Imperial conversations: linking the Caribbean, South Asia and North America through the monuments to William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, Vice-Admiral Charles Watson, and George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax, c. 1801, 1933 and 2026

In 1933 John Flaxman’s monument to William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1793–1801), was relocated from the central aisle of the north transept to the west aisle, where it now triangulates the monument to Vice-Admiral Charles Watson (1760–63), designed by James Stuart and executed by Peter Scheemakers, and John Bacon’s monument to George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax (1782). This article explores the impact of this relocation on interpretations of Mansfield’s legacy in the Westminster Abbey pantheon. It challenges Mansfield’s conventional hegemonic presentation as an abolitionist and demonstrates how this characterization can be critiqued by interrogating the monument’s new surrounding contexts. Sculptural and biographical intersections between the Mansfield, Watson and Halifax monuments activate Mansfield’s personal familial connections to the Caribbean and professional judicial interactions with the British enslavement and transatlantic trafficking trades, reflecting more broadly the global imperial intersections which comprised the British imperial world. Hence, this article demonstrates how contested imperial legacies in the abbey pantheon can be extracted and scrutinized by engaging with nuanced conversations between monuments which are often overlooked by conventional methodologies that focus on individual monuments in isolation.