Every Monument Will Fall

‘An extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource’ Paul Gilroy, founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at UCL

‘Hicks’ must-read book describes how it was possible for a human skull to be made into a drinking cup and used in a genteel Oxford college, well into the 21st century, as if empire were an eternal state of nature . . . Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police’ Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of White Sight

‘Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present. This is a book about falling statues, but so much more. It’s about how we’ve been lied to, and how we can approach the past with honesty. Hicks asks whether history and archaeology should be used to justify actions we know impinge on the rights of others - or to understand ourselves better’ Alice Roberts, bestselling author of Crypt

‘Dan Hicks writes with grace and fierce focus about what we choose to remember and why, in our patterns of thought, our institutions and the built environment in which we live’ Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than you might think.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland...read more...