Marvin Rees: We must build our national story on strong foundations

History is not fixed. It evolves as we uncover new evidence, hear new voices, understand and confront the biases we individually and collectively carry. It is shaped by conscious and unconscious decisions about what we see as evidence, what we include, what we leave out, and how we interpret the past. These choices matter because they frame our understanding of ourselves, our society, and our world. That’s why the British Museum should establish a permanent exhibition on the transatlantic slave trade.

When protesters in Bristol pulled down the statue of Edward Colston and threw it into the harbour, we were confronted with a choice about what to do with the statue. For years, the city celebrated Colston for his philanthropy, while his role in the transatlantic slave trade was downplayed or ignored. The ‘We are Bristol’ History Commission I set up didn’t focus on Colston or who he was. Instead it examined what we choose to remember and by implication, what we choose to forget.

In confronting these questions, we uncovered a crafted narrative that celebrated Colston’s generosity but silenced the voices of those who suffered because of his actions. We also uncovered a wider city history in which the voices and stories of the white working class, women, gay people and disabled people had been consciously and unconsciously left out. Recognising this put Bristol in a better position to begin telling a fuller, more accurate story about who we are and how we became the city we are today. You can see some of the results of that work in an exhibition that opened earlier this year at M Shed.

The British Museum now faces an opportunity. It has to decide what counts and what doesn’t count as important in the British story. The transatlantic slave trade is critical to understanding the nation’s wealth, power, and modern identity. It shaped Britain’s economic development, directly generating wealth and indirectly stimulating industries such as banking and insurance. Slavery fuelled Britain’s colonial expansion, and it changed our connectivity to the world, the makeup of our society and the ways in which we live. So the lack of a permanent exhibition at the British Museum about the transatlantic slave trade is not just a hole in our national story, it’s a distortion of history.

Some fear that a permanent exhibition would be divisive or unpatriotic, but history is not about comfort or celebration and it should not be limited by how it might make us feel. History is about getting as close to truth as you can with all the evidence you can find. Ignoring inconvenient truths does not protect us – it diminishes us. We are not at liberty to bend evidence to desired outcomes in the physical sciences. And the same holds in the human sciences. Messy, painful truths, whatever they are, are inevitable parts of our history, because humans are complicated, imperfect and sometimes of ill motive. A permanent exhibition would not be an attack on Britain, it would be a commitment to understanding our shared history.

I think of a parable here. If we hide from our past to make us feel better, if we keep truth incomplete, it’s like building a house on sand. Our story will be quickly told, easily heard and consumed but also easily washed away. If we take the hard option, hacking into the rock, contending with the difficult, we’ll build a national story on strong foundations underpinning a society that is resilient enough to resist the storms that will inevitably come our way. We need openness and evidence, courage and leadership. The British Museum must measure up to the challenge of this significant chapter of British history, so we can understand, acknowledge and build on the full range of evidence that make up our nation’s story.