Monuments after Empire? The Educational Value of Imperial Statues

The Black Lives Matter campaign has forced a reassessment of monuments that commemorate historical ﬁgures in public spaces. One of these, a statue of General Lord Roberts, stands in Glasgow, once the Second City of the Empire. A critical reading of this monument as a memorial text in a landscape of power contrasts the intended heroic depiction of Roberts with the excluded histories of those who were on the receiving end of his actions. I consider possible courses of action in determining what should be done with this memorial, recommending against its removal. Keeping the monument in its privileged public space without further action will not do. Arguing that the Roberts memorial is educationally valuable, despite and because of its celebration of Roberts as a hero of Empire, I defend its potential role in postcolonial and postimperial education.

: Harry Bates, Monument to Lord Roberts, from the rear. of his military victories, it stands rooted in the landscape, protected by wrought-iron railings (Figure 2), apparently immovable and permanent. It was one of several city monuments sprayed with Black Lives Matter graffiti, thus bringing into question its future and the city's long-standing celebration of Roberts as a hero of the Empire, arguably 'the most significant imperial figure between 1857 and 1914' (Edwards, 2012, p. 199).
Monuments commonly honour supposedly heroic lives, and sometimes they remember victims of conquest, oppression, exploitation, crimes against humanity or genocide. Now objects of deserved controversy, statues of figures like Roberts, Rhodes and Colston were originally intended to be celebrations of heroic figures whose actions benefitted others, but they do not acknowledge the lives of those who suffered the consequences of their deeds. Each represents different features of Britain's imperial past, which subjugated peoples across distant parts of the globe, subjecting them to colonial rule, plundering their wealth and natural resources-and in Colston's case trafficking human beings for profit. While the formal Empire 1 ended in the process of decolonisation that followed the Second World War, the wealth still evident in the fine buildings of cities like Glasgow that with Roberts punctuate the cityscape is a material reminder of Scotland's role in Britain's imperial project.
In exploring the educational value of monuments like the Roberts statue, I follow Young's treatment of the complex conceptual relationship between monuments and memorials (1993). While memorials can take a wide variety of forms including special days and festivals, I view monuments like Roberts' statue 2 as 'a subset of memorials' (Young, 1993, p. 4). Borrowing from a cultural geography approach to memorial landscapes, I will discuss the Roberts monument as one type of 'memorial text' that serves a symbolic and legitimising role and is 'designed to facilitate remembering and forgetting of the past' (Dwyer and Alderman, 2008, p. 167). Whether they remember the victors or those they conquered, each monument can be considered as a text, a narrative of specific memories and identities, to be read in time and space-in other words, historically but with an eye on the future as well as within the landscapes they occupy in specific public spaces. Reflecting on the possible educational value of a monument like the Roberts memorial can instructively start with such a reading.
Following a reading of this monument as a text that remembers the past by celebrating power, affirming imperialism and ignoring its victims, I will then consider possible courses of action in determining what should be done with it, arguing that like most monuments the Roberts statue is educationally valuable, despite and because of its celebration of Roberts as a hero of Empire. Through a critical reading of the statue as an imperial text, I propose to show its value for postcolonial education, which I interpret broadly to include schooling and public debate to reappraise the monument itself, the history of Empire and Scotland's role in Britain's imperial past. I will argue that in the case of this particular monument, which remembers an imperial figure, its educational value lies in its potential for postimperial education.
