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22.07.2023 - 22:43 / bbc.com / River Avon
"Erected by citizens of Bristol as a memorial of one of the most virtuous and wise sons of their city, AD 1895", said a dark plaque decorating an empty plinth in the centre of Bristol, the largest city in south-west England. That "most virtuous and wise son" was Edward Colston, a 17th-Century merchant who oversaw the enslavement of 84,000 Africans, 19,000 of whom are thought to have died en route to the Americas.
Colston's role in the slave trade was ignored by the Victorians, who revered his philanthropic work – Colston used his profits to found schools, churches and almshouses in his native Bristol – and erected a statue of him nearly two centuries after his death in 1721. But on 7 June 2020, the statue was torn down, daubed in red paint and blue graffiti and thrown into the harbour during an anti-racism protest that made worldwide headlines.
It was a divisive moment, but one that spoke of an increasing desire in Bristol to confront a darker past in a city that's known for its liberal and often rebellious outlook. Now, as Bristol re-evaluates its history, visitors can gain a diverse view of the city through tours that delve into the transatlantic slave trade and walks dedicated to Bristol's modern multicultural communities.
"As a tour guide, I always talked about everything great in Bristol," said Rob Collin, who developed the Bristol Slave Trade Walk to explore a history he never learned in school. "The more I read, the more I began to ask: how can we talk about Bristol without talking about the slave trade?"
As we stood in Queen Square, where a grand equestrian statue of King William III is surrounded by elegant Georgian architecture, Collin explained how Bristol's location on the River Avon, close to the Bristol Channel, enabled the city to become heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade in the 17th Century. Few slaves ever set foot in Bristol itself, but the city benefited from a triangular trade that shipped goods from Europe to Africa, sent enslaved Africans to colonies in the Americas and brought commodities like tobacco, sugar and cocoa back to Europe. Collin noted that Bristol ships trafficked an estimated 486,000 enslaved Africans between 1698 and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, making Bristol the third-largest slave trading port in England after Liverpool and London.
"Bristol was transformed in the 17th and 18th Centuries," he said, as we walked past grand merchant houses in Queen's Square that all date from 1699 onwards. "And that's no coincidence. It was transformed because of the transatlantic slave trade."
Central to that transformation was Colston. Born in Bristol in 1636, he rose through the ranks of the Royal African Company, which was founded in 1660 as a joint
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