1This dissertation explores the relations between architecture and colonialism in the historic built environment of Europe itself, rather than “beyond” Europe. Although imperialism was essentially the exertion of European power over regions in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, it has been well established that these power relations also made an impact on European societies. The dissertation investigates how architecture in Europe contributed to this impact by 1) facilitating the existence of imperial networks between metropole and colonies and 2) mediating its role in such networks to the public. The study argues that between 1860 and 1960, empire-related architecture contributed to the creation of an imperial environment in Western European countries that involved Europeans with imperialism and helped construct local, national, and European self-images. It approaches this topic from a transnational perspective in order to understand the border-crossing and European nature of these processes.

Key concepts and methodology

2For its conceptual framework, the dissertation mainly draws on the New Imperial History of British historiography and its more recent equivalents in other countries. First, the investigation is informed by the notion of an imperial culture in European societies: a culture or worldview that legitimized imperialism by propagating the assumed cultural and racial superiority of what was seen as European civilization. Primarily, the dissertation is interested in how architecture contributed to the development of this imperial culture and in exploring its local, national, and transnational dimensions. The timeframe for this is the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a dynamic period of imperial expansion, technological innovation, urbanization, and capitalist globalization.

3Second, to complete the analytical framework, the dissertation introduces the concept of “imperial place” as a useful complement to the concept of imperial space. Historians have used imperial space as a theoretical innovation to conceptualize empires as interconnected, integrated entities rather than as loose collections of separate and self-evident territories. The idea of imperial space is closely related to that of imperial culture, the result of such connections. The dissertation proposes that if imperial spaces were formed by global networks, imperial places were the local, small-scale focal points of such networks. These sites produced imperial connections―for instance, connections based on trade, religion, political allegiance, or scientific knowledge and, as they were constructed as meaningful places, also involved a wider audience with these connections. The dissertation distinguishes between five domains of empire-related building categories, if not building “types,” that had a clear impact on the European built environment: religion (mission houses); politics (government buildings, public buildings, monuments); commerce (factories, office buildings); shipping (offices, ports); and science (ethnographic and colonial museums).

4The five chapters of the dissertation correspond to the above domains and are divided into two parts: an introductory survey, which charts the development of the building category in question and how such buildings figured in contemporary society, and an in-depth case study of a single site, to uncover specific historic events, actors, stories, and legacies. The surveys are necessitated by the fact that few of the abovementioned buildings in Europe have been analyzed for their “imperial” nature (and in some cases, such as mission houses, have rarely been analyzed at all), apart from some obvious examples such as colonial ministries and museums.

5To find transnational connections and similarities, and to explore the European nature of the imperial culture, the study casts a wide European net. The surveys discuss examples from the modern colonial powers of Western Europe (Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) but if applicable, also pay attention to sites related to overseas imperialism in other countries such as pre-1884 Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, or the Habsburg empire. The case studies, as explained below, investigate a Scottish, French, German, Dutch, but also a Swiss building. The surveys are based on relatively accessible sources such as secondary literature and contemporary publications, while the case studies are based on research in various archives of firms, institutions, organizations and local authorities in several countries.

6The surveys and case studies approach the various kinds of empire-related buildings with a set of recurring questions, exploring the ways in which these sites involved society around them with their imperial links. Imperial places directly involved various groups of people by their use: mission houses allowed missionary organizations to function, factories provided employment to workers, museums welcomed visitors. In addition, the dissertation proposes that a repertoire of imperial “placemaking” strategies developed with which contemporaries also explicitly propagated the imperial links of particular sites. First, architects and clients propagated these links with the design of their buildings in terms of style and decorations, applying impressive classical architecture, exoticist styles, or explicit personifications of colonial regions and people, both sculpted and painted. Sometimes, they signified the imperial links by using “exotic” building materials such as tropical hardwoods, or by naming buildings after colonial locations. Second, different groups of actors constructed imperial places into meaningful locations through various representations that created, reinforced, and disseminated their imperial significance. These representations might be written (brochures, architecture journals, the press), oral (speeches at inauguration ceremonies), and visual (posters, advertisements).

Findings

7Chapter 1 discusses the mission houses that were erected in Western European cities as part of the expansion of Protestant and Catholic missionary activity in the nineteenth century. Because most mission houses served as headquarters and schools, their architecture was chiefly practical in nature. However, in rhetoric and visual representations, they were commonly portrayed as strongholds of Christian civilization, linked directly to a troubled “heathen” world in Africa, Asia, or the Americas. In addition, mission houses often contained public museum spaces to exhibit objects from these regions. Examples of mission houses studied in the chapter include those of the London Missionary Society, the Société des Missions-Africaines in Lyon, and that of the Society of the Divine Word in Steyl (Netherlands).

8The chapter takes as its case study the Missionshaus of the German-Swiss Basel Mission Society in Basel, Switzerland (1858-1860). The society’s new mission house was a relatively sober four-story building with two wings and corner pavilions, where some 160 persons―directors, teachers, housekeeping staff, and above all, students―lived and worked in a strict hierarchy. During the building’s ribbon-cutting ceremonies and on posters produced for the Society, the stern, religious atmosphere of the compound was portrayed as being predicated on the Society’s sinful and uncivilized mission fields –the Gold Coast, India, China and, later, Cameroon. Furthermore, its largest space was a purposely-built museum room with hundreds of foreign objects, accessible to the public. In both instances, the missionary society was part of a wider European imagination of mission work in the imperial era, notwithstanding the fact that it was headquartered in Switzerland.

9Chapter 2 is dedicated to the varied category of “political” buildings. It charts the introduction of buildings for colonial ministries in capital cities and touches upon colonial monuments, the erection of which got underway particularly post-1918. But the chapter also shows how not only national, but also local authorities embarked on a “municipal imperialism” that impacted the built environment of their cities, for instance when it comes to the exchange buildings of Le Havre, Marseille and Hamburg. The chapter continues in this vein by taking as its case study the town hall, or City Chambers, of Glasgow (1883-1889), an economic center with strong imperial links. Built to house the governmental bureaucracy of the self-proclaimed “Second City of the empire,” the impressive town hall was styled after Rome and Venice and richly decorated. In a coupling of local civic pride with British nationalism and imperialist ideology, the building’s main pediment was turned into a monument to Queen Victoria’s 1887 jubilee and depicted the monarch surrounded by her British and colonial subjects. Local, national, and imperial identities formed a set of interlocking political allegiances.

10Chapter 3 treats European industries predicated on colonial resources or colonial markets, and interprets factories such as sugar refineries, rubber factories, textile mills, and engineering workshops in the context of imperialism and globalization. Among other examples, the chapter references the India Mill in Darwen (United Kingdom), the Huilerie franco-coloniale in Bordeaux, and the Korff cocoa factory in Amsterdam, where tile panels of an Indonesian couple with cacao pods marked the entrance. The chapter then zooms in on the rice mills of the Dutch Zaan region, which processed large quantities of rice from Burma and the Dutch Indies and flourished especially between 1890 and 1914. Rather utilitarian building complexes of steam mills and warehouses along the Zaan waterway, the factories were nonetheless explicitly coupled to the colonial production regions by being named after Burmese and Indonesian locations. In addition, a range of publicity materials―exhibits, advertisements, packaging―reinforced this connection by juxtaposing the state-of-the-art mills in the Netherlands to what was portrayed as traditional agriculture in the colonies.

11Chapter 4 treats the category of the offices of shipping lines in various port cities, such as the Rotterdamsche Lloyd office in The Hague and the Norddeutsche Lloyd office in Bremen (unrelated firms, despite the names), both with sculpted references to “exotic” overseas regions. The chapter’s case study is the main office of the German HAPAG firm, which became the world’s largest shipping line before 1914. Its office in Hamburg was constructed as a large so-called Kontorhaus in 1899-1903, providing ticketing offices, office space, and spaces for the line’s various departments, and being designed in a Beaux-Arts-infused style with massive caryatids of the continents of America, Africa, Asia, and Australia on its main façade. However, HAPAG’s growth soon necessitated an extension and in 1912-1920, the building was largely absorbed by a massive new office. For the second office, HAPAG chose an imposing “Wilhelmine” classicism―befitting both emperor Wilhelm II’s personal involvement with the design and HAPAG’s status as one of the economic giants of an assertive imperial Germany.

12Finally, chapter 5 analyzes the ethnographic museums that were established in many European cities. It discusses the museums’ mission of having researchers and curators work to gain and disseminate scientific knowledge about human cultures and “races,” and some of the architectural means by which this mission was facilitated and communicated to the outside world. The chapter focuses on the specialist colonial museums: London’s Imperial Institute, Amsterdam’s Koloniaal Instituut and Tervuren’s Musée du Congo belge, all housed in grand, richly decorated premises, and all supposed to support the imperial enterprise through scientific research and propaganda to the public. As the dissertation’s final case study, the chapter introduces the French Musée des Colonies (1928-1930), placing this institution within its European context. The debates on the museum’s location and the design that was chosen to fulfill the museum’s mission are analyzed: its modern exhibition galleries; its appearance, related to French colonial architecture in North Africa; and its decorative program, which explicitly exalted French imperialism and the benefits it allegedly brought to France and its colonies.

13In sum, by working with the concept of imperial place, the dissertation argues for a revaluation of the role of architecture in constructing imperial cultures and identities in Western Europe. Large numbers of buildings were linked directly to overseas colonial endeavors and that link that was actively communicated and propagated to contemporary Europeans. The dissertation also argues for a transnational perspective on imperial (architectural) history. If it has become accepted that metropoles and colonies should be studied in the same analytical framework, this framework should also be expanded to go beyond the boundaries of individual empires.