Does ABE Journal need a rethink? “Early modern” and “modern” in the study of imperial / colonial architecture
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historia de la arquitectura, imperialismo, intercambio transnacional, influenciaTexte intégral
- 1 See https://abe.revues.org/.
1At present ABE Journal is limited to publishing scholarship dealing with the “nineteenth century onwards”.1 Although I am on the journal’s Editorial Board, I have long questioned this limitation. To my mind, this chronological structure is not only arbitrary and therefore artificial, but a kind of wilful denial of the origins and longue durée of the European imperial project in its totality. Can the nineteenth and twentieth centuries be seen as exclusively representative of European imperialism vis-à-vis architecture, let alone wider transnational encounters through time? Why should modern transnationalism be considered any more significant than early modern, or even ancient? If so, what is the journal’s claim to such exclusivity? Surely it is not competing for topical space in the ever-proliferating world of architectural publishing. Is it a mandate relating to some as yet unarticulated notion fundamental to industrialisation, or is there some larger epistemological basis to this curb?
2To be fair, these are somewhat rhetorical questions, for it needs remembering that the journal’s chronological limit as currently stated has historical roots, in the sense that ABE Journal was born of a pan-European funding initiative (COST Action IS0904) that was itself bounded by these parameters. Therefore, ABE Journal as it now exists is a direct legacy of that initiative. Nevertheless, this does not immunise it from scrutiny or criticism. Now independent of these contractual origins, does ABE Journal need to maintain its temporal pretence? Given the implicit scope of its principal acronym, “A(rchitecture) B(eyond) E(urope),” it would seem not. The journal’s remit may not pertain solely to the colonial / postcolonial strand in architectural history, but there is no question that this is a substantial part of what it does, and something for which it is largely recognised.
- 2 G. A. Bremner, “Rethinking British Architecture: Towards an Expanded Methodology,” in G. A. Bremne (...)
3In a number of recent publications I have made the argument that scholars working in later periods of colonial / imperial architectural history might benefit from a familiarity with the methods and historiographies employed by those working in earlier periods.2 It seems to me that the unspoken assumption has long been that the more contemporary or “modern” a topic one works on, the more methodologically advanced one’s scholarship is considered to be, as if the further one delves back into the past, the less innovative and pertinent one’s insight necessarily proves. There is no logic to this kind of thinking, other than what might be described as a fear of the past and the apparent sense of irrelevance that looking too far back is seen to engender. To be sure, this is something of a caricature, but it never ceases to amaze me how many scholars who work on the medieval or Renaissance periods in the history of architecture are au fait with theories relating to the interpretation of twentieth-century or contemporary architecture, and, conversely, how ignorant contemporary scholars and theorists can be of approaches pertaining to earlier periods. I am not speaking here of architectural knowledge per se, for many indeed have extensive and wide-ranging knowledge of architecture, but rather historiographic perception and working method.
- 3 E. g., see Mario Carpo’s rather pessimistic piece from a few years ago: Mario Carpo, “Why Architec (...)
- 4 The question here might be, has the teaching of history in schools of architecture begun to revert (...)
- 5 I was told recently of an experience that occurred during a process to replace a retiring historia (...)
4Part of the problem, of course, lies in the overly close relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary design culture, especially in schools of architecture, where much architectural history (or what remains of it) is currently taught, and where fewer and fewer specialist architectural historians are being employed.3 The “operative” imperative, driven by the neo-liberal logic of late capitalism, continues both to constrain and to gut the historical body of architecture for its own purposes, leaving in its wake a derivative “ghost”, suitable alone for what is fast becoming not only a “post-fact” world but a post-historical one, too.4 Perhaps professional historians need no longer apply, for we are now entering upon the age of the “historiographer of contemporary practice”.5
- 6 I use the term “between” in a provocative sense here as a way of both highlighting and reminding u (...)
- 7 E.g., see Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres (...)
