Edward Colston

Edward Colston (2 November 1636 – 11 October 1721) was an English merchant, slave trader, philanthropist and Tory Member of Parliament. He was born in Bristol, the son of William Colston, a prosperous merchant, and Sarah Batten. His family were members of the Society of Merchant Venturers, and his father’s commercial activities provided the basis for Edward’s later career. Colston spent much of his early life between Bristol and London, and by the time of his father’s death in 1681 he had already become established in mercantile circles. In that year he appears as a governor of Christ’s Hospital in London, an institution to which he would subsequently make frequent donations, marking the beginning of his long association with charitable and educational endowments.

Colston followed his father in the family business, becoming a sea merchant and building up extensive trading interests. He initially traded in wine, fruits and textiles, mainly in Spain, Portugal and other European ports, and later expanded into a broader range of commodities and money lending. From 1680 to 1692 he was a member of the Royal African Company, which held a monopoly on the English trade along the west coast of Africa in slaves, gold, silver and ivory. Within the company he rose to a senior position, serving as deputy governor from 1689 to 1690, when the Governor was James, Duke of York, the brother of King Charles II of England. Colston’s involvement in the Royal African Company placed him at the heart of the English slave trade at a time when slavery was generally condoned in England and throughout Europe by churchmen, intellectuals and the educated classes. The proportion of his wealth that came specifically from the slave trade and slave-produced sugar, as opposed to other commodities and financial dealings, is not known.

By the late 1680s Colston had largely settled in London, while maintaining close ties with his native Bristol. From about 1689 he lived at Cromwell House in Mortlake, in south-west London, which remained his principal residence for the rest of his life. During the remainder of his life he seems to have divided his attention fairly equally between the city of his birth and that of his adoption, directing his commercial affairs from London while using his growing fortune to fund charitable projects in both cities. He never married, and in 1704 he settled what was described as a “considerable fortune in land” on his nephew, also named Edward Colston, who later served as Member of Parliament for Wells.

Colston’s parliamentary career was relatively brief but reflected his political alignment as a High Church Tory. He sat in the House of Commons as a Tory Member of Parliament, representing the borough of Bristol. In Parliament he was associated with the Tory interest and with Anglican causes, consistent with his wider public persona as a defender of the established Church of England. His political views were strongly conservative, and he was noted for his extreme antipathy to religious nonconformists, a stance that also influenced the conditions he attached to some of his charitable foundations.

Colston supported and endowed schools, houses for the poor, almshouses, hospitals and Anglican churches in Bristol, London and elsewhere. In 1691, on St Michael’s Hill in Bristol, at a cost of £8,000 (equivalent to about $1,800,000 in 2023), he founded Colston’s Almshouses for the reception of 24 poor men and women. In the same period he endowed, at a cost of £600, the merchant’s almshouses in King Street, which included accommodation for “Six Saylors.” He also endowed Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital school in Bristol. In 1696, at a further cost of £8,000, he endowed a foundation for clothing and teaching 40 boys, stipulating that the books employed were to have in them “no tincture of Whiggism,” a reflection of his partisan Tory and Anglican convictions. Six years afterwards he expended an additional £1,500 in rebuilding the schoolhouse. In 1708, at a cost of £41,200 (equivalent to about $8,400,000 in 2023), he built and endowed his great foundation on Saint Augustine’s Back in Bristol for the instruction, clothing, maintenance and apprenticing of 100 boys. In times of scarcity during this and the following year, he transmitted some £20,000 (equivalent to about $3,400,000 in 2023) to the London committee, to be managed by the Society of Merchant Venturers for the upkeep of this and related charitable work. He also gave money to schools in the parish of Temple—one of which later became St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School—and to several churches and to Bristol Cathedral. His name came to feature widely on Bristol buildings and landmarks as a result of these extensive benefactions.

