Fortifications and Other Infrastructures of the British Empire

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain constructed a global empire across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and transformed built and natural environments around the world. In this seminar, we will interrogate the role of infrastructure in this process. Fortifications and dockyards, urban plans and land drainage systems—these large-scale design projects required vast resources and coordination; at the same time, they facilitated access to, knowledge of, and control over colonized landscapes. Drawing on methods from the histories of science, empire, and environment as well as engineering and architecture, we will explore this complex but entangled relationship between the construction of infrastructure and colonial expansion. The course asks the questions: How did the English (and later British) state negotiate with companies and private entities to construct large-scale building works? How was knowledge about colonial territory produced, and how did information about projects circulate around a global empire? How did practices of design and visual representation influence both infrastructure and colonial politics? How did infrastructural projects contribute to the rise of the Atlantic slave trade? And most importantly, how does studying the built environment reveal new ways of comprehending the emergence of empire?

This course moves thematically and (loosely) chronologically through histories of fortification and infrastructure in the British Empire. We begin with the sixteenth century contexts for European fortification and imperial practices, before turning to early efforts to know and transform territories in England’s fledgling empire, focusing on themes of visualization and possession. We will then take up infrastructures of land, cities, and oceans, with an eye towards questions of design, political organization, and the law. In the second half of the course, we’ll consider problems of expertise, trust, information, and administration, and consider the lines between material and administrative infrastructures. We’ll also grapple with infrastructure and power, looking at the relationship between infrastructural networks and the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade, upon which the British Empire was built. Finally, we’ll consider the concept of the “network” empire, as it applies to eighteenth-century imperial Britain. Throughout, we’ll pay particular attention to the ideologies as well as practices of infrastructural development, and think about the layers of infrastructure that enabled the rise of the British Empire.