Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire

Abstract

Abstract The built environment is important to how we experience and negotiate our daily lives, both past and present. In the post-colonial world today, buildings, monuments, parks, streets, avenues, entire cities even, remain as witness to Britain’s once impressive if troubled imperial past. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the architectural and urban transformations that took place across the British empire between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. With extensive chronological and regional coverage, by leading scholars in the field, this volume will quickly become a seminal text for those who study, teach, and research the relationship between empire and the built environment in the British context. It provides an up-to-date account of past and current historiographical approaches toward the study of British imperial and colonial architecture and urbanism, and will prove equally useful to those who study architecture and urbanism in other European imperial and transnational contexts. Divided in two main sections, over twelve chapters, the first part of the volume deals with overarching thematic issues, including building typologies, major genres and periods of activity, networks of expertise and the transmission of ideas, the intersection between planning and politics, as well as the architectural impact of empire on Britain itself. The second section builds on the first by discussing these themes in relation to specific geographical regions, teasing out the variations and continuities observable in context, both practical and theoretical. In addition to being fully referenced, each chapter includes a select bibliography of key scholarly sources.

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