Raising the ideas of the postcolonial and the postimperial prompts reflection on the conceptual relationship between imperialism and colonialism. For the purposes of this paper, I use imperialism and colonialism as overlapping terms which are both necessary in an analysis of monuments like the Roberts statue and a (re)consideration of its potential educational value. Although sometimes used interchangeably, I make the distinction between imperialism and colonialism by agreeing in large part with Said (1993, p. 8), who observed that colonialism is usually a consequence of imperialism. While the distinction is notoriously difficult to make, I favour treating imperialism as largely about the ideas and assumptions held by a dominating metropolitan power over a distant or an adjacent territory, and the more distinctively modern practice of colonialism as the control, exploitation and settlement of a conquered, distant territory. Both convey political, economic and often cultural domination including through education, but imperialism has an older historical record and is more obviously associated with creation and defence of empires. Puri observes of colonialism as a form of imperialism: 'To reduce a territory to a colony was to claim exclusive rights over its sovereignty. Settler colonies involved communities being dispatched from the imperial core to populate this land, in all likelihood to disempower or displace the previous inhabitants ' (2020, Introduction, para 20).
Imperial power and the military conquests that made colonialism possible created the conditions not only for military occupation and administrative control, but also for the plundering of resources and enforcing trade on terms favourable to Britain as the metropolitan power (see Tharoor, 2017). Colonial schooling served the interests of the colonising powers (Kelly and Altbach, 1978), in its content, organisation, language, conceptions of knowledge and availability to the indigenous people. Limited mainly to poorly resourced primary schooling and dismissive of local culture and traditions, its main purpose was to prepare its recipients to serve the colonial order, mostly in menial roles. Hence the attention paid in postcolonial theory to education, to the effects and significance of education as a tool of cultural imperialism and the emphasis in postcolonial and anti-colonial thought on education as fostering critique and agency (Freire, 1993). A postcolonial perspective is a critical response to the lingering effects of colonial conquest after formal decolonisation and the achievement of sovereign independence for former colonies. Leela Gandhi has observed that a task of postcolonial theory is a 'political obligation to assist the subjects of postcoloniality to live with the gaps and fissures of their condition, and thereby learn to proceed with self-understanding' (1998, p. 8). Proponents of postcolonial and anti-colonial education would insist that this should apply also and especially to education in the schools and universities of the former colonial powers. But Carnoy observes in Education as Cultural Imperialism (1974) that although older forms of imperialism had given way by the late 20th century, the educational systems they created remained little changed after independence; this serves as a reminder that imperialism endures in different forms after its formal end.
As a military hero of the British Empire, Roberts can be viewed as an agent of both imperialism and colonialism, though it is his role as an imperial hero that the monument expresses-as a text, in its plot, placement in the landscape, and in the interests it expresses.

THE ROBERTS MONUMENT AS A MEMORIAL TEXT
As a text, the Roberts statue presents an extravagant imperial narrative that conceals as much as it tells through its overt story. Starting with the official narrative it presents, its celebration of Lord Roberts' achievements by depicting him as a heroic military leader in colonial wars in India and Afghanistan and in the Second Anglo-Boer War, this is captured in the inscription that describes him by his title: 'of Kandahar, Pretoria and Waterford'. While the last-mentioned refers to the Roberts family's Anglo-Irish origins, the first two appropriated place-names commemorate his successes in campaigns in Afghanistan and South Africa, by no means his only victorious campaigns. His leadership in relieving the siege of Kandahar in 1880 led to the establishment of a British protectorate in Afghanistan, while his long service in India, which saw him become Commander in Chief of British forces there, confirmed his reputation as the most successful commander of his era. Later, after early setbacks, Roberts' assumption of control of the British forces in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899)(1900)(1901)(1902) led to victory over the Boers in battle. As an innovative commander, his scorched earth response to guerrilla warfare, undermining the Boer supply lines to force their surrender, was supplemented by his initiating the concentration camps, implemented further by General Kitchener, that brought about their ultimate surrender.
