Displacing empire: Aphasia, ‘trade’, and histories of empire in an English city

Abstract

ABSTRACT How does a port city like Bristol present and approach its history as a centre for colonial industries such as sugar and tobacco, and its role as an epicentre of the slave trade during the eighteenth century? And how might the relationship between colonialism and slavery be understood in Britain today? This paper unpacks the spatial and temporal aspects of a central assumption in understanding the British Empire in Britain today – that it was ‘a long time ago, somewhere over there’. I argue that these practices are a means of displacing this contentious history rather than directly confronting the history of Empire and its centrality to the making of both Bristol and of Britain. While museums address the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its importance to Bristol, the wider frame of Empire remains hidden. In heritage practices involving both Bristol City Council Museums and various history workers, the trope of ‘trade’ demonstrates one example. In both casual conversation with Bristolians and in museum displays, the processes of violence, exploitation, and displacement which were fundamental to Empire are often glossed over as ‘trade’ with limited context or scrutiny to the origins or processes involved in ‘trade’. ‘Trade’ is thus not only a way to detach problematic context and detail, but by its very nature, it also conceals and obscures. These practices of displacement indicate Britain's ‘aphasic’ relationship with its imperial past. Unable to articulate and confront it explicitly, this past still haunts and pervades the nation and its cities.