In the decades which followed the end of the Second World War, Britain emerged as a democratic state shorn of its empire, committed to a new global order based on the self-governing sovereignty of nations and the equality of their citizens. This was a radical break with what had gone before. Protecting empire had been a central theme in the politics of the 1930s. War was fought by the empire, in part to defend empire. But after 1945 empires collapsed quickly, and as they did so, in most parts of the world, the imperial statues came down quickly.
Statues celebrating Germany’s empire were the first to fall, replaced by heroes of nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia, newly independent from Nazi occupation. In India, statues were first moved by Britons anxious to protect the monuments of imperial heroes from newly enfranchised Indian crowds. For example, a figure in Kanpur commemorating the death of Britons during the rebellion of 1857 was quietly moved in 1947 to protect it from Indians let into the previously white-only park where it had been housed. By the 1960s, Indian state governments were pulling down imperial statues in the hundreds. They did so to express a more confident sense of cultural nationalism, and caused diplomatic protests from Harold Wilson’s government in London. More recently, the fall of the Soviet empire has seen the mass removal of statues to Russia’s Communist empire-builders in eastern Europe.
In Britain, statues to imperial heroes were – until recently – ignored not pulled down, more likely to be the repository of bird-shit than political rage.
