‘The point is, history sells’: Martin Davies’s political critique of history and heritage

In this article we aim to work in the political direction that Martin Davies’s critique of history-focused-behaviour opened up. More specifically, we apply Davies’s thinking to a discussion of recent UK governments’ heritage policies and preferred types of heritage discourse. After an initial overview of how heritage is instrumentalised for political and financial purposes in the present, we move on to discuss two case studies of heritage work in operation. The first of these looks at one of London’s most recent regeneration schemes in King’s Cross. This redevelopment provides a good illustration of how heritage professionals, property developers and the urban regeneration industry can work together in ways that summon history as a resource for overriding the mechanisms of democratic accountability. The second study looks at how the politics of heritage relate to the legacies of British involvement in slavery and the slave trade, mainly focusing on the recent controversy about the statue of Robert Milligan at Canary Wharf, plus the more high-profile pulling down of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol in 2020. As these cases suggest, instrumental and coercive rhetoric about the apparent public value of history intensified under the pressures of financial crisis, Brexit and the disruptions of the pandemic. Davies’s observation that history performs a socially affirmative function that must identify itself with prevailing social and political practice describes the current situation well.