British Museum moves bust of slave-owning founding father Sir Hans Sloane

The British Museum has moved a bust of its slave-owning founding father in a bid to confront the institution's links to colonialism.

Hartwig Fischer, the institution’s director, said on Tuesday that the bust of Sir Hans Sloane has been placed in a secure cabinet alongside artefacts explaining his work in the context of the British Empire.

The museum's curators said that the decision was influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement, following worldwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in the US in May.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Mr Fischer said: “We have pushed him off the pedestal. We must not hide anything. Healing is knowledge.”

Sir Hans, born in 1660, was an Irish physician and natural scientist who married a wealthy heiress of Jamaican sugar plantations worked on by slaves. His collection of artefacts provided the starting point for what became the British Museum.

Mr Fischer added: “Dedication to truthfulness when it comes to history is absolutely crucial, with the aim to rewrite our shared, complicated and, at times, very painful history.

“The case dedicated to Hans Sloane and his relationship to slavery is a very important step in this. We have pushed him off the pedestal where nobody looked at him, and placed him in the limelight.

“The British Museum has done a lot of work – accelerated and enlarged its work on its own history, the history of empire, the history of colonialism, and also of slavery. These are subjects which need to be addressed, and to be addressed properly. We need to understand our own history.”

Today Sir Hans is honoured by a number of place names, including London’s Sloane Square.

The British Museum’s demotion of its founding father is part of a wider reckoning on race triggered by Mr Floyd’s death.

In June, protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston while campaigners have reignited their calls to remove the Cecil Rhodes statue from outside an Oxford college.

The museum said in a statement that the bust "has been redisplayed in the Enlightenment Gallery juxtaposed with objects that reflect that Sloane's collection was created in the context of the British Empire and the slave economy.

"The display acknowledges that Sloane's travels and collecting in colonial Jamaica used enslaved Africans and explores the fact that his collecting was partly financed from the labour of enslaved Africans on his wife’s sugar plantations."

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