Cast in Stone

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• Gahagan, Sebastian
  Irish sculptor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His most notable colonial work is the monument to the slave-owner and colonial administrator Thomas Picton (1758–1815) in St. Paul's Cathedral.
• Gainsborough, Thomas
  English portrait and landscape painter. Gainsborough painted a number of figures with connections to transatlantic slavery and colonialism during the eighteenth century. These include, for example, the absentee slave-owner and MP Charles Tudway (c. 1765) as well as The Byam Family (c.1762–66) and The Baillie Family (c. 1784). In 1768, Gainsborough painted a portrait of Ignatius Sancho, who was a Black British writer, composer, and abolitionist. Gainsborough also painted portraits of Robert Clive, credited with turning the British East India Company into an imperial state in India, and his son, Edward Clive.
• Gallieni, Joseph Simon
  Saint-Cyrien, of Italian origin and rather modest, he embodied the republican officer who rose from the ranks thanks to the colonial wars. From his first posting to La Réunion (1872-1875) to the post of Governor General of Madagascar (1896-1905), his career was imperial: Senegal (1877-1881), Martinique (1883-1886), French Sudan (now Mali and Burkina Faso) (1886-1888) and Tonkin (1892-1896). He wrote extensively theorising the doctrine of "pacification", a brutal mix of war of conquest and the establishment of colonial power, and that of "race politics". He ended his career in France at the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre. In 1914, he returned to service as Governor of Paris, and distinguished himself at the Battle of the Marne. He was Minister of War from October 1915 to March 1916.
• Gandhi, Mahatma
  Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and nonviolence leader who led India's successful independence campaign from the British Empire in the twentieth century.
• Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
  Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1885-1886; 1886-1892; 1895-1902).
• Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert, 7th Marquess of Salisbury
  British Conservative politician
• Geffrye, Robert
  English merchant and slave trader in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Geffrye was a petitioner to the East India Company (1654), a Charter Member (1672) and Assistant (1691-2) of the Royal African Company, and Lord Mayor of London (1685-1686).
• George I
  King of Great Britain and Ireland (1714-27) and Elector of Hanover (1698-1727). George I was governor of the South Sea Company, which was involved in the transatlantic slave-trade through the Asiento contract, and held a substantial amount of shares in the company.
• George II
  King of Great Britain and Ireland (1727-60). Like his father, George I, George II was also a governor and shareholder of the South Sea Company, which was involved in the transatlantic slave-trade through the Asiento contract.
• George III
  King of Great Britain and Ireland (1760-1820)
• George IV
  King of the United Kingdom and Hanover (1820-1830)
• George V
  King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India (1910-1936)
• George VI
  King of the United Kingdom (1936 to 1952) and Emperor of India (1936-1948)
• Gibbons, Grinling
  Anglo-Dutch sculptor and wood carver in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A number of his works depict figures with connections to the transatlantic slave-trade, including the statue of Robert Clayton at St Thomas' Hospital, the statue of John Moore at Christ's Hospital, and the statue of Charles II at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea.
• Gibbs, Hayley
  British sculptor
• Gibson, John
  Welsh sculptor active in the nineteenth century. One of his most important patrons was the slave-owner and West Indian merchant Henry Robertson Sandbach, who was awarded slavery compensation for several estates in Guiana after abolition. Gibson produced a number of works for the Sandbach family, including a monument to Margaret Sandbach, a relief titled Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me, and two portraits of William Robertson and Sara Maria Sandbach. Another of Gibson's patrons was the slave-owner and politician George Watson Taylor MP, who commissioned a number of works from Gibson including a bust of William Roscoe, six family busts, and statues of Paris and a nymph.
