Every monument will fall

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 to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford – revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. The book reappraises how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past.