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Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting
The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn’t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities — and one that has a deeper history than you might think.
Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator.
Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.
Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.
Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator.
Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.
Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
592 pages, Paperback
Published August 26, 2025
36 people are currently reading
351 people want to read
About the author
Dan Hicks
46 books56 followersDan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 30, 2025
At the beginning of this month, I found myself in a pair of rather painful Oxfords, walking down the streets of London to Swedenborg Hall, to attend a talk by one of most talked of professors at Oxford, who had written a book on–among other things–Oxford and the legacy of colonialism that still permeates through that ancient and enchanted town. Not too long ago–rather barely four days before–I myself had been at Oxford–pointing at the statue of Rhodes at Oriel college as we walked down the High Street, heading to the Pitt-Rivers Museum, walking down Little Clarendon street for lunch at my favourite French restaurant. In other words, tracing the footsteps of the story that’s been told and remains unfinished in this 413 paged book that greeted me the minute I returned home. Since then, for the better part of May, this book has been tucked under my arm, lying flat against my bosom, even served as a makeshift pillow or a travel companion. So, when I finished it three days ago—my heart cleaved as it does when letting go of a dear friend. What would I now do with my evenings?
Perhaps, I’d take the story further. Perhaps you could continue to decolonise the narrative, I almost heard @profdanhicks say in his voice.
Be fair warned: it’s a book that speaks the truth and truth is seldom easy to digest, often bitter. However, it’s the truth we all need to hear: the successors of former colonies and of former colonialists. It doesn’t try to convert you. It doesn’t try to rally you around a “fad movement of neo-liberalism”. It just speaks the truth. Simply, beautifully, almost like Italo Calvino’s lyrical style. It will make you laugh. It will make you bristle with anger. And if you’re anything like me, it will make you argue with Dan in the margins and annotate and hope and pray he really means it when he said in the end: “Come to Oxford next week, next year or next decade. I’ll buy you a coffee…” not because you want to have coffee with him but because you want to experience the world through his decolonising eyes, hear him talk passionately, experience the town you love and hate in the same breath through his perspective, argue and discuss things with him as you walk.
Read this book because you deserve to hear the truth. Read it because all of us—enslavers and the enslaved, masters and the owned, or just their descendants perhaps–all of us need to decolonise our minds, the way we study the past, art, history, archaeology. Stories have been written by the victors for too long. It’s time that the wheel of the narrative turned again.
Read it because it reads like a conversation, because it’s the least archaeological book about archaeology. Read it because like me you love literary references thrown in even when talking about heritage, because you tend to throw in a reference or two to Hamlet or Emily Dickinson. Read it because reading is perhaps the only way to keep yourself sane in the AI world. Read to relearn. Read to ponder.
Perhaps, I’d take the story further. Perhaps you could continue to decolonise the narrative, I almost heard @profdanhicks say in his voice.
Be fair warned: it’s a book that speaks the truth and truth is seldom easy to digest, often bitter. However, it’s the truth we all need to hear: the successors of former colonies and of former colonialists. It doesn’t try to convert you. It doesn’t try to rally you around a “fad movement of neo-liberalism”. It just speaks the truth. Simply, beautifully, almost like Italo Calvino’s lyrical style. It will make you laugh. It will make you bristle with anger. And if you’re anything like me, it will make you argue with Dan in the margins and annotate and hope and pray he really means it when he said in the end: “Come to Oxford next week, next year or next decade. I’ll buy you a coffee…” not because you want to have coffee with him but because you want to experience the world through his decolonising eyes, hear him talk passionately, experience the town you love and hate in the same breath through his perspective, argue and discuss things with him as you walk.
Read this book because you deserve to hear the truth. Read it because all of us—enslavers and the enslaved, masters and the owned, or just their descendants perhaps–all of us need to decolonise our minds, the way we study the past, art, history, archaeology. Stories have been written by the victors for too long. It’s time that the wheel of the narrative turned again.
Read it because it reads like a conversation, because it’s the least archaeological book about archaeology. Read it because like me you love literary references thrown in even when talking about heritage, because you tend to throw in a reference or two to Hamlet or Emily Dickinson. Read it because reading is perhaps the only way to keep yourself sane in the AI world. Read to relearn. Read to ponder.
March 19, 2026
I think the first thing that struck me, in a slightly unsettling way, about this excellent book was the absoluteness of the title – every monument
will
fall. This wasn’t the imperative of the activist – “Rhodes must fall”, but certainty. It seemed cocky, but it also gave me pause –and of course every monument will fall, they always do, eventually. Somewhere along the line we stop venerating them.
