For those in 2020 who did not support the removal of statues (the Secretary of State for Culture among them, you’ll remember), their dismantling constituted a form of erasure: cancel culture’s elimination of the past, the rewriting of history. Of course, the truth is that the statues being deposed were those of men who had far more literally and violently erased history themselves. They were slave traders and owners, colonisers and imperialists. It was on their watch, with their authority and to their enrichment that humans were enslaved, oppressed, murdered, censored, raped, traumatised, kidnapped and traded as chattel.
This you know. But perhaps few beyond professional historians have thought about the effects of these activities on the archive of history: that is, the very documents that create for us what history is. It is too easy to think of the archive as, in the historian Stephanie Smallwood’s words, ‘merely a repository of free-floating empirical facts to be lifte