Such a standard narrative, lent authority and normative heft by the statue's powerful presence-in size and height alone as well as its decorative details-invites a reverential response. But Dwyer and Alderman warn that 'The subtle power of memorials is that they often communicate seemingly authentic and unproblematic representations of history ' (2008, p. 168). That representation in the statue's heroic depiction of Roberts both conceals its ideological purpose and excludes the histories of those defeated in his campaigns, including the Afghan and Indian people drawn into the Empire and subjected to colonial rule (see Tharoor, 2017), as well as the Boer and Black casualties of the Boer War, among them thousands of civilians who died of disease in the concentration camps (Smith and Stucki, 2011). The Irish today may have their own views on Roberts being 'of Waterford'. Although the title alludes to the Roberts family's historical links to Waterford, the monument's representation of Roberts does not acknowledge Britain's record as a colonial power in Ireland.
The narrative depicted on the monument's pedestal shows 'scenes from Roberts' march from Kabul to Kandahar, leading the infantry and cavalry divisions of the Sikh, Highlander and Gurkha regiments' (McKenzie, 2002, p. 232). The theme of military conquest is elaborated in the symbolism of the large bronze figures placed at front and rear: a semi-naked female 'Victory' gestures triumphantly, while 'War' epitomises 'masculine sternness and restrained physical power' (ibid.). Although the monument acknowledges the troops commanded by Roberts in the relief carving of soldiers and their horses and wagons, the type of story it tells reflects the 'great man' interpretation of history, implying that history is largely forged by significant individuals whose unusual abilities and determination decide its course. This neglects the lives of masses of ordinary people-those whose efforts made the great deeds of men like Roberts possible, as well as those he defeated and brought under imperial control. Celebration of heroic individuals also detaches them from the wider structures whose power they helped to exert. In this latter sense, there is a structural continuity between Roberts and figures like Rhodes. Both were agents of the Empire and of Britain's colonial project in Africa (Roberts also served for a time in Abyssinia). Roberts' military achievements also made him a notable contributor to Rhodes' project of painting Africa red from Cape to Cairo. 3 Reading the explicit and the concealed narratives represented in this listed memorial requires reference to its placement in the public square, in a prime site in the landscape of Glasgow. Kelvingrove Park is not the location of Roberts' deeds, which took place in far-flung parts of the Empire. Roberts may be 'of' Kandahar, Pretoria and Waterford, by name, but he is also and differently of Glasgow and Scotland, who embraced him and host his memorial in a landscape of power. This is done with evident pride in the memorial's role as part of the civic estate and also in marketing the monument and the city as an attraction to tourists. The space occupied by the statue, and its wider hinterland in a City of the Empire makes this Glasgow copy of the original erected in Calcutta (as it was then called) in a former colony a very different object. In Glasgow the monument commemorates victory over distant others celebrated by the city's citizens, while in Calcutta the original was a statement of the colonised status of the local population.
Describing the statue's dramatic impact as 'underlined by the sheer magnificence of its location', McKenzie regards it as 'an essay in urban monu-mentalism…one of the most successful works of its kind, perhaps anywhere in the world ' (2002, p. 234). Commenting on the placing of sculptures in Kelvingrove Park, Edwards observes that, contrary to the general informality of the park, 'The Monument to Earl Roberts, high up on the eastern entrance from Park Circus, is a piece of pure urban theatre, a coup d'oeil as spectacular as anything to be found anywhere in the British Isles' (Edwards, 2012, p. 220, emphasis in original). This grandness matches the imperial, militarist vision declared by Roberts himself as quoted in the inscription on the plinth, extracted from a speech given by Roberts in May 1913, while campaigning for compulsory military service: I see the gleam in the near distance of the weapons and accoutrements of this Army of the future, this Citizen Army, the warder of these islands and the pledge of the peace and the continued greatness of this Empire. (Extract from Lord Roberts' speech in Glasgow on 6th May 1913) News of Roberts' death from pneumonia on the Western Front in 1914 was soon followed by a popular campaign to raise funds to erect a memorial in Glasgow. The public responded with enthusiasm and a sum of just over £6,000 was raised. Roberts' widow, Lady Roberts, expressed a wish that the memorial should take the form of a copy of the original in Calcutta by Harry Bates. In a day's programme that included a parade, the unveiling in 1916 was greeted by a cheering crowd, and is reported to have been 'a massive popular success' (McKenzie, 2002, p. 233).
