This review was first published in the July 2025 issue of The Critic.

A decade into the culture wars, the argument for the decolonisation of the museum has run out of steam. Nowhere is its critical dead end more evident than in Dan Hicks’s Every Monument Will Fall, a bewildering moralistic call for guilt and hatred of all history. “Dead”, not least because a “mediocre dead white man” haunts the museum where Hicks made his career. “Dead”, because Hicks’s attempt to escape that man’s shadow takes the form of a necrography. “Dead”, finally, because it exorcises this ghost with no interest in the living.

The 19th-century collector Henry Lane Fox is a dark father figure to ethnography and archaeology. Fox, known as Pitt-Rivers in later life, founded the collection that is now Oxford University’s ethnographic museum bearing this name. The museum’s website offers a scant biography of the benefactor. It obliquely refers to Fox’s “professional interests in the development of firearms”. It then marks the unusual arrangement of the collection by type and function. The “parallels and juxtapositions” of this display, the institutions suggests, are evidence of a “great diversity” of distinct cultures.

For Hicks, this celebration is a whitewash. In the background of Every Monument is a sprawling portrait of Fox entrenched in the industry of killing, intellectually excusing state-orchestrated repression, and unquestioningly benefiting from the spoils of slavery. Hicks’s thesis is that Fox’s understanding of world cultures was underpinned by a belief in the righteousness of Western civilisational might and the cultural supremacy of whiteness. His conclusion? That the same supremacy still thrives on death today.

There are, indeed, plenty of reasons to consider condemning Fox. The collector stated on record, for example, that the orientation of his collection was not to celebrate difference but distinguish developed Western and other “barbaric” cultures. His key interest was in the rituals of killing. He did not hold back, either, in offering now suspect theories of cultural reproduction and degradation. 

These ideas, Hicks suggests, became so ingrained in archaeology and ethnography that it wasn’t until 2022 that his museum removed from display Fox’s macabre collection of shrunken human heads. The uproar which those changes prompted from the conservative press is evidence of British society unreflectively venerating their inherited past. Such an attitude belongs to a death cult, one which Fox knowingly and intentionally created as a trap for successive generations.

Hicks finds evidence of that cult’s cultural transmission in material artefacts. His case study is a drinking cup fashioned out of a human skull, once in Fox’s private collection. This item was presented to Worcester College by Fox’s grandson, George Fox-Pitt, an undergraduate there in the 1920s. Recent scientific analyses confirmed the cranium belonged to a woman who died in the 1780s. Nothing is known of her life. 

What is documented is Fox-Pitt’s admiration of Hitler and the Nazi party. The cup’s donor attended the 1937 Nuremberg rally. He published an apologia for Germany’s Anschluss grounded in the inferiority of Czech culture. He attended meetings with Oswald Mosley. When he was arrested in 1940 under wartime regulations, he pleaded for academic asylum at Worcester. This was denied because the security service thought exposing his “objectionable views in the university” undesirable. 

Hicks is not content with condemning Fox-Pitt for his overt fascism and declares it a heritable trait of the Pitt-Rivers line. Indeed, he finds that fascism was synonymous with establishment British culture then, and that it is establishment British culture today. Faced with this realisation, Hicks only half-ironically proposes redefining fascism itself to include traits like a “love of the railways”, “the family and public education”, and “an interest in inheritance and posterity”. All of these, he dismisses as “irrational”. One almost hears him invoking Fox-Pitt in approval of universities no-platforming thinkers who hold undesirable views today as though they were no different to Hilter’s.

For what purports to be a serious argument for rewriting history with contemporary ethical intent, Every Monument brims with anecdotes, digressions, and appeals to ahistorical theory that undermine its goal. The narrative barely maintains the distinction between fact derived from historical evidence and material drawn from hearsay and opinion. Hicks bamboozles the reader by referring to six thinkers such as Leibnitz and Deleuze in the space of two pages and then switching scale to intimately address them as “you”, thus forcing nods of unwitting agreement. 