5Working as I do on the nineteenth century—somewhere between the early modern and modern (especially Modern, with a capital “M”)6—I am constantly reminded that history has no fixed or privileged referent; that what makes itself more or less perceptible at any given moment has both antecedents and descendants that enable its recognition as such, and that give it presence and meaning as an historical phenomenon (for instance, nineteenth-century eclecticism and the Modernist movement are inextricably linked in the Hegelian sense; Modernism was neither presaged nor inevitable). Personally, the development of my own scholarly position has benefited hugely from looking across the chronological spectrum, both backwards and forwards. This has enabled me not only to glean certain clues from past events and practices (or up to the present, as the case may be), but also to reflect upon the methodological apparatus brought to bear by specialist historians in the analysis of those events and practices. This includes ranging well beyond the standard kitbag of post-structuralist methodological appliqué that tends to characterise much architectural writing these days, to serious consideration of major (and carefully-articulated) historiographic frames of reference emanating from cognate disciplines such as history proper (imperial, economic, and intellectual) or historical geography. If interested in the phenomenon of empire, here one finds approaches that not only have a remarkable and, as yet, largely untapped capacity to inform studies of architecture and the built environment, but a number of which also pertain to earlier periods of history, such as the early modern or medieval. Therefore, the apparent divide (real or imagined) between “early modern” and “modern” studies in this regard is wholly artificial if not specious, in my view. It is being seriously questioned, especially outside the domain of architectural studies.7 At best it is a pretence or practical excuse, and although I can understand why it occurs, it is not one that can withstand serious intellectual scrutiny.
- 8 Showcasing these connections and continuities was one of the motivating factors behind the product (...)
- 9 Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, “Global History, Imperial History, and Connected Histories of E (...)
- 10 David Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of Europ (...)
6The divide between early modern and modern, as convenient as it may be, has also aided the erection of barriers (consciously or otherwise) to scholarly dialogue and exchange, especially in the realm of architectural history. In the context of imperial / colonial studies, such a barrier is singularly counterproductive. In the end, are we not all studying empire and its architectural manifestations in one form or another? As I teach a senior course at university level on architecture and empire in Britain and the British colonial world, which begins in c.1550 and ends around c.1960, I am very much alive to the long view of Britain’s empire as a kind of extended building project that helps explain architectural continuity and change through time and across space.8 In a wider scholarly environment that in recent times has espoused the “long” century, deep time, the network, global space, “big” and “connected” histories, and trans-nationalism, in addition to the ever-present call for cross- and inter-disciplinarity, how can a divide between the early modern and modern be maintained? A current example of how these two apparently distinct periods have influenced one another, methodologically speaking (in this case, early modern to modern), is the way in which Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s notion of “connected history” has challenged historians of modern British imperialism to rethink the way they relate “Global” to “imperial” history.9 Moreover, such periodisation has led intellectual historians of empire, such as David Armitage (who, incidentally, works primarily on the early modern period) to argue for a return to the longue durée through a methodological process he describes as “serial contextualism”—a process that entails making meaningful historical links between discrete “contexts”, thus creating an interpretative sequence that marries synchronic and diachronic perspectives.10 Synchronic approaches to history have been de rigueur for much of the past fifty years, but with the advent of the digital humanities, big data, and the apparent need to understand the story of humanity in the context of the Anthropocene, a more diachronic approach is being called for. If the most recent generation of historians has been quick to espouse the benefits of transnational history (and rightly so, in my opinion), why not the transtemporal? This is perhaps a much more dissident concept.
- 11 This is an argument also made by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton. See Tony Ballantyne and An (...)