Colston died of old age on 11 October 1721, aged 84, at his home, Cromwell House, in Mortlake, where he had lived since about 1689. Although his will stated that he wished to be buried simply and without pomp, this instruction was not followed. His body was carried to Bristol and interred at All Saints’ Church. His monument there was designed by the architect James Gibbs, with an effigy carved by the sculptor John Michael Rysbrack, reflecting the esteem in which he was held by many contemporaries and by later generations in the city. Over the nineteenth century, accounts of Colston were extremely positive, lauding him for his philanthropy and the supposed nobility of his character. In 1852 Thomas Garrard, in a biography of Colston, cited Pliny the Elder to argue that it was the historian’s duty to preserve the memory of such a benefactor, and asserted that immortality of fame had seldom been awarded to a nobler philanthropist than Edward Colston.

In the early twentieth century, however, Colston’s historical reputation began to be reassessed. The first critical biography was written in 1920 by the Reverend Henry J. Wilkins, who was the first to demonstrate systematically that Colston had been a slave trader. Wilkins was also critical of Colston’s extreme hostility to nonconformists and, drawing attention to evidence of unscrupulousness in his business dealings and to charges of personal immorality, argued that Colston could only be understood against his historical background. Wilkins’s work provoked a strong reaction in interwar Bristol, where many sought to defend Colston’s legacy, which by then was commemorated annually in Colston Day celebrations. In 1925 Wilkins published a supplementary account with additional evidence of Colston’s failings, urging that Bristol should free itself from what he regarded as an unhistorical and ill‑proportioned veneration of Colston and instead commemorate a broader “galaxy of benefactors and worthies” of the city.

From the late twentieth century onward, with increasing recognition of Colston’s central role in the transatlantic slave trade, criticism of his commemoration intensified. The Dolphin Society, an organization formed to continue Colston’s philanthropy, by 2015 explicitly referred to “the evils of slavery” and acknowledged that Black citizens in Bristol could still suffer disadvantage in education, employment and housing for reasons connected back to the days of the slave trade. Public institutions in Bristol and beyond began to reconsider their association with his name. In April 2017 the Bristol Music Trust, which ran the city’s principal concert venue, then known as Colston Hall, announced that it would drop the Colston name after a planned 2020 refurbishment, following protests, petitions and boycotts by some artists and concertgoers. Despite petitions signed by almost 10,000 people to retain the name, the hall was formally renamed Bristol Beacon in September 2020 after three years of consultation.

Other institutions followed a similar path. In November 2017 Colston’s Girls’ School, funded by the Society of Merchant Venturers, initially announced that it would not change its name, arguing that doing so would be of “no benefit” to the school. After further consultations with staff and pupils in 2020, the school changed its name to Montpelier High School. In April 2018 the Lord Mayor of Bristol ordered that a portrait of Colston be removed from her office, stating that she would not be comfortable sharing the room with it and indicating that the portrait would instead be displayed in a proposed Museum of Abolition. In summer 2018 Colston Primary School was renamed Cotham Gardens Primary School after consultation with pupils and parents, and in February 2019 St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School announced that it would rename its former Colston house after the American mathematician Katherine Johnson. A Bristol pub formerly known as the Colston Arms temporarily adopted the name “Ye Olde Pubby McDrunkface” in June 2020 while inviting suggestions for a permanent new name; in December 2021 it was renamed the Open Arms.

These debates culminated in international attention in June 2020, during protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the killing of George Floyd in the United States. On 7 June 2020 demonstrators in Bristol toppled the bronze statue of Edward Colston, erected in 1895, and pushed it into Bristol Harbour. The statue had long been criticized by campaigners who argued that it glorified a man whose wealth was significantly connected to the enslavement and transportation of thousands of Africans. One member of the organizational team for the protest stated that Colston’s charitable deeds in no way compensated for his role in the slave trade, describing his donations as “blood money.” The toppling of the statue intensified public discussion in Britain and abroad about how to commemorate historical figures involved in slavery and empire, and led to further reconsideration of Colston’s place in Bristol’s civic identity and in the wider history of the transatlantic slave trade.