This enthusiasm has not been universally shared. Graffiti have been added from time to time, and despite its protective railing, the statue's fabric has suffered occasional damage and disfigurement. Much of the time it is a 'cold' monument (Bellentani and Panicio, 2016), 4 ignored by passers-by who use the park for jogging, relaxing on benches, dog-walking, picnicking and sunbathing. Yet over 100 years since its unveiling and now in a different time, it still stands as a memorial, hosted by Glasgow, once an imperial city whose influential citizens chose to fund and maintain it. This demands its reappraisal by today's Glaswegians and the wider Scottish population. Many of today's citizens are descendants of soldiers who conquered the empire's colonies. Scotland also sent traders, missionaries, government officials and settlers to those colonies, though its population now also includes a significant minority descended from those who were on the receiving end of imperialism during the colonial era. There is no denying Scotland's gains in opportunity and wealth from its contribution to building the Empire, even if all would not go so far as agreeing with Thomson's claim that: Of all the people in the United Kingdom, it is the Scots' contribution that stands out as disproportionate. They were the first peoples of the British Isles to take on an imperial mentality, and possibly the longest to sustain one. In the spheres of education, engineering, exploration, medicine, commerce, and shipping, the Scots earned a particularly strong reputation for empire building. (Thomson, 2008, p. 51, quoted in MacKenzie andDevine, 2011, p. 19)

WHAT IS TO BE DONE WITH CONTROVERSIAL OLD STATUES?
Deciding about our future relationships with now 'hot' monuments requires reflection in relation to space and time, starting first with the question of what to do with the memorial space. In a recent BBC radio debate about what changes need to be made to public spaces in Britain's cities, Neil MacGregor asks of Glasgow's public statues whether they still express how Glaswegians see themselves and what they believe in (Ahmed, 2020). Contrary to the city's enthusiastic welcome given to the monument at its unveiling, the Roberts statue evidently does not express how all of today's citizens view themselves and their beliefs. Uzma Mir wrote in a recent opinion piece in The Herald: What do statues like that of Lord Roberts in Kelvingrove Park -a man who brutally suppressed Indians and Afghans in the 19th centurysay to children and grandchildren of that empire like me who were born and who live here now? For me, it glorifies that suppression, and subjugates me all over again. (12 June 2020) As the unacknowledged narrative behind the Roberts memorial should make clear, there is no shortage of constituencies likely to be offended by its presence in its current form and privileged location. Descendants of those defeated in the campaigns named on the statue's base are likely to be joined by both some Irish citizens and also by feminists who could object to its gendered aesthetic. The Black Lives Matter protests have prompted a reexamination of imperialism and the colonial era across a range of themesespecially slavery and racism-and the opportunity to face up to Britain's past should not be wasted. Especially if there is some possible complacency among the general public about revising popular assumptions about the past, a righteous outrage like Mir's 5 does require that all such monuments in our public spaces be reassessed. Decisions about their futures need to be made, hopefully through public deliberation, with possible roles for citizen assemblies (as suggested by MacGregor in Ahmed, 2020) where uncomfortable stories about the Empire could be heard and acknowledged.