7Even so, we would do well to remember that imperialism is a socio-political force that is both emergent and amorphous. It knows no boundaries, either spatial or temporal. It is a “project” that builds from one experience and / or encounter to the next, web-like in its pervasiveness, continually reshaping and adapting itself in an endless and often chimeric proliferation of connections through time and across space that logically consolidates its gains, always carrying traces of its origins.11 To be sure, the phenomenon is uneven; nor can it ever be characterised as entirely coherent. There are fits and starts, advances and retreats, conquests and defeats, commercial gains and losses; but the project marches on, finding new and evermore effective means by which to propagate its interests (planned or not). What historians choose to see, or wish to extract, from this phenomenon is a particular contour or feature, which then becomes an instance of historiographic convenience: but the behemoth of empire, as a whole, remains as aggregated, interspersed, and inscrutably complex as ever. Only a more diachronic, transtemporal approach towards historical understanding is capable of drawing out, identifying, and reassembling the sinews of power and practice that reveal empire’s truly diffuse nature.
- 12 For instance, see Sibel Zandi-Sayek, “The Unsung of the Cannon: Does a Global Architectural Histor (...)
- 13 In the case of the East India Company, for instance, a recent study has demonstrated convincingly (...)
- 14 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic (...)
8Let us consider for a moment “architecture” in its widest sense. One area that underscores these continuities is the built infrastructure that facilitated global trade as a critical factor in the spur to imperial expansion.12 Many of the business networks, practices, and forms of commercial influence and coercion resulting in the corporatist and developmental agendas that characterised the late imperial and immediate post-colonial eras had clear origins in the advent of capitalism and its methods in the early modern period, especially in the rise of monopolistic joint-stock enterprises such as the East India Company (1601), the Royal Africa Company (1660), and the South Sea Company (1711).13 These organisations and their cultures of spatial practice are not as distant from the twentieth century as they might at first sight appear. As the noted business historian David Hancock observed in his important book Citizens of the World (1995), although choosing a location for and erecting a business premises, and arranging its interior for operational efficiency, including training, filing, and cleaning etc., might seem insignificant, it all signalled a continuing, rational, and disciplined revolution in business management techniques that transformed the modern world. This assisted in creating a “true bred merchant” class, of which Britain was evidently a leading exponent.14
- 15 Huw V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833, Camb (...)
9Moreover, as Huw Bowen has demonstrated in his magisterial study of business practice within the East India Company, the steady transformation and improvement of information supply and management within the Company cannot be separated from wider developments in techniques for the gathering and classification of data that occurred throughout the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a transformation that characterised the evermore efficient administration of Britain’s empire as a whole.15 Such enterprises were not just about making money: they were part and parcel of an evolving and competitive imperial strategy.
- 16 For example, by 1814 the East India Company was shelling out some £53,000 on expenses relating to (...)
- 17 E.g., see “The Managing Agency Houses in the Era of High Imperialism, 1860–1919,” in Maria Misra, (...)
10Again, all this had definite if less perceptible effects on architecture and networks of built infrastructure, especially when one moves beyond the office environment to consider issues of spatial organisation and technical specification relating to warehousing for the processing, conserving, and transhipping of commodities.16 In this sense, mercantilist monopolies such as the East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries foreshadowed and eventually made way for the free-trade imperial Agency House in the early nineteenth century, exemplified in the form of Jardine, Matheson & Co. or Butterfield & Swire, which in turn transformed the colonial economy.17 Following the logic of capital, these agency houses, through diversification, merger, and acquisition, would eventually morph into the multi-national corporation that we know today, such as Jardines or Swire.
- 18 G. A. Bremner, “Black Gold: Opium and the Architecture of Imperial Trade in Nineteenth-Century Asi (...)
- 19 Vimalin Rujivacharakul, “Connecting the Dots: Global Idea, Local Agency, and the Burden of Evidenc (...)
- 20 Take, for example, Richard C. Hoffmann’s analysis of the European fish industry. Development of aq (...)
