Introduction The stratified construction of Qasim Khan’s tomb, into the Governor’s House at Lahore, Punjab, echoes the broader colonial system of maintaining difference between the ruler and the ruled through the process of building in the Indo-Saracenic style. While the common post-colonial reading of the Indo-Saracenic style has been often interpreted as a political strategy […]
William Marlow, View of the Wilderness at Kew, 1763, Watercolour on paper, Coutesy The Metropolitain Museum of Art. The Great Pagoda at the Royal Botanic Kew Gardens was completed in 1762. Located outside of London, the Gardens were a project of Frederick, Prince of Wales and Dowager Princess of Wales, Augusta, who between 1731 and […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Egyptian Revival Style enjoyed attention in the United States (US) as “an exotic” and as a primarily architectural phenomenon in the mid-nineteenth century.1 Architectural markers from the time—such as the original Library of Congress (1808), and the Washington monument (1848)—point to the problematic nature of colonial power exerting influence through the fetishization of ancient […]
From July 1845 to September 1857, Henry David Thoreau lived in a small, self-built, single room cabin. It stood beside Walden Pond on the property of Ralph Waldo Emerson, just outside of Concord Massachusetts within the territory of the Pennacook Nation. The structure itself was extremely simple, occupying a ten by fifteen foot footprint with […]
In 1595, the Dutch arrived in the archipelago of Indonesia as part of their voyage of obtaining natural resources1. The Dutch began settling, and continued to establish trading posts around the islands, slowly beginning their 350-year-long colonization. Cities were built around ports, endorsing the trading of goods. With the arrival of the Westerners, comes an […]
Fig. 1.Plan of an African Ship’s lower deck with Negroes in the Proportion of only one to a Ton, 1789, In Black Art and the Aesthetics of Memory, by Cheryl Finley (Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 1969) In 1789, the Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck with Negroes in the proportion of only One to a Ton’ […]
Introduction By the end of the 19th century, it is estimated that close to 150 million pounds-sterling was invested by British companies in the Indian railway system; the single greatest investment in the British Empire.[1] By 1947, the end of the British Raj, 57,000 miles of track had been laid down in Colonial India, 225,000 […]
The Elmina Castle in Ghana was the first European fortress built in the tropics in 1482, it was originally built for trade and missionary work by the Portuguese.1 The castle was an important node in the transatlantic slave trade along with several other fortresses and trading posts built along the West African coast.2 By examining […]