European museums formed clear connections to the empire as they collected objects from the colonies for research and education purposes. In ethnographic museums, anthropologists produced knowledge about cultural and racial others, while governments used colonial museums to exhibit colonial objects and commodities to increase the public’s enthusiasm for the imperial enterprise within a nationalist context. The Musée des Colonies in Paris (1928–1930) was the latest of these colonial museums. It was off to a good start, with plenty of attention during the 1930 International Colonial Exposition and a modern, efficient museum building whose rich decorations glorified French imperialism. However, the museum’s peripheral location and the advent of decolonisation, soon after its completion, meant that fulfilling its mission proved to be difficult.
Empires stretched around the world, but also made their presence felt in architecture and urban landscapes. The Architecture of Empire in Modern Europe traces the entanglement of the European built environment with overseas imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As part of imperial networks between metropole and colonies, in cities as diverse as Glasgow, Hamburg, or Paris, numerous new buildings were erected such as factories, mission houses, offices, and museums. These sites developed into the physical manifestations of imperial networks. As Europeans designed, used, and portrayed them, these buildings became meaningful imperial places that conveyed the power relations of empire and Eurocentric self-images. Engaging with recent debates about colonial history and heritage, this book combines a variety of sources, an interdisciplinary approach, and an international scope to produce a cultural history of European imperial architecture across borders.
The political architecture of government buildings and official monuments clearly formed an empire-related layer in the built environment of Europe. However, outside of the capitals, port- and industrial cities developed their own attachments to imperialism, mediated through exchanges, offices, or public buildings. In Victorian Glasgow, self-proclaimed ‘Second City of the Empire’, even the new town hall (1877–1889) was to be made part of the city’s imperial vocation. Façades referring to Rome and Venice and sculpture symbolising the British empire turned this municipal office into an imperial palace. However, this project by the civic elite rested on a hierarchic vision of the city and could not prevent doubts about Glasgow’s and Scotland’s position in the empire the from arising.
The built environment of Western Europe became entangled with overseas imperialism in the period 1860–1960, when colonial empires were at their largest. Europeans at home experienced the vast imperial spaces, formed by networks between colonies and metropoles, by encountering the local imperial ‘places’ that sustained such networks: mission houses, government buildings, factories, offices, museums. Such sites contributed to the development of an imperial culture in European societies, which legitimised colonial rule by stressing the necessity and righteousness of imperial power relations. As architecture of this kind could be found in different colonial powers, as well as in countries without colonies but with ties to the empires of others, it allows us to scrutinise the transnational, European nature of imperial culture.
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