Latest News

Revered art historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor delivers the annual Palliser Lecture in London

By acknowledging the differences between political contexts from distinct eras of history, expanding on selective interpretations of history to include wider perspectives, and reflecting on what societies have got wrong and how learnings can be taken from these lessons, we can move forward and bring communities together to go some way toward resolving tensions caused by contested histories.

These were some of the themes explored by the former director of the British Museum and National Gallery, Neil MacGregor, as part of the 2021 Palliser Lecture, a collaboration between Salzburg Global Seminar and 21^st Century Trust, hosted by the Aga Khan Centre in London.

MacGregor raised a number of examples of how the evolution of public discourse around specific moments in history have succeeded in doing this, and how we can draw on these as inspiration for a more democratic discourse that helps to avoid the confrontational manner which has become ever more pronounced in recent times.

With monuments and public spaces as a central focus, the nuance of political context around certain events in history was a starting point for the lecture.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unveiling of a statue of confederate general Robert E. Lee in Dallas, Texas in 1936, accompanied by a flattering speech from the US President was jarring given Lee’s role in the civil war, but it was part of a strategy by Roosevelt at the time to garner support in the southern states for the liberal new deal.

It was, MacGregor noted, “the necessary narrative for building a new society… Rather oddly a contradictory one, we might now think, but an essential one. The president told a story, a history, that reshaped the thinking of the past to make a different future.”

Other instances of such time-sensitive and contextual versions of the past highlighted George Square in Glasgow, Scotland, where monuments which strongly identified the city as being at the heart of the British Empire were erected in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

This was challenged vehemently years later through events such as the Battle of George Square in 1919, in which striking workers fought police in a show of rebellion against the government, and most recently with attacks on the statue of British Conservative politician Robert Peel as part of wider protests around the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Such challenges rally against “the construction of a national identity through public statues, a selective history that taken together tells a very coherent story”, but one which cannot last forever. The removal of a raft of Lee statues across the United States, and the toppling of others through public action, such as that of Robert Colston in Bristol, UK, in summer 2020 evidence this point.

In many cases the retention of monuments and statues, whose original purpose had been to celebrate contentious historic events, have been repurposed to serve as memorials to people, communities or lands that were victimized.

Civic engagement in this process also allows for an educative and equitable approach to how history is presented, MacGregor considered.

In Greenland, a statue of Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede which stood in Nuuk was opposed by many because of his status as a symbol of colonialism on the island, and was daubed in paint with the word “decolonize” written across it. A vote on whether to remove the statue was put to the public, who chose to keep it but with Egede’s impact on the nation made much clearer.

“This is, I think, a very big question,” said MacGregor. “How do you deal with statues that tell a story that's either partial, or no longer acceptable? What's the best way to do it, and how do you handle it?” 

He then discussed further cases from around the world – Bremen’s elephant statue, Singapore’s Raffles monument, and the Spandau Citadel in Berlin – and how such historical memorials can not only be reframed, but also serve as stark reminders of a history that needs to be confronted head on.

“What I think is fascinating about this museum,” said MacGregor, referring to the Spandau Citadel, “is that it's a museum of what we don't want to be. It's a museum that we have to keep in public view to remind us not to repeat the same mistakes.

“It reminds not of what we did wrong, but of what we got wrong, and at every stage you're reminded that people like us, exactly like us, thought these statues represented something admirable at one point, and that that's the important thing to think about. How does that happen? How do societies get into that position and what are we not thinking about?”

Watch the 2021 Palliser Lecture in full:

The Palliser Lecture is part of the Designs on the Future initiative. All webinars in this series are available online: www.salzburgglobal.org/go/dotf