For over two decades, Manchester Studies in Imperialism has been a trailblazer in the realm of imperial history. Positioned firmly at the forefront, this series has illuminated the annals of history and transformed our understanding of empire.
Pioneering perspectives
The Studies in Imperialism series has embarked on a transformative journey, reshaping not only British history but also the vast landscape of imperial histories. It has boldly expanded boundaries, delving into uncharted territories, and shining a light on subjects that were once overlooked. More importantly, it has masterfully unveiled the intricate and inseparable relationships between these domains.
A treasury of knowledge
Within the pages of Manchester Studies in Imperialism lies a treasure trove of scholarly exploration. It unveils the rich tapestry of cultural encounters between colonisers and the colonised, shedding light on the intricate web of power that flows through the production and organisation of colonial knowledge. It unravels the complex construction of identity, both at the heart and on the peripheries of empire.
2025 Manchester Studies in Imperialism
This chapter focuses on the French military engineer and architect François Blondel, known for the construction of several monumental structures in metropolitan France. Blondel devised several plans and accounts on the feasibility of developing existing strongholds in modern fortresses or choosing completely new sites for a rayon of fortified towns, forts, and batteries. Blondel’s maps represented the islands as seemingly homogenous entities, where local differences between French and Carib settlements were blurred. This spatial construction of the islands of French territory on representations such as maps or plans was preceded by the so-called seigneurial period on the islands, including next to Guadeloupe and Martinique also Saint-Christophe (Saint-Kitts and Nevis) and Tortuga Island. It was then that French feudal proprietors tried to enclose land with a combination of manorial economy with a kind of baroque representation practice resulting in the creation of several more or less magnificent ‘castles’ on the islands. It is important to consider this ‘feudal’ period in order to understand how it prefigured the effort in the later seventeenth and in the eighteenth century to form a territory from only a few individual and scattered settlements and strongholds that could be regarded as a coherent empire.
The example of the fortified port city of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island (formerly Île Royale) gives a different outlook on large building practices and the community it fostered. Thanks to more available resources in Canada large structures of the city that were destroyed in the Seven Years’ War are not only being reconstructed as a national lieu de mémoire, but also much more thoroughly researched. The towers of this Atlantic coastal town were a landmark that were reputed for not only representing French power in the region against other nations, but also representing the enormous costs figuring in the budgets of the Versailles government. Louisbourg was indeed exceptional to the other colonies in the sense that workers employed at the construction site were predominantly of European origin. The Mi’kmaq, the indigenous nation of the Île Royale, were neither included in the construction of the town nor were they part of its community. The exclusive confinement of Louisbourg, however, can be seen as a spatial practice typical for French expansion in the Canadian Upper Country, where they pursued the establishment of a series of fortresses as a claim to empire in North America. Thus the building practice in Louisbourg was segregationist in nature and did only produce a space that served few French settlers as the condition for forming their French identity.
Departing from an intervention by a colonial official from Martinique at the end of the eighteenth century on the issue of the Exclusif, the French protective trade restrictions in the colonies, emphasis is laid on the ‘right’ earned by individuals and groups in participating in the material construction of empire. As the argument continues the claim is brought forward that those who have built the empire earn a right of its possession, not only morally, but also materially and existentially. The emotional binding of individual, groups, and whole societies to their built environment gives an important insight into how empires become actually stable without having a strong dependence to the centre. The French empire, therefore, is a global construct that is connected by certain similar practices, emotional ties that stretch over the distance of oceans, and finds its best expression in the large buildings and complexes that not only the French had built, but many other people that earned a right of the possession of ‘their’ empire. But the only revolutionary outcome this earned right provoked was on Saint-Domingue, when the newly formed republic appropriated the material culture of the former colony in order to stabilize the new nation of Haiti.
The chapter illustrates that building a fortress (in this case Fort Royal on Martinique) took a considerable amount of time; engineers had to fight the constant lack of sufficient resources, workforce, and the financial funds to keep the construction site running. In detail, the chapter lays out the difficulty the responsible engineers had in receiving funds from the central administration, which most of the time relegated that problem to the local administration. The chapter examines how much materials and workers cost, differentiating between European free and indentured skilled and unskilled workers as well as free and enslaved African skilled and unskilled workers. Also, the body of engineers sent from France to the colonies is addressed here. They performed not only the task of their metier, sketching plans, maps, and drawings for the building projects, but also the more profane duties as managers of the construction site, budget oversight, as well as negotiation with superiors, other officials, and contractors. Concerning the individual careers of these engineers, who were also officers of the French navy, a sojourn in the colonies was considered by most of them more a duty than a privilege.