11Each of these corporate transformations may be seen to have had its own distinct but related architectural manifestations, crucially relying on the capital, connections, and infrastructure built up and maintained during its previous iterations. However, as I have recently had the experience of discovering, in order to make adequate sense of the spatial practices inherent to each of these transformations one needs to understand the historical trajectory, not just architectural but cultural as well (by “cultural” I mean entrepreneurial culture).18 In such transformations the “early modern” and “modern” are inextricably entwined. At no point is it possible to draw a clear distinguishing line that would dissociate one phase, period, or epoch from the others (in sequence). Only at either end of this process would such a contrast be possible or even instructive, but this in itself is artificial. Where does one begin to draw such an “end”? It is difficult to say, and this is perhaps one of the challenges of a diachronic approach. Also, the further one goes back in time, the harder it is to “join the dots,” as Vimalin Rujivacharakul has recently observed.19 Nevertheless, we need to be aware of the continuities.20
12Despite the opportunities and challenges associated with such a transtemporal approach, I am not suggesting here that ABE Journal become an outlet for the championing of this kind of scholarship, as much as that would please me. This is probably too ambitious, certainly at this stage in the journal’s development. In any case, it is a challenge that faces architectural history as a whole. I would merely insist upon starting with something far more modest: nothing other than the extension of its chronological purview. This would at least juxtapose early modern and modern forms of scholarship, along with their respective methodologies, thus putting them in potential if not actual dialogue with one another. This can only be good, not just for the history of architecture per se, but for the study of imperial / colonial architecture especially. Initially, at least, it has the potential to expose both “modernists” and “early modernists” to corresponding problems vis-à-vis empire and its spatial configurations. Such a juxtaposition would in turn facilitate a productive tension, accelerating acquaintance with different yet co-applicable analytical frameworks, as readers will see how similar problems (or perhaps problems that one or other had not thought of) have been articulated and worked through.
- 21 E. g. George Kubler, “Two Modes of Franciscan Architecture: New Mexico and California,” in Thomas (...)
- 22 For instance, see George Kubler in Santos: An Exhibition of the Religious Folk Art of New Mexico, (...)
- 23 See David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, Basingst (...)
- 24 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Pre (...)
- 25 Emily Mann, “First Lines of Defence: The Fortification of Bermuda in the Seventeenth Century,” in (...)
13Speaking personally, I have learned a great deal about how to understand and problematise nineteenth-century missionary architecture from looking at scholarship on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jesuit and mendicant order missionary architecture, which had a longer and more distinguished scholarly pedigree than did the historiography of nineteenth-century Protestant missionary architecture.21 Even looking at scholarship on how the Cistercians operated in a trans-European capacity during the Middle Ages, transplanting their architectural ideas over a very wide geographical area, proved useful. In the case of the Jesuit and mendicant orders, this not only concerned concepts of inculturation, but also what Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has highlighted as the “geography of art”.22 Although my work has long been influenced by the World / Global turn in historiography, it was initially piqued in this direction by oceanic frames of reference, in particular “Atlantic” history, which, in its initial phases, was heavily associated with the early modern period (i.e., pre-revolutionary North America).23 These methods have since been applied much more widely, including to problems that informed many of the questions that concerned the COST Action from which ABE Journal originally sprang. Even in the realm of the intellectual history of empire and imperialism, I have absorbed a great deal from reading carefully works by the likes of David Armitage, Nicholas Canny, P. J. Marshall, Anthony Pagden, and Kathleen Wilson in tracing ideas of political economy and genealogies of imperial ideology into the modern world.24 The insights of these scholars have assisted enormously in understanding where such ideas originated and how they developed the way they did. More latterly I have been engaged with the work of architectural historians Emily Mann, Daniel Maudlin and Bernard Herman, Louis Nelson, and Christine Stevenson, all of whom work in the early modern period, and mostly in a transatlantic capacity, in order not only to appreciate better the ways in which concepts and practices relating to imperial / colonial architecture evolve and mutate over time, but also to consider what methodological tools these historians use in framing their subjects.25
14If only there was a journal out there that brought this geographically and chronologically expansive scholarship together, into useful and potentially co-productive partnership. Even if the cross-fertilisation of ideas and methods was slow to take off, at least this collocation would highlight continuities in architectural production and keep open the potential for dialogue right across the chronological spectrum of modern European imperialism, with the prospect of facilitating an Annales-type historiography. More importantly, I believe such a move would dramatically widen the journal’s readership and scholarly appeal. Does this present an opportunity that the journal can afford to ignore?
