Comparative Studies of Modern Colonial Architectures

While modern colonial empires have seen a substantial increase in attention during recent decades, their study remains largely determined by national boundaries, linguistic limitations, and siloed expertise. Laudable ongoing work to diversify and globalize the study of architectural history is noteworthy, but truly comparative studies that cross imperial boundaries remain relatively rare. As calls to decolonize increase, comparative scholarship on modern colonial empires thus presents opportunities for redressing these deficiencies in our understanding of systems and architectures that remain extremely relevant around the world. The potential for new perspectives and unanticipated discoveries offered by this developing approach is substantial.

This panel welcomes submissions that explore meaningful similarities and differences in Europe’s empires in terms of guiding philosophies and architectural practices, and that help reveal the truly global nature of colonialist systems and related historic built environments. It seeks to deepen our understanding of historic empires and the surviving architectural legacies of those empires through a comparative lens. Presented work should therefore engage multiple empires and geographies during the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries. It should ultimately contribute to our understanding of the intermingled development of imperial systems and/or the postcolonial condition and the enduring influence of inherited colonial-era built environments. Papers that consider the empires of Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and others, and their architectural activities in postcolonies of the Global South are particularly encouraged. Work on material at all scales (e.g., individual structures, building typologies, urban forms, etc.) is welcome, and we invite comparisons that consider architecture and its representation.