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British Empire Industrial/resource extraction Infrastructure South America

Viscous Pathways

Bitumen from La Brea Pitch Lake, Trinidad to Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C. 1876 Diatoms are a major group of microalgae which reside in the world’s oceans, waterways, and soils. Living diatoms make up an incredibly large portion of the Earth’s biomass, constitute nearly 50% of the organic material found in the oceans, and generate between […]

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Asia British Industrial/resource extraction Infrastructure Public/government

Rangoon’s Port Trust Office: a beacon of British Imperialism

Rangoon (Yangon) has a complex history as Burma’s (Myanmar) largest city, its former capital, and most influential port city. The Port Trust Office (Myanma Port Authority building) was designed by Thomas Oliphant Foster and completed in 1928.[1] A powerful beacon in contemporary Yangon, the Port Trust Office represents British Imperial Power over its inhabitants, streetscapes, […]

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Asia Empire Industrial/resource extraction

Hashima Island: “Difficult Heritage”

Hashima Island is also widely known as Gunkanjima (Battleship Island) — its silhouette defined by concrete high rises, mining facilities and seawall resembling a battleship. This abandoned six-hectare island was once a glorious site of the undersea coal mines that fuelled rapid industrialization of Japan in the late 19th century to the 20th century. In […]

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British Industrial/resource extraction North America

Gooderham & Worts Distillery: Distilling Industrialism & the Colonies

Every Christmas, Torontonians flock to the distillery district to shop under twinkling lights as they stroll down old brick roads lined by preserved heritage buildings that have been adaptively reused. Designated as a heritage neighborhood based upon, “illustrating the entire distillery process, from the processing of raw materials, to the storage of finished products for […]

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British Community/urbanism Industrial/resource extraction North America Race Uncategorized

The Hastings Mill Store and the Colonial Project of “Vancouver”, 1865

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 […]

Categories
Empire Industrial/resource extraction Settler colonialism

The Colonial Parker Ranch and Preexisting Conditions of Native Hawaiian Culture

Pre Existing Native Hawaiian conditions allowed for the rapid industrialization of the Big Island of Hawaii and surroundings Islands, Capitalized on by John Parker and the Parker Ranch. The Parker Ranch, on the Big Island of Hawaii, is one of the oldest Ranches in North America, pre-dating many Mainland Ranches by more than 30 years. […]

Categories
Industrial/resource extraction North America

Lowell Mills: The Factory Town in Massachusetts (1835-1955)

A City Created By the Mills The Industrial Revolution was a change in human life circumstances that occurred in Britain, the United States, and Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, owing in large part to developments in industrial technology. 1 Massachusetts became one of the wealthiest manufacturing centres in the nineteenth […]

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Industrial/resource extraction Infrastructure North America Settler colonialism

Rogers Sugar, Vancouver, 1891.

A bitter-sweet investigation into the rich history & role that Rogers Sugar played in Vancouver’s development. The BC Sugar Refinery is a highly industrial building located just behind the railway tracks at the Port of Vancouver, and an easy building to quickly dismiss without giving it a second thought. A series of warehouse buildings and […]

Categories
British Industrial/resource extraction North America Settler colonialism Uncategorized

Tuckahoe Slave Labour Camp

A Conflict of Dominion at the Slave Quarters Tuckahoe slave labour camp is located ten miles west of Richmond, Virginia and was first settled by the Randolph family in 1714 and was at one point the childhood home of Thomas Jefferson.1 Construction of the main house began soon after and ultimately underwent the addition of […]

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British Empire Industrial/resource extraction Infrastructure North America Race Settler colonialism

Good Hope Cannery and Exploitation of Canada’s Northwest Coast in the 19th Century.

The Influence of Pre-Contact Native Settlements on the Construction of Good Hope Cannery and Other Newly Established Colonial Fish Canneries Good Hope Cannery is a large gable-roofed structure with two perpendicular, long rectangular wings, creating an ‘L’ shaped plan, surrounded by smaller servicing structures, connected by boardwalks. It rests on wooden pilings and beams, some […]

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