Notes
1 See https://abe.revues.org/.
2 G. A. Bremner, “Rethinking British Architecture: Towards an Expanded Methodology,” in G. A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.1840–1870, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 431–440; “Architecture, Urbanism, and British Imperial Studies,” in G. A. Bremner (ed.), Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 1−18; “Intersecting interests: Developments in networks and flows of information and expertise in architectural history,” with Johan Lagae and Mercedes Volait, Fabrications, vol. 26, no. 2, 2016, p. 227−245.
3 E. g., see Mario Carpo’s rather pessimistic piece from a few years ago: Mario Carpo, “Why Architectural Historians Are Not Being Hired (and Often Should Be Fired),” EAHN Newsletter, no. 1, 2010, p. 6−7.
4 The question here might be, has the teaching of history in schools of architecture begun to revert back to what Manfredo Tafuri once described as a “planning” of the past for pragmatic and instrumental reasons? Did it ever get beyond this? See “Operative Criticism,” in Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture [First published in 1968; trans. Giorgio Verrecchia], London: Granada, 1980, p. 141−170.
5 I was told recently of an experience that occurred during a process to replace a retiring historian at a leading school of architecture in the UK where it was suggested that, instead of a specialist historian, they would seek (in the singularly oxymoronic phrase) a “historiographer of contemporary practice”.
6 I use the term “between” in a provocative sense here as a way of both highlighting and reminding us of how, for so long, the “nineteenth century” was used as the whipping boy of Modernist ideology and historiography, as if it were a catastrophic hiatus out of which Modernism had to emerge (in a teleological sense) as the rightful inheritor of the rational, formal, and tectonic traditions of modern architecture forged during the early modern period. For a rebuke of this historiographic trajectory, see James A. Schmiechen, “The Victorians, the Historians, and the Idea of Modernism,” American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 2, 1988, p. 287−316. For the general emergence of this trend in historical thinking, see Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008 (Writing architecture series).
7 E.g., see Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. In terms of architectural history, one can find this divide being questioned in such recent studies as Ethan Matt Kavaler’s Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470-1540, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2012, or Christy Anderson’s Renaissance Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
8 Showcasing these connections and continuities was one of the motivating factors behind the production of my most recent book. See G. A. Bremner (ed.), Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
9 Simon J. Potter and Jonathan Saha, “Global History, Imperial History, and Connected Histories of Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, para. 5. URL: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/89866/5/Potter%20Saha%20Connected%20Histories%20FINAL.pdf. Accessed 1 December 2017. The original piece by Subrahmanyam to which Potter and Saha refer is: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 1997, p. 735–762.
10 David Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of European Ideas, vol. 38, no. 4, 2012, p. 493–507 (497–499).
11 This is an argument also made by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton. See Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870-1945, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 13.
12 For instance, see Sibel Zandi-Sayek, “The Unsung of the Cannon: Does a Global Architectural History Need New Landmarks?,” ABE Journal, vol. 6, 2014. URL: https://abe.revues.org/1271. Accessed 4 December 2017.
13 In the case of the East India Company, for instance, a recent study has demonstrated convincingly that in order to make full sense of the Company in its latter phases, one must first understand its origins as part of larger story. See Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
14 David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 114.
15 Huw V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756-1833, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. See also Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
16 For example, by 1814 the East India Company was shelling out some £53,000 on expenses relating to estate management, including £31,807 on average per year on warehouse maintenance alone. See Huw V. Bowen, Business of Empire, op. cit. (note 15), 287-288.
