Two Days in Bristol

This chapter is about two days in Bristol, a city in south-west England. The first day is 16 June 1795. It was on this day that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge delivered his Lecture on the Slave Trade at the Assembly Coffeehouse situated alongside Bristol dock. Our second day is 8 June 2020. On this day, a group of protestors toppled a bronze statue of Edward Colston, which had stood at Colston Avenue in Bristol for a century and a quarter, dragged it along the dockside, and threw it in. Between our two days lie 225 years. Our chronological ‘chain of conjecture’, to borrow Carlo Ginzburg’s phrase, is then longer than our geographical, which only stretches a few hundred yards. The intellectual ambit is though considerable, encompassing the history of the slave trade in English law, politics, and poetry.