Dan Hicks is professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford and curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. His books include The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution and Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting.

11.10.2025

• Dan Hicks

One Day, Britain’s Monuments Will Fall

Monuments, museums, and cultural institutions were often created in the image of “militarist realism,” presenting colonialism and enslavement as eternal. Undoing this legacy is not erasing the past but combating a pernicious ideology.