17 E.g., see “The Managing Agency Houses in the Era of High Imperialism, 1860–1919,” in Maria Misra, Business, Race, and Politics in British India, c.1850-1960, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 (Oxford historical monographs), p. 17–64.
18 G. A. Bremner, “Black Gold: Opium and the Architecture of Imperial Trade in Nineteenth-Century Asia,” in AnnMarie Brennan and Philip Goad (eds.), Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 33, Gold, Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2016, p. 66–74.
19 Vimalin Rujivacharakul, “Connecting the Dots: Global Idea, Local Agency, and the Burden of Evidence-Based Architectural History,” ABE Journal, vol. 7, 2015. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/abe/10808. Accessed 4 December 2017.
20 Take, for example, Richard C. Hoffmann’s analysis of the European fish industry. Development of aquiculture and its infrastructure in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries cannot be separated from, or the one hand, a steadily increasing demand for fish dating back to the middle ages (owing to religious observance), and, on the other, the opportunity this demand created for commercial exploitation coming into the early modern period. In other words, organised commercial fishing and its emergent practices and infrastructure, including the steady improvement of hydraulic engineering cannot be adequately explained within the bounds of conventional historiographic periodisations such as “medieval” and “early modern”. Here a transtemporal approach is required to make sense of this phenomenon and its spatial manifestations. See Richard C. Hoffmann, “Carp, Cods, Connections: New Fisheries in the Medieval European Economy and Environment,” in Mary J. Henninger-Voss (ed.), Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002 (Studies in comparative history), p. 3–55. I wish to thank Katie Jakobiec for bringing this piece to my attention.
21 E. g. George Kubler, “Two Modes of Franciscan Architecture: New Mexico and California,” in Thomas F. Reece (ed.), Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1985 (Yale publications in the history of art), p. 34 38. For the global Jesuits in general, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
22 For instance, see George Kubler in Santos: An Exhibition of the Religious Folk Art of New Mexico, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Forth Worth, June 1964, with an Essay by George Kubler, Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1964. For the geography of art, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Towards a Geography of Art, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004; idem, “The Geography of Art: Historiography, Issues, Perspectives,” in Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried Van Damme (eds.), World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008, p. 167–192.
23 See David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p. 11–27; Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005; Peter A. Coclanis, “Beyond Atlantic History,” in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (eds.), Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 (Reinterpreting History), p. 337–356; Jack P. Greene, “Hemispheric History and Atlantic History,” in Jack P. Greene, Creating the British Atlantic: Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013, p. 1–18. This “Atlantic” perspective initially gained purchase among historians studying the transatlantic slave trade, such as Paul Gilroy in his The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), but can be seen to extend as far back as Philip D. Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969). For more on this historiographic phenomenon, see Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 3, 2006, p. 741–757. For the Indian Ocean, see Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007.
24 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 (Ideas in context, 59); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British: 1580-1650, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Peter James Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c.1750–1783, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500–c.1800, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1995; Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 (Past and present publications).
25 Emily Mann, “First Lines of Defence: The Fortification of Bermuda in the Seventeenth Century,” in Olivia Horsfall Turner (ed.), “The Mirror of Great Britain”: National Identity in Seventeenth-Century British Architecture, Reading: Spire Books, 2012, p. 51–71; Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman (eds.), Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture, 1600–1850, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016 (H. Eugene and Lillian Youngs Lehman series); Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2016; Christine Stevenson, “Making Empire Visible at the Second Royal Exchange, London,” in Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn and Martin Myrone (eds.), Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1740, New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art; London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016 (Studies in British art, 24), p. 51–72.
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G. A. Bremner, « Does ABE Journal need a rethink? “Early modern” and “modern” in the study of imperial / colonial architecture », ABE Journal [En ligne], 12 | 2017, mis en ligne le 26 janvier 2018, consulté le 25 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/11078 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.11078
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