Empire Building

• Published in: Architecture since 1400
• Main Author: James-Chakraborty, Kathleen
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: University of Minnesota Press 01-01-2014
• Subjects: Africa; architecture; Asia; colonialism; colonization; Europe; History of Architecture
• ISBN: 9780816673964; 0816673969
• DOI: 10.5749/minnesota/9780816673964.003.0020

This chapter discusses how colonialism transformed the architecture of both colonizers and the colonized. Between 1800 and 1940 every country in Africa and most countries in Asia came under European or—more rarely—American or Japanese control. Europeans introduced new architectural and urban planning ideas in order to propagate their own authority as well as to create familiar environments for themselves. The results, however, inevitably differed from their models. Meanwhile, new indigenous elites deployed imported architectural forms in order to modernize in a process that eventually encompassed resistance to foreign rule, while existing elites deployed precolonial architectural precedents in new ways to buttress their own claims to authority.