As I wander through the provincial English town I live in I pass a war memorial – there’s always a cenotaph – and just past that a moss covered, poorly maintained pith-helmeted Tommy commemorating local men who died in the South African War. But before I get to that, at least walking from my part of town, there’s a statue of local composer of national and international significance, atop a plinth in the middle of a fountain (which seldom ‘fountains’); for the most part he’s part of the park scenery and seems to be ignored, and across the road the remnants of memorial marking the Crimean War. Depending which route I take, I might pass an engraving on a house recalling one of the members of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1912 – an expedition overshadowed by Scott’s folly that killed all of its members, and William Oates heroic ‘I’m going out for a walk, I may be some time’ sacrifice: I assume he’d lived there, and wonder how many others also forget who he was…. and I’m of an age where Scott’s failure was celebrated as a heroic act of empire, despite being beaten to the goal by a Norwegian. The cenotaph is regularly bedecked with wreaths, while the Crimean memorial for a while also carried a Ukrainian flag in the wake of the Russian invasion. It has lapsed back to being a thing to be walked round, largely ignored like everything else but the cenotaph. On reflection Hicks’ use of the absolute may well be right.
Despite the cover illustration, however this is not so much a book about monuments-as-statues, but the development of a set of monumental colonial and imperial ideas and ideologies that underpin and sustain a set of intellectual practices that give those statues-as-monuments credence and power. It centres on nineteenth century racial science, the development of archaeology, anthropology, museums, and white supremacy. That is to say, Hicks turns his lens to his intellectual and professional home, building on the ideas developed in the impressive previous book The Brutish Museums but extended beyond the focus on artefacts to craft an intellectual history. At the core of the discussion is the Pitt-Rivers pairing of imperialist father and fascist-aligned son who gave us the museum Hicks works at in Oxford and a particular strand of British social anthropology.
Part of the reason monuments fall is that we stop believing in what they stand for, but to stop believing we need to be clear about what it is we’ve come to believe – which is what Hicks sets out to explore here through an intellectual history that is layered, weaving together artefacts, key ideas, and people who stand in as vital exemplars of those ideas to give a sense of intellectual history as a kind of palimpsest where new ideas, even some that seem quite divergent, come together in ways that leave their predecessors peeking through. These are not so much foundations, shoulders we are standing on, as residuum, still present despite our best efforts.
At the core of the narrative is Augustus Pitt-Rivers, land holder and inheritor of great wealth along with the Pitt-Rivers necronym (a word I learned here, and enjoy for its layering and implications) as the closest male of the next generation – oh, primogeniture – who was an imperial agent, collector of artefacts, adherent and promulgator of racial science, and advocate of white supremacy. That is to say, a fine example of the investors in and beneficiaries of empire. Sitting alongside him is Cecil Rhodes as entrepreneur of imperialism, similarly invested in racial science and white supremacy. Part of the point of the case is to show how these ideas were woven through empire both within and beyond the shores of Britain’s Isles; in colonial occupation, in imperial investment, in enslavement and resource exploitation, in military occupation and expansion – successful or not. It’s not about showing empire as the basis of Britain’s wealth, but of its vision of what it is and who Britons are.
Hicks weaves together ideas, their adherents and advocates, and key political and intellectual figures to show how and where much of the thinking that underpins and shapes intellectual, political, and often popular ideas of the place came into being and had and have force. This gives the book, in many places a circular and allusive character, reflecting the sense of this history of ideas as palimpsest. The focus is very much in intellectual development and elite imperial thinking; this is not an attack on popular ideas as false consciousness but elite thinking as conscious and intentional framing of a legitimation of dominance. Hicks also seems to realise this might become abstract and obtuse, so he very much grounds the case in Rhodes’ and Pitt-Rivers’ biographies. More so, he centres a single artefact: a human skull converted to a drinking cup mounted on a stand and with a silver rim donated by Pitt-Rivers to Worcester College, Oxford and used at formal dinners until the 1970s: here in a single artefact he encapsulates white supremacy and racial science. It becomes even more unsettling when records show Pitt-Rivers purchased it auction in 1854 and testing shows it dates from the late 1700s. This was not an ancient artefact bought at auction, but a recent manufacture from a recently living person, used, I presume with carrying degrees of comfort and discomfort, by College Dons until quite recently.
The case is subtle, impressive and destabilising, unsettling much of what we can easily fail to see in the ways stories, histories, and ideas take hold. In a sense, this is an exposition on what the anthropologist Michael Taussig called a ‘public secret’, which Hicks explores by contrasting the ways these ideas come into being and have power with colonies writing back in work such as that done by Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, but also in the ways stories and histories are told, so he draws, critically and sceptically on work by Ursula Le Guin and more favourably on Saidiya Hartman’s notions of critical fabulation and makes a powerful case for museums and monuments, anthropology and archaeology as what he calls ‘sites of subjection’.
