Every Monument Will Fall

Dan Hicks takes issue with the idea of a culture war. In his view, what the world has seen is better described as a war on culture: a long campaign in which civic museums, public art and even universities have been turned into weapons. He argues that this campaign has roots reaching much further back than most people assume.

Every Monument Will Fall traces where today's disputes over art, heritage, memory and colonialism come from. Hicks links the putting up of statues, the founding of disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology, and the storing of looted art and human skulls in museum collections. That includes the museum where he himself works as a curator.

The book is part history, part biography and part excavation. Its story moves from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the front line of the American Civil War, and from the City of London to the University of Oxford. Along the way it shows how militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy remain built into the foundations of cultural institutions.

Hicks offers an urgent rethinking of how we approach culture, and of where hope, remembrance and reconciliation might be found among the fragments of a violent past that is still unresolved. He rejects both toppling every statue and simply living with a past that cannot be changed. Instead he argues that monuments, including ones that are hard to recognise as monuments, should be allowed to fall from time to time, so that a culture of memory fit for our own era can be built.