Places: Histories of Colonisation

While slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape was abolished by British parliament in 1833, the ongoing legacies of enslavement continue into the present day. Slavery, one aspect of global histories of colonialism, served to structure both British and slave societies, and in the 2010s a project was established by University College London, led by historian Catherine Hall, to track the ‘compensation money', a ‘grant of £20 million in compensation, [which was] paid by the British taxpayers to slave owners'.

The first part of the project paid careful attention to where this money was spent, ‘tracking, in so far as it is possible, what they did with the money'. In this way, new memories about places were created: new histories of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, for instance, were produced, as maps were made of the Fitzrovia and Portman areas of London showing where this compensation money went.^{^[1099]} In this way, this project acts as a situated memorial which seeks to overturn a history of forgetting slave ownership in Britain generally, and in London in particular. This historical and memorial project remembers the way that the benefits of violence were reaped not only in close proximity to the physical violence but across the globe; the ways that colonisation was - and is - a global project, and so requires a global memory of the violence. Such memorials present an idea that the violence perpetrated was not only physical but can exist in the forgetting, or disremembering, that has occurred, as well as in the making of profit from physical violence and the dispossession of land.

Alongside such projects sit others which remember violent histories of settler colonialism. One such recent memorial established in Melbourne in September 2016 commemorates the hanging of Tasmanian Aboriginal men Maulboyheenner and Tunnerminnerwait in 1842.

Sitting at the site where they were executed, the memorial, named ‘Standing by Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner', narrates the story of how ‘The two men and three Tasmanian Aboriginal women - Truganini, Pyterruner and Planobeena - had waged a guerrilla campaign, robbing and clashing with settlers from Dandenong to South Gippsland.' At the dedication of the memorial it was narrated that ‘the memorial “will forever stand as an unambiguous reminder of the brutal impacts of displacement, dispossession and despair that was inflicted upon our people and their homelands and of those who bore the brunt of that invasion and paid the ultimate price”'. This memorial was important, Carolyn Briggs, a Boon Wurrung elder, explained, as it represents ‘a first step towards acknowledging our stories of the past'.^{^[1100]}

Indeed, settler colonial violence is predicated on a certain forgetting of that violence, both its initial moments of contact and the continuing violence of dispossession.^{^[1101]} The very land, or place, on which colonisation (and decolonisation) occurred remains an important facet of memory making. Sitespecific memorials to colonial violence, then, serve as one way in which colonial forgetting can be undone, or colonial memory can be made more vivid. Memorials to this historic, and continuing, violence, serve to intervene in the colonial situation.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Places: Histories of Colonisation

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