There is a lot going on here in 400 pages (plus extensive notes) and it merits slow and careful consideration, and revisiting. In showing how white supremacy and racial science have shaped so much of the British intellectual world, Hicks has also helped make clearer what it is we’re are stopping believing in (despite the furious outbursts of imperial reactionaries and writers in The Spectator and other defenders of imperial consciousness), and hastened the fall of those monuments that are coming down, hopefully sooner.
As I wander through the provincial English town I live in I pass a war memorial – there’s always a cenotaph – and just past that a moss covered, poorly maintained pith-helmeted Tommy commemorating local men who died in the South African War. But before I get to that, at least walking from my part of town, there’s a statue of local composer of national and international significance, atop a plinth in the middle of a fountain (which seldom ‘fountains’); for the most part he’s part of the park scenery and seems to be ignored, and across the road the remnants of memorial marking the Crimean War. Depending which route I take, I might pass an engraving on a house recalling one of the members of Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole in 1912 – an expedition overshadowed by Scott’s folly that killed all of its members, and William Oates heroic ‘I’m going out for a walk, I may be some time’ sacrifice: I assume he’d lived there, and wonder how many others also forget who he was…. and I’m of an age where Scott’s failure was celebrated as a heroic act of empire, despite being beaten to the goal by a Norwegian. The cenotaph is regularly bedecked with wreaths, while the Crimean memorial for a while also carried a Ukrainian flag in the wake of the Russian invasion. It has lapsed back to being a thing to be walked round, largely ignored like everything else but the cenotaph. On reflection Hicks’ use of the absolute may well be right.
Despite the cover illustration, however this is not so much a book about monuments-as-statues, but the development of a set of monumental colonial and imperial ideas and ideologies that underpin and sustain a set of intellectual practices that give those statues-as-monuments credence and power. It centres on nineteenth century racial science, the development of archaeology, anthropology, museums, and white supremacy. That is to say, Hicks turns his lens to his intellectual and professional home, building on the ideas developed in the impressive previous book The Brutish Museums but extended beyond the focus on artefacts to craft an intellectual history. At the core of the discussion is the Pitt-Rivers pairing of imperialist father and fascist-aligned son who gave us the museum Hicks works at in Oxford and a particular strand of British social anthropology.
Part of the reason monuments fall is that we stop believing in what they stand for, but to stop believing we need to be clear about what it is we’ve come to believe – which is what Hicks sets out to explore here through an intellectual history that is layered, weaving together artefacts, key ideas, and people who stand in as vital exemplars of those ideas to give a sense of intellectual history as a kind of palimpsest where new ideas, even some that seem quite divergent, come together in ways that leave their predecessors peeking through. These are not so much foundations, shoulders we are standing on, as residuum, still present despite our best efforts.
At the core of the narrative is Augustus Pitt-Rivers, land holder and inheritor of great wealth along with the Pitt-Rivers necronym (a word I learned here, and enjoy for its layering and implications) as the closest male of the next generation – oh, primogeniture – who was an imperial agent, collector of artefacts, adherent and promulgator of racial science, and advocate of white supremacy. That is to say, a fine example of the investors in and beneficiaries of empire. Sitting alongside him is Cecil Rhodes as entrepreneur of imperialism, similarly invested in racial science and white supremacy. Part of the point of the case is to show how these ideas were woven through empire both within and beyond the shores of Britain’s Isles; in colonial occupation, in imperial investment, in enslavement and resource exploitation, in military occupation and expansion – successful or not. It’s not about showing empire as the basis of Britain’s wealth, but of its vision of what it is and who Britons are.
Hicks weaves together ideas, their adherents and advocates, and key political and intellectual figures to show how and where much of the thinking that underpins and shapes intellectual, political, and often popular ideas of the place came into being and had and have force. This gives the book, in many places a circular and allusive character, reflecting the sense of this history of ideas as palimpsest. The focus is very much in intellectual development and elite imperial thinking; this is not an attack on popular ideas as false consciousness but elite thinking as conscious and intentional framing of a legitimation of dominance. Hicks also seems to realise this might become abstract and obtuse, so he very much grounds the case in Rhodes’ and Pitt-Rivers’ biographies. More so, he centres a single artefact: a human skull converted to a drinking cup mounted on a stand and with a silver rim donated by Pitt-Rivers to Worcester College, Oxford and used at formal dinners until the 1970s: here in a single artefact he encapsulates white supremacy and racial science. It becomes even more unsettling when records show Pitt-Rivers purchased it auction in 1854 and testing shows it dates from the late 1700s. This was not an ancient artefact bought at auction, but a recent manufacture from a recently living person, used, I presume with carrying degrees of comfort and discomfort, by College Dons until quite recently.
