A statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, who was born in Bristol in 1636, was pulled down and thrown into Bristol Harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest on Sunday. Colston was a member of the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on the slave trade at the time and was responsible for selling up to 100,000 people from West Africa in the Caribbean and Americas between 1672 and 1689. The bronze statue was erected in 1895, on Colston Avenue in the centre of Bristol, by the city’s Society of Merchant Venturers. A petition calling for its removal has been circulating since 2017; by Sunday it had attracted more than 10,000 signatures. In 2018 a decision was taken to change the statue’s plaque to acknowledge Colston’s involvement in the slave trade, but a final agreement on wording was not reached. The mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, has said that after the statue is eventually fished out of the harbour, it is ‘highly likely’ that it will end up in a museum.