Starting with an example that shows the surprising loyalty of the revolting slaves on Saint-Domingue, the later nation-state of Haiti, to the French king, the Introduction develops the theme of empire building in the French colonial realm in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, it underlines the importance of historical actors that play a major role in this book despite its focus on material culture. This is explained by the slight difference to the mainstream in the studies of material cultures that tends to emphasize the consumption of things rather than the conditions under which these were produced. In this revived concept of materialism the study of colonial building projects fits perfectly, since the sources available for the process of construction reveal precisely the people, material, and aesthetic concepts involved. Overviewing previous literature on colonial building projects in other empires in general and on the French empire in particular, it becomes apparent that only few newer publications have discovered the importance such undertakings had for implementing cultural, political, and social identities within a largely fragmented and culturally diverse society. The Introduction concludes with an analysis of the book’s structure, a reflection on used written and material sources, as well as a note on currencies and measures.
The constellation the French encountered at the coast of Senegambia was already one of a mixed society formed over centuries after the arrival of Portuguese traders in the region. But following the founding of the Senegal Company, French directors and the Company’s agents pursued a more ambitious building programme that included larger fortresses on Gorée Island and on Saint-Louis Island in the estuaries of the Senegal River. The style of colonial buildings in Saint Louis and on Gorée Island did not develop in the same manner as it did in the Antilles, Pondichéry or, for that matter, in Canada. Government buildings, trade houses, and residences were, for example, largely influenced by the ornamental style of the Toucouleur, an ethnic group of Muslim faith that settled in the area of today’s Mali. It was only in the later period of territorial colonization of West Africa that the colonial style superseded the local Creole style.
This chapter examines the effects large buildings had on people building and living with them. In describing the formation of such a landscape of affective buildings the material evidence is to speak for itself, that is, written accounts of impressions these buildings may have had on an observer are only briefly mentioned. By doing this, the material approach to history is taken to its necessary end to sometimes let things speak only through themselves and not by their representation. Showing the success and the limits of this active production of spaces for an emotional community of settlers and slaves on the island, I conclude with an outlook on the Haitian Revolution that did not destroy the landmarks created under colonial rule, but appropriated buildings, monuments, and also, perhaps most importantly, the ambition from the French to create a coherent national identity by continuing the effort to pursue large building projects. Thus the early modern practice of empire building continued in the form of nation building in this first republic of freed slaves in the nineteenth century.
Africans and Europeans were not the only ones involved in the construction of the large buildings on the islands. The indigenous populations, the Caribs, whom the Europeans encountered when they landed on these islands, mastered several building techniques, disposed over knowledge about the local materials, different sorts of woods, stones, corals, and how to handle, use, and apply them for construction works. This chapter describes the multicultural constellation of the population in the Antilles at the beginning of European colonization efforts. A close look on materials used in the large buildings reveals the sort of assemblage that the actor–network theory proposes to be an essential image of the interconnection between things and people. In the Antilles bricks, stones, and lime, including sea corals and shells, were used in many buildings; sometimes French engineers imported bricks, tiles, steel, and even stones from Europe making the walls of the large buildings thus perfect examples of assemblages of Atlantic materials.
This chapter explores the issue of the relation between metropole and colony, as well as of the loyalty of imperial subjects, by exploring the phenomenon of compensation, paid by the government in London to those who had incurred losses in relation to the empire. It is, therefore, a study of imperialism in practice, and of the risks associated with imperial expansion, in terms of the response from the centre to failure at the periphery. This is undertaken in order to analyse the assumptions and principles that structured the making, maintenance and loss of empire, themes that require much greater attention than they have received hitherto.
This chapter demonstrates the importance of recognising the connection between two well known issues – anti-popery/anti-puritanism and orientalism – both of which are understood as tools of ‘othering’ that helped to shape national identity. It demonstrates how responses to the religions of Islamic empires involved claims about popery and puritanism, and how this led to the construction of a discourse of oriental priestcraft and tyranny. It thus argues that later orientalism originated not in Enlightenment philosophy but in late Renaissance and post-Reformation historical culture. As such, it informs our understanding of the relationship between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, as well as between domestic and imperial history.