what Leopold von Ranke – one of the pioneers of modern historical research – said, history is not only about finding out “how it actually happened”, but also about how we think about the past and our relationship to it. The past may be dead but history is alive, and it is constructed in the present. The other important thing to hold on to in this debate is that statues do not do a particularly effective job of documenting the past or educating people about it. Much has been written recently about British “imperial nostalgia”, and the idea that as a nation we yearn for the empire that, for many of us, ended before we were born. But this country’s relationship to its imperial history is built more on erasure and forgetting than on remembering – it is a series of silences from the past. The number of monuments to men who enslaved other humans or who killed hundreds of unarmed civilians or who performed other horrific crimes in the service of empire, or the woman who presided over them, stands in contrast to the number of critically engaged conversations we have about empire’s crimes. Every time a statue comes down, we learn a little more. Some people would have it that the British are just too polite to talk about the dark side of imperialism. But it isn’t shame about the past that prevents us from having these conversations. For the British to be ashamed of their imperial history, they would have to know about it, and to understand both the worst excesses of imperial violence and the simple daily injustice of imperial rule. But many British people don’t know about this, and mostly they don’t care to find out. Instead, as a nation, we exonerate the actions of people in the past by claiming that it was simply a different time, with different values, forgetting that many brave people at the time protested against these atrocities, and resisted, and worked tirelessly so that they might be uncovered or condemned. The outcry about the removal of the statue shows that some people in Britain are uncomfortable with any critique of Britain’s past. But they want it both ways: to be free of guilt for historical sins, but to be proud of what they see as historical achievements. The most obvious example of this is the way that the British are comfortable talking about the slave trade only through Britain’s much-lauded part in ending the slave trade. But the men whose statues are being pulled down were not abolitionists but enslavers: owning up to their crimes is much more difficult for many British people than simply walking past them in the street. And for other British people, having to see these statues every day, sitting in lecture theatres and concert halls named after these men, is a daily act of violence that has become unbearable. Many of these statues, and concert halls, and lecture theatres, were built and named either in the late Victorian period, or in the dying days of empire in the middle of the 20th century. This isn’t a coincidence. Empire was continually constructed as a political and cultural project at home both while the colonies and their populations were being subjugated overseas and when those colonies fought back and took their independence. Empire did not just “happen” to the British – the empire was not gained in a fit of absence of mind – and imperialism was a cultural project as much as a political, military or economic endeavour, one that had to be constantly rejuvenated. These statues do not provide a neutral narration of this country’s history, they are political monuments to anxieties about Britain’s status at the times that they were erected. The claim that removing the statue is “whitewashing” history is a pretence that these statues were somehow part of a nuanced conversation about Britain’s imperial past. But they weren’t, not least because we have statues to slave owners, but no statue to the victims of the slave trade or other victims of imperial violence. Since 2007, there has been a Museum of Slavery in Liverpool, but there is no Museum of Empire – although our museums are full of plundered treasures from Britain’s former imperial possessions – and there is no national memorial to the victims of the slave trade. If you want to talk about whitewashing history, perhaps start here. As our ideas about the world change, it is natural that so too does our attitude to the heroes and victories that our ancestors chose to commemorate. When those heroes were anything but heroic, leaving their statues standing is an insult to the modern values we claim to hold. This isn’t a sinister erasure of history: this is re-evaluating our history based on new evidence and ideas. This is historiography. And if the criticism is that bringing down Colston means we might have to pull down some more statues, then sure: bring it on. This historian approves. • Charlotte Lydia Riley is a historian of contemporary Britain at the University of Southampton