The case is subtle, impressive and destabilising, unsettling much of what we can easily fail to see in the ways stories, histories, and ideas take hold. In a sense, this is an exposition on what the anthropologist Michael Taussig called a ‘public secret’, which Hicks explores by contrasting the ways these ideas come into being and have power with colonies writing back in work such as that done by Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter, but also in the ways stories and histories are told, so he draws, critically and sceptically on work by Ursula Le Guin and more favourably on Saidiya Hartman’s notions of critical fabulation and makes a powerful case for museums and monuments, anthropology and archaeology as what he calls ‘sites of subjection’.
There is a lot going on here in 400 pages (plus extensive notes) and it merits slow and careful consideration, and revisiting. In showing how white supremacy and racial science have shaped so much of the British intellectual world, Hicks has also helped make clearer what it is we’re are stopping believing in (despite the furious outbursts of imperial reactionaries and writers in The Spectator and other defenders of imperial consciousness), and hastened the fall of those monuments that are coming down, hopefully sooner.
May 23, 2025
DNF @ 150 pages
i just hated how this was written. the second person, the excessive references to oxford, the esoteric writing style. i'm really interested in the topic but couldn't push through. audiobook was also a hard listen!
i just hated how this was written. the second person, the excessive references to oxford, the esoteric writing style. i'm really interested in the topic but couldn't push through. audiobook was also a hard listen!
January 13, 2026
I'm a Fan of Dan Hicks and also adored his first book. As I follow him son social media, listen to his podcast etc. most of his second book seemed a bit repetitive. Of course not less important but I feel like, even for me, there were too many new names and places which made it a bit hard to follow.
July 15, 2025
This book is on such an important topic, but the experimental writing style is off putting. The main points could have been made more clearly and directly in less than 100 pages instead the book is over 400 pages
September 6, 2025
okay fine abolish museums but maybe keep the dinosaurs and interactive sections?? [please]
October 9, 2025
This book seems to have something important to say - that colonial museums and monuments continue to reinforce racist stereotypes and support systems of oppression. However, the book is so confusing and wildly convoluted that it never really gets to making this point. The use of the ‘you’ perspective, as if you as the reader are in conversation with the author, allows Hicks to mansplain his opinions as he writes his thoughts in a stream of consciousness manner that is extremely hard to follow. He constantly refers to ‘what this book will do’ without actually doing it. I am unsure who the intended audience is - if you want to engage the general public, this massive book employing perplexing academic language is not the way to do it. If you want to reach academics, they are also not going to be inclined to read a book that seems to have no clear organisation or deep analysis of facts and events. The style and length of the book is truly self-indulgent.
Additionally, he writes about the importance of repatriation from a position of power, as a curator at the Pitt Rivers, and yet despite having over 400 pages to say about this, Hicks has yet to help repatriate any cultural items in the two decades he has worked for the museum he claims to believe should not exist.
Additionally, he writes about the importance of repatriation from a position of power, as a curator at the Pitt Rivers, and yet despite having over 400 pages to say about this, Hicks has yet to help repatriate any cultural items in the two decades he has worked for the museum he claims to believe should not exist.
October 22, 2025
I very much enjoyed reading this book despite the fairly grim nature of the topic. The writing style is very different from other books on society and racism that I have read but, having over the surprise and in tune with it, it made the book an engaging and enjoyable read.
Reading this book was an unusual experience as the well laid out charges against the Victorian racists and their continuing legacy are not softened by the unusual and engaging style of the writing.
Reading this book was an unusual experience as the well laid out charges against the Victorian racists and their continuing legacy are not softened by the unusual and engaging style of the writing.
January 10, 2026
While I enjoyed the experimental approach Professor Hicks took with the use of second person, I did grow weary of those sections. It's quite a long text, and perhaps we should have quickened our pace a bit. (Full transparency: I was reading it for an essay, so I was trying to get through it on a time crunch).
The refusal to name also became tedious. I get what he was trying to do with that, but in doing so, he did sacrifice clarity.
The refusal to name also became tedious. I get what he was trying to do with that, but in doing so, he did sacrifice clarity.
June 25, 2025
What a read! So thought provoking and made me rethink many things. Great book.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews