Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire ed. by G.A. Bremner (review)

Whereas Britain's earliest sixteenth-century forays into the "building" of empire endured a century of missteps that sought to emulate the exploits of the imperial juggernaut of sixteenth-century Spain, the period spanning the sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries nevertheless saw the momentous birth and accelerated expansion of the British Empire. Beginning in 1536, the global empire colonized by what in 1801 eventually became the United Kingdom was launched by a foray into Ireland, and soon advanced into Eurasia, Africa and the American hemisphere. In short order, the British staked claim to their place in those emerging trade networks that came to define the global scope of the late sixteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. Soon thereafter, British colonialism manifested its territorial, political, military and economic hegemony on a global scale. This thereby bolstered the proliferation of a host of trading networks and political formations, including colonies, possessions, dominions, mandates, protectorates and other territories. Each of these formations produced regionally distinctive urban plans and architectural expressions conveying the power and grandeur of the global British Empire.

Despite the fact that the British Empire once encompassed 35,000,000 km², or a quarter of both the Earths total land mass and population, extant scholarship pertaining to the elaboration of the built environment (produced to extol and symbolize power and influence) remains limited. As with British imperial designs in North America, Africa and the Indian subcontinent, independence movements throughout the United Kingdom ultimately paved the way to a succession of newly independent nation-states, and thereby the balkanization of Britain's long-lived territorial imperative. Even so, questions regarding the means by which colonized communities were controlled by, and subsequently appropriated, such British imperial landscapes in a postcolonial world, is now more relevant to the scholarship of globalization than at any time in the historiography of the Modern Age.

In order to address the paucity of British colonial studies bearing on the impact of the built environment, G.A. Bremner (Senior Lecturer in Architectural History, University of Edinburgh) has assembled an impressive cohort of scholars, and a particularly noteworthy collection of essays, that chronicle the globalization of British colonial architecture and urban planning. Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire constitutes a truly consequential contribution to that scholarship bearing on the evolution of the British Empire, and colonialism more generally; particularly as this serves to illuminate those dimensions of British imperial historiography that promote the interrogation of the intersection obtaining between urbanism and the architecture of empire.

A significant and timely contribution to the Companion Series of the Oxford History of the British Empire, Bremner's volume begins with a comprehensive review of the state of the art, its rationale and scope. In this way, he advances a review of that scholarship that defines colonial architecture and urbanism, critically considers approaches to the study of the colonial built environment, and follows with a consideration of "The Way Forward?" In so doing, Bremner conjures Alan Lester, who contends that "historians of the former colonies have begun to think in terms of the transnational processes which gave rise to their nation-states." Whereas an earlier generation of British colonial historiography is often characterized as largely insular in its considerations, Bremner and his associates pay homage to the extent that the New Imperial History has infused culture, technology, polity and people into a global reimagining of the place of urbanism and the built environment across the imperial landscapes of the United Kingdom.

In order to address the scholarly mandates of the New Imperial History, Bremner has assembled a diverse team of scholars, whose expertise spans the spectrum of traditions and legacies wrought by the global enterprise that comprised the British Empire. The sheer scope of the volume spans the whole of the colonial encounter from its inception through to its deconstruction in the mid-twentieth century. The twelve chapters that constitute the volume are partitioned into two Parts, with the first...