Leaving such monuments in place without further action is no longer defensible and several alternative possibilities present themselves. In an interview about her recent book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019), Susan Neiman has said of American statues that glorify the Confederacy: Monuments are visible values. They portray the men and women who embodied the values that we want our community to share, that we want our children to learn. So they have to go. And hopefully that process should be a democratic and public one. They don't all need to go into the harbor. Contextualization can be an option in some cases. It really needs to be decided case by case. (Chotiner, 2020) Deciding on the future of each statue by a democratic process in Glasgow should follow Neiman's advice and consider each controversial monument through a contextual reading that takes into account much more than past pride and the statue's value to the heritage industry, each with an educational element. There are several possibilities for making case-by-case decisions in deciding the fate of old statues. One is direct action to remove statues like Colson's, or campaigns that have succeeded in forcing decisions to relocate statues of Rhodes at the University of Cape Town and Oriel College Oxford. Elsewhere monuments to dictators have been destroyed, for example, in the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad and in the removal of statues of Stalin in former East European satellite states freed from Soviet domination. 6 However, such examples do not fit the recommended procedure of democratic public decision-making, even if those statues' fate was deserved. But hot takes and direct action, while successful in mobilising public outrage through moments of insurgency, tend to be of the moment and could close off other longer-term strategies with a more lasting benefit in shifting public attitudes and serving an educational purpose. A topical metaphor is used by Neiman in her New Yorker interview, where she remarks that 'anti-racism, or facing up to your past, is not a vaccine. It's not a one-shot option. It's a process that you need to continue to go through, and it will change generationally' (Chotiner, 2020).
Other approaches that avoid a one-shot solution set out to redesign public spaces to shift the meaning and significance of monuments, curating the space differently in situ, by commissioning explanatory plaques or new adjacent statues to provide counter-narratives that reflects the perspectives of those ignored in the original monument. Alternatively, controversial monuments whose continued presence in public spaces is no longer defensible could be placed in more out-of-the-way spaces in museums, where a less direct relationship with the surrounding community is created but where they could still be preserved. This limits their educational value as to be viewed there they would need to be sought out. Museums are accessible to the public, but they are likely to provide a less dynamic social space than locations in the public realm such as the Roberts monument in public parks and squares. Although for regular visitors to the park it is easy to pass by without noticing it, on pausing to look at the Roberts monument one cannot but be impressed by its sheer size and height; its dominance over the surrounding space can be a starting point for closer investigation. Museums will in any event have work to do in reviewing their current holdings for their significance in relation to the imperial past as well as the ways in which they are presented.
If relocated to museums, however, monuments that ought to be acknowledged as problematic because of the actions of those they have celebrated might be less likely to offend and could perhaps be curated under conditions that more readily enable the positioning of counter-texts. Yet even if removed, the Empire that the Roberts memorial celebrates would remain as part of the history of this city. This statue's expression of imperial power can serve a beneficial purpose in fostering a public review of the past that it represents, while its removal would make it more likely to be forgotten, thus forfeiting opportunities for citizens to continue to recognise and reflect on past injustices and their present and future consequences. With national memories still nostalgically fixated on victory in the Second World War as the most enthusiastically embraced historical narrative, a case can be made that monuments like this one are more likely to contribute to disrupting complacent popular assumptions about Britain's colonial and imperial past as well as its continuing neocolonial advantages if they stay in place.
Destroying or removing statues does not erase the deeds they celebrate. Such actions may assuage the understandable outrage about the considerable harm done to the past victims of those being celebrated, but they are likely to render them educationally defunct. In many, though not all, cases it is not worth trading a galvanising moment of public action for long-term educational engagement. But keeping a monument like the Roberts statue in place without further action will not do, especially given its privileged location at a focal point that connects paths in and out of one of the city's most scenic public spaces. Continuing to dwell with this monument, leaving it in place with the setting unaltered might no longer actively encourage the attitudes that originally celebrated Roberts' life, but leaving the space unaltered from its present form renders the past still very much present and does little to prompt any reconsideration of its significance. A precondition for 'making the past past' (Lacquer, 2020, p. 14), 7 if indeed that is possible, is to take further measures to ensure that it plays its part in working through the colonial past, ensuring public and educational engagement with Glasgow and Scotland's role in Empire.
