Imperial Premises

Colonial capital and imperialism have shaped and redefined built environments in both metropole and periphery. Apparitions of trans-Atlantic colonialism and neo-colonialism haunt those societies and bound an important field of ideological and political contest, repudiation and resistance. Most of those actions have targeted commemorative monuments, object collections, and museum interpretation. Below and beyond those blatant ideological examples of imperialism, however, are the landscapes and structures that reinforce a habitus of imperial life, inferring rather than explicitly declaring its hegemony.

This collection of historical archaeological studies, centered in the long nineteenth century, examines and reinterprets a series of architectural remnants – structures and landscapes – that continue to ideologically reinforce neo-colonial social and power asymmetries. Examples include the failing Spanish mission and colony in New Spain; the bombastic reconstruction of imperial Paris; the nascent imperium centered in an expanding New York City; the failed cooperative utopia of the Oneida religious community; and the wide-area effects of early industrialization in New England.