Hicks might argue that this is what Fox did to build the myth of a superior British culture which today’s historians must unravel by any means possible. The frequent hyperbole, such as his designation of the activist anti-decolonisation group Restore Trust as Tufton Street “Muskian astroturfers”, is thereby justifiable. But Hicks’s project loses all credibility when he imagines that the juvenile Fox-Pitt drunk from that gruesome skull cup at his grandfather’s dining table, becoming thus initiated in his bloodline’s culture of violence. Is this story true? “Who knows,” Hicks replies. “And frankly, who cares?”

It is remarkable that this project of decolonisation by “vibes, papers, and essays”, as that viral social media post had it, has had any material consequences. Hicks’s 2020 book The Brutish Museums was pivotal to the restitution of the Benin bronzes, despite its central argument of British culpability in the 1897 Edo massacre being riddled with errors. Now, Every Monument opens with the rhetorical “ever felt you’ve been lied to?” Hicks promises that he’ll cheer the decolonial mob toppling the next statue with new quasi-historical morsels.

Granted, some monumental falls are justified. But as forceful as Hicks is in indicting legacy culture, one will look in vain in Every Monument for a positive moral argument. The text offers no cogent theory of cultural absolution that might result from the denunciation of one’s forefathers. Hicks promises neither earthly nor heavenly reward for the restoration of dignity to the human remains once labelled as “barbaric”. Instead, he conjures the image of himself gazing at the skull cup in his study as though he were Hamlet.

This tableau mort, a deathly still life, might offer psychoanalytic insight into how Hicks emancipated himself from his discipline’s colonial, fascist tendencies while the “Pitt Rivers” necronym remained his academic affiliation for nearly two decades. By designating all culture as fascist, Hicks blackmails his readers into admitting that they, unlike him, still secretly venerate the spoils of death.

Yet Hicks declares that the arc of history has bent towards justice under his watch. But what he is concerned with is not history but historiography. He confuses one discipline for the other like he confuses archaeology with morality. His hubris as the UK’s ethicist decoloniser-in-chief is thus self-justifying. He wants to reform ethnography, archaeology, and their museums. He wants to reset all Western history. But thus, absent a method for interpreting historical evidence, he is unable to explain how societies might progress in the present. Perversely, he must resort to Fox’s argument for the forced equalisation of all cultures as the means of moral improvement. Pitt-Rivers’s tool was war; Hicks’s is its feeble cultural sibling.

Every Monument is a missed opportunity because there is undisputable value in an account of Fox’s legacy, however unflattering to us. The greater miss is that Hicks’s illegitimacy as a moralist detracts from the positive aspects of the growing public engagement with what are euphemistically called “complex histories”. It brings into question the integrity of the intellectual project that dominates the institutions.

There is an opening here for those interested in matters of history and culture themselves. Wishing to rescue the decolonial project from Hicks, one might remind him that the distinction between ethics and fact is not some reactionary fantasy. One case in point may be Hew Locke’s excellent 2024 British Museum exhibition what have we here?, whose art-historical indictment of the British Empire was deftly couched in the artist “just telling” his audience “stories”. The Guyanese-born Locke has not shied from taking up colonial legacies in his work for decades but has consistently resisted the institution turning his work into vapid morality tales. 

Another chance could lie in pointing out, for example, the role of cultural activists in compelling the National Portrait Gallery to tell the full biography of the first freed slave in Britain, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. Diallo’s remarkable story of capture and emancipation was an inspiration for advocates of the abolition of slavery. Yet the Gallery’s biographical entry omitted that he was himself a slave owner even after his return to West Africa. This is no gotcha, because these facts have long been known, yet their forgetting illustrates the risks of disciplinary boundaries shifting with fashion.

Hicks might call this “whataboutism” and miss the point that is clear to anyone truly interested in how cultures relate to their histories. Pitt-Rivers’s founding of the museum might have been a misguided attempt at instilling an idea of historical knowledge, wrapped in a myth of a superior “aboriginal” English culture. Hicks, by contrast, offers no inkling of its successor. What is apparent from Every Monument, however, is that it produces no monuments worth toppling.

Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting by Dan Hicks is published by Hutchinson Heinemann.