Sharing some responsibility for Scotland's imperial past suggests the need in the first instance to get the narrative of Empire right, with some granular understanding of its details. There are uncomfortable questions to face at national, local and institutional levels, including actions for restorative justice, 8 if not for reparations. Being mindful of the past can begin by engaging with controversies about what Britain's legacy of Empire is, at least with awareness of the range of different opinions expressed between, say, Niall Fergusson and Shashi Tharoor, on the alleged benefits to India of having been colonised by Britain, initially by the East India Company (Ferguson, 2012;Tharoor, 2017). 9 This statue thus offers a valuable locus for reassessment. Those not necessarily offended by the Roberts monument's presence and what it stands for in this city could be encouraged to reflect on what it means and on their location as beneficiaries of Empire, while acknowledging the offence to Black, Asian and minority ethnic Scots and descendants everywhere of those hurt by his actions. The statue is a complex text that invites a critical reading, and there is an obvious role for the arts and the media in supporting public reflection on this and other statues.
There is also an obvious opportunity for schools to play a part in shifting public perceptions of the age of Empire. As imperial texts, monuments like the Roberts statue are ripe for lessons in critical literacy. History, literature and the arts can engage creatively with such monuments, for example in creating counter-texts-and some schools already do this. In the wider curriculum, textbooks need further revision, and there is a burgeoning literature on the colonial, migrant and Black experience to draw on to ensure that all pupils see themselves and their ancestors in the textbooks and the literature they read. Strategies to enact postcolonial education are already in place in the literature (some are reviewed in Enslin, 2017), if not yet applied as widely as they should be. Such learning requires teaching about the colonial past and the ongoing unequal relationships between former colonisers and colonised, with clear support for multilingualism to counter the dominance of English alongside the teaching of global literatures and subaltern histories.
In postcolonial and anti-colonial education inclusiveness, diversity and anti-racism are strongly emphasised. But postcolonial theory, Loomba observes, is vulnerable to the criticism that it tends to be engaged with 'the shades of the colonial past much more than with the difficulties of the postcolonial present' (Loomba, 2005, p. 256). It can be strengthened by paying more attention to the theme of Empire itself, which is conceptually related to but not identical with ongoing coloniality as a condition that marks education as cultural imperialism. Deciding what to do with each monument, the person it memorises, in its features and location, requires informed critical reflection about its characteristic features. The Roberts statue is a celebration of the creation of an Empire through military power, though it does not acknowledge the enormous economic and cultural advantages that it brought to Britain-benefits still present today, of course. In this way, it celebrates and legitimises imperialism.
Considering the educational value of the Roberts statue as a particular monument takes us back to the earlier discussion of the relationship between the contrasting but complementary concepts of imperialism and colonialism. This monument offers both an instructive text for discussing and implementing postcolonial education as a means of countering imperialism in education and also in inviting consideration of the ongoing influence of new forms of Empire, after decolonisation. Both postcolonialism and postimperialism aim at dealing with the past, but with different emphases. Attunement to imperialism draws attention to new forms of Empire that perpetuate old practices of oppression and foster new ones. Formal empires of the past, most obviously those of the European imperial powers, have been replaced by new informal empires of economic and political influence. Distinguishing between formal imperialism that concluded with independence and an informal imperial condition that persists in a global order that still favours the old imperial powers, Puri (2020) argues that we are living with 'a great imperial hangover', as empires have not only influenced the past, but new forms of Empire also profoundly influence this century. The pattern of Empire is 'of people imposing their will on others' (Introduction, loc 105). As Harari observes: 'the global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group' (2017, p. 232). These new forms of Empire take the form of globalised commerce and the staggering influence, wealth and power of the tech giants as well as American and Russian adventures abroad and the growing Chinese influence in Africa.
As much as ever, we need to recognise and respond to instances of imperialism-now taking new 21st-century forms. As an imperial monument, the Roberts memorial is particularly valuable for educational reasons. Making monuments like the Roberts memorial past by learning through public engagement and encouraging a role for schooling too might help to render the past the monument represents past, or to read the text in a lastingly alternative way that could justify its remaining in place.