Kingston, a city in Jamaica, has mostly been ignored by historians despite it being the fourth largest town in the British Atlantic before the American Revolution and the town with the largest enslaved population in British America before emancipation. Slave trade in Jamaica was at its height, from the early 1770s through to the early […]
A Glance at Belgium and the Misconstrued Perception of its Colonial Past The Royal Museum for Central Africa, currently referred to as the AfricaMuseum, located in Tervuren, Belgium is a colonial museum that was founded by King Leopold II at the very end of the 19th century.[1] The origin of the museum “dates back to […]
While once commonplace in the American landscape, mental asylums are often seen as obsolete relics of an antiquated form of psychiatry. The typology of a stately, manicured hospital for the “insane” emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century as representations of a newfangled, “moral” and romanticized view of treating mental illness.1 This relatively […]
The weaponizing of architecture in Canada’s longest running residential school. In a report written to Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, providing advice on how to assimilate the native population to the culture of the colonisers, it was observed from the American government’s experience that when children are permitted to return home after school, “the influence […]
A city built around resource extraction and the dispossession of indigenous lands and culture The Hastings Mill Store was built in 1865 and is an important case study to examine how British colonists used land as an extractive resource to build industrial capital in BC. The colonial government systematically displaced and dispossessed the lands and […]
All the colors, creeds, breeds, and voices become Rangoon; Rangoon was born in Rangoon, Rangoon was raised in Rangoon, Rangoon stood on par with other cities around the world. Proud Rangoon, the son of an urban city: (From Dressmaker Rangoon by Maung Chaw Nwe and translated by Kenneth Wong, 2013)1 The growth of British control […]
The convoluted emergence of the federal center of American democracy and how it reflects the colonial roots of a nation The location and architecture for the U.S federal government did not always exist as it does today. The immediate image that is conjured up of the white, neoclassical portico and columns in front of a […]
Introduction The Caribbean is a region historically notable for its legacy of colonization and slave labour. As early as the 16th century enslaved Africans were shipped to islands in the West Indies to work on plantations owned and operated by Europeans. In particular, France claimed a substantial amount of territory for its monarchy, and took […]
The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and products of Soil and Mine – referred to as the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 – proudly highlighted the United States’ advancements and achievements, featuring its ability to reunite and resurrect after the American Civil War, but also acted as an “effort to lift the country out of a […]
A Brief History of Lawang Sewu Lawang Sewu is an old Dutch colonial building located in central Java island’s north coast city of Semarang in Indonesia and occupies a total space of 23m x 77m. . In Javanese language, one of the many languages in Indonesia, Lawang Sewu can be directly translated as “A Thousand […]