• Gilbert, Alfred
  British sculptor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• Gladstone, William Ewart
  Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1868-1874; 1880-1885; 1886; 1892-1894). Gladstone's father, John Gladstone (1764-1851) was one of the largest and wealthiest British absentee slave-owners in the Caribbean, owning several estates in both Guiana and Jamaica. Although William Ewart Gladstone did not claim slavery compensation himself, he supported compensation payouts for slave-owners (including aiding his father in making his own claims), the apprenticeship system, and the West India interest over issues such as sugar duties. Gladstone's position on slavery did change over time, however, and he gradually became more critical towards the institution. His changing relationship on the matter should be seen in the wider context of Victorian Britain's self-representation as an "anti-slavery nation", and its attendant erasure of the legacies of British slavery in the Caribbean. In 2023, several of Gladstone's descendants traveled to Guiana to formally apologise for the family's involvement in slave-ownership and committed to paying reparations in response. In addition to his own complex relationship to transatlantic slavery, Gladstone's time in office was also shaped by the period of New Imperialism, which saw unprecedented European colonial expansion in Africa and Asia. Although Gladstone and the Liberal Party were known for their opposition to imperialism generally, his premiership involved the British takeover of Egypt in 1882.
• Gleichen, Feodora
  British sculptor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• Gordon, Charles George
  British army officer and colonial administrator. Gordon was Governor-General of the Sudan from 1877 to 1879 and 1884 to 1885. Gordon's death in 1885 during the nationalist revolt in Sudan, led by the Sudanese religious and political leader Muhammad Ahmad, immortalised him as the archetypal colonial hero in Victorian society. George William Joy's famous painting, The Death of General Gordon (1893), presented Gordon as a stern martyr figure making his "last stand" against empire's racialised and infrahuman others. The cult of Gordon took several artistic forms, including bronze statues by Hamo Thornycroft and Edward Onslow Ford, and indeed outlasted the Victorians, as the films The Four Feathers (1939) and Khartoum (1966) exemplify. Lytton Strachey satirised the hero-worship around Gordon in his work Eminent Victorians (1918), sardonically describing the aftermath of the revolt with the words "At any rate, it had all ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring".
• Gough, Hugh, 1st Viscount Gough
  British Army officer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gough fought in a number of imperial conflicts across the globe, including in the Caribbean, China, and India. He was Commander-in-Chief in China during the First Opium War (1839-1842) and later Commander-in-Chief in India from 1843 to 1849.
• Green, Richard
  British shipowner and philanthropist in the nineteenth century. The family firm Green, Wigram, & Green were involved in constructing East Indiamen for the East India Company.
• Guest, Hector
  Scottish sculptor
• Guy, Thomas
  British slave-trade investor, bookseller, politician, and founder of Guy's Hospital. Much of Guy's wealth was made through his investments in the South Sea Company, which was involved in the transatlantic slave-trade from 1713 onwards. He founded Guy's Hospital in 1721.
• Haig, Douglas, 1st Earl Haig
  British military officer who served in India, Sudan, South Africa and Europe.
• Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Frederick Temple
  British public servant and colonial administrator in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was Governor-General of Canada (1872-1878) and Viceroy and Governor-General of India (1884-1888).
• Hampton, Herbert
  British sculptor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of his notable colonial works include the busts of Guy Fleetwood Wilson and John Jenkins in Old Delhi, which are now located in Coronation Park.
• Hamy, Ernest
  Trained as a doctor, Ernest Hamy was interested in all human sciences. A student of Paul Broca, he adopted his methods of somatic anthropology to study human skulls. In 1882, he published a synthesis of his studies, Crania Ethnica, Les crânes des races humaines, with Quatrefages, professor of anthropology at the Muséum naturel, in which he gives the measurements taken on the skulls of different "races", considered unequal to each other, and concentrates the study on those he claims "remained at the lowest rung of the ladder of civilizations" (p. VI). A member of numerous learned societies and part of scholarly networks in France and Europe, prolific author of memoirs, books and notes in journals, assistant then professor of anthropology at the Muséum from 1882 to 1908, he worked tirelessly to create the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro. He directed the museum from its creation in 1878 to 1906.
• Hannekom, Wayne
  Rhodesian soldier who fought to uphold white minority-led rule in Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) from 1978 to 1980 during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation.
• Haque, Ehtasham
  Tower Hamlets Councillor in London.
• Haque, Nurul
  Bangladeshi-British politician and community leader; first Bangladeshi councillor in the UK. Denied membership by the Labour Party, he contested elections as part of the People's Alliance of East London, and took his seat in Tower Hamlets Council in 1982 as an Independent member.
• Hardiman, Alfred Frank
  English sculptor active in the twentieth century. Hardiman produced a bust of Cecil Rhodes for Rhodes House in Oxford.
• Hardinge, Henry, 1st Viscount Hardinge
  British soldier, politician and colonial administrator. Hardinge was Governor-General of India from 1844 to 1848.
• Harland, Edward James
  Prominent English shipbuilder and politician in Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century. Harland co-founded the shipping company Harland & Wolff with Gustav Wilhelm Wolff in 1861. Harland later served as Mayor of Belfast (1889-1886) and Member of Parliament for Belfast North (1889-1895). Harland & Wolff was actively involved in supporting Britain's maritime empire with ship-building yards across the UK. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Harland & Wolff also received orders for steamers from the Confederate States of America, although whether these orders were actually carried out has not yet been established.
• Harris, Arthur
  Colonial air-force officer and Marshal of the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. Harris was the son of George Steel Travers Harris, an Indian Civil Service officer, and spent his early adult years in Rhodesia before fighting in Africa and Europe during the First World War. During the interwar years Harris served with the RAF in India, Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Jordan, where he helped to suppress anti-colonial revolts as well as develop new area bombing techniques. After leading RAF Bomber Command in the Allies' bombing campaign against Nazi Germany in the Second World War, Harris moved to South Africa to briefly manage the South African Marine Corporation, before finally returning to the UK in 1953.
• Harryhausen, Ray
  American-British animator and special effects creator in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Harryhausen produced the statue of David Livingstone in Blantyre alongside Irish artist Gareth Knowles.
• Hartwell, Charles Leonard
  English sculptor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some of his notable colonial works include the memorial to Admiral Arthur Phillip in London, the Boer War memorial in Brighton, and the statue of Robert Sandilands Frowd Walker in Perak, Malaysia.
• Havelock, Henry
  British Army general in the nineteenth century who fought in Burma, Afghanistan, Iran and India.
• Hems, Harry
  British sculptor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
• Herbert, George, 13th Earl of Pembroke
  Under-Secretary of State for War (1874-1875)
• Herbert, Sidney, 1st Baron Herbert of Lea
  Secretary of State for the Colonies (1855) and Secretary of State for War (1859-1861).
• Herriot, Alan Beattie
  Scottish sculptor
• Heywood, Oliver
  British banker in the nineteenth century. The Heywoods family had investments in the transatlantic slave-trade.
• Hibbert, George
  West Indian slave-owner, merchant, collector and philanthropist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hibbert was one of the founding figures behind the West India Docks in London as well as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
• Hill, Rowland, 2nd Viscount Hill
  British politician in the nineteenth century.
• Hillary, William
  British absentee slave-owner in Jamaica and philanthropist in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hillary was the founder of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in 1824. Hillary's connections to figures across Britain’s maritime imperial economy, including politicians, merchants, slave-traders and slave-owners, were important in securing the financial backing needed for the creation of the charity. Some of the charity’s first patrons included figures such as George Hibbert who owed their riches to British slavery.
• Hogg, Alice
  Alice Anna Hogg (née Graham), born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1846, was the daughter of William Graham (1817-1885), a Scottish politician, East India merchant, cotton manufacturer, and port shipper. In 1871, she married Quintin Hogg (1845-1903), who was a colonial merchant and philanthropist involved in sugar production in British Guiana.
• Hogg, Quintin
  British colonial merchant and philanthropist in the nineteenth century. Hogg was the seventh son of James Weir Hogg (1790–1876), who was twice Chairman of the East India Company. He was also the brother-in-law of Charles McGarel (1788 - 1876), a former slave-owner in British Guiana, through his sister Mary Hogg (1829 - 1913). In 1864, Hogg entered McGarel's sugar merchant firm of Bosanquet, Curtis & Co. and was involved in managing colonial sugar production in Demerara, British Guiana.
• Holland, Sam
  British sculptor
• Hollins, Peter
  English sculptor in the nineteenth century.