Preface

Bremner, G. A.

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Preface

G. A. Bremner

Description: Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British...

Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.1840–1870

~It is just over half a century since the publication of Basil Clarke’s Anglican Cathedrals Outside the British Isles (1958). By no means a scholarly work, Clarke’s book (by his own admission) is more a country-by-country, building-by-building compendium...

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G. A. Bremner

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23939

Preface

It is just over half a century since the publication of Basil Clarke’s Anglican Cathedrals Outside the British Isles (1958). By no means a scholarly work, Clarke’s book (by his own admission) is more a country-by-country, building-by-building compendium of nearly every extant Anglican cathedral built outside Britain between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. In the foreword John Betjeman observed that Clarke’s book would come as both a ‘shock and [an] encouragement’ to those who supposed that Anglican dioceses abroad were nothing more than places where ‘a few old colonels keep the flag flying and where the bishop is a glorified vicar’.1John Betjeman, Foreword, in Basil F. L. Clarke, Anglican Cathedrals Outside the British Isles (London: SPCK, 1958), p. xxi. Although it is debatable whether colonial dioceses were perceived in such naïve terms after about 1840, the point was taken: by the late 1950s Britain had all but lost its former colonial empire, and the idea that it — let alone its Anglican dioceses — ever amounted to anything much was on the wane. Clarke’s book was therefore a product of its time, a kind of annotated photo album that served as a reminder of the fact that there was indeed an Anglican Church outside the British Isles and that it had actually achieved quite a lot.

But as Alan Gowans pointed out in his review of Clarke’s book in 1959, this was a rich and diverse subject that deserved far greater attention than Clarke had given it.2Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 18:3 (1959), pp. 119–20. George Hersey delved a little further into the subject in 1972, but even this was only based on what he could glen from The Ecclesiologist. See George L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972). To be sure, Gowans’s review was perhaps something that only a scholar gazing from across the Atlantic at the demise of Britain’s empire could have written. The subject was surely too sensitive, or even embarrassing, for a British scholar to have expounded at length. Nevertheless, Gowans’s criticism remains valid, that the material covered in Clarke’s book warrants closer and more serious examination.

In the fifty-odd years that have elapsed since the publication of Clarke’s book, the intellectual climate in Britain has changed considerably. Gone is the cringe that once accompanied the study of empire. The last two decades in particular have witnessed a sea change in the way Britain’s imperial past is perceived, and the scholarly genre of ‘new imperial history’ has played a significant role in providing a more complex (and complete) understanding of Britain’s economic, political and social development during the modern era.

More recently an interest in the way religion, especially Protestantism, helped shape Britain’s imperial experience has emerged, with the publication of a number of specialist studies dealing with aspects of this phenomenon in detail.3Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004); David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005); and, more lately, Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (London: Routledge, 2008); Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Hilary Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010). See also Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002). This global perspective on the expansion of Christianity has also begun to shape the study of Roman Catholicism. For example, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008). However, the history of Anglicanism (especially Tractarianism) vis-à-vis empire remains seriously under studied, particularly in comparison to Nonconformity and other strands of evangelical Christianity during the Victorian period.4Two outstanding exceptions to this are Sara H. Sohmer, ‘Christianity without Civilization: Anglican Sources for an Alternative Nineteenth-Century Mission Methodology’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 18:2 (1994), pp. 174–97; Howard Le Couteur, ‘Anglican High Churchmen and the Expansion of Empire’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 32:2 (2008), pp. 193–215. The role that High Anglican churchmanship played in the development and characterisation of Britain’s empire during the mid- to late nineteenth century is still unclear. As Pamela Welch and others have argued, our understanding of Anglicanism in all its forms would benefit greatly by being set in a much wider social, cultural and geographical context.5Pamela Welch, ‘Constructing Colonial Christianities: With Particular Reference to Anglicanism in Australia, ca 1850–1940’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 32:2 (2008), pp. 237–9. Rowan Strong’s Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850 (2007) has taken major steps towards addressing this problem. But, again, the majority of Strong’s analysis resides in the Georgian and Regency periods and deals predominantly with church organisation and the influence of Evangelicals.6See also W. M. Jacob, The Making of the Anglican Church Worldwide (London: SPCK, 1997); and D. O’Connor et al. (eds), Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000 (London: Continuum, 2000).

Given that the formal expression of divine worship was so important to High Church Anglicans, one of the most advantageous ways of measuring their contribution to empire (spatially and culturally) is through a study of architecture. Indeed, as Andrew Saint has recently observed, churches were the most important buildings the Victorians built.7Andrew Saint, ‘The Late Victorian Church’, in T Sladen and A. Saint (eds.), Churches 1870–1914, themed issue of Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design, vol. 3 (2011), p. 7. They were at the very heart of Tractarian activity in the colonies, and a great deal of care was taken over their design and construction. Buildings of this kind not only provide clues as to the theological inclination of those who created them but also tell us where and to what extent High Anglicans were active in the empire and how they used architecture to achieve their goals, both politically and spiritually.8The same could be said of the Roman Catholic Church as it began branching out into all parts of Britain’s empire, following the passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829, and consolidating its prior missionary holdings in those places that were now under the sway of the British crown. For example, for A. W. N. Pugin and the Roman Catholic Church in Tasmania, see Brian Andrews, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin in the Antipodes (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2002). Thus, in the spirit of Gowans’s appeal, and in light of the work that remains to be done on the global reach of Anglican culture during the Victorian age, now seems an opportune moment to revisit the history of Anglican architecture and its reverberations worldwide.

As the writing of this book took me to a great many locations that were part of Britain’s vast and sprawling territorial empire during the nineteenth century, it called to mind the sheer ambition (and at times cupidity) of Britain’s imperial enterprise. At its height Britain’s empire extended over some 13 million square miles and included nearly a quarter of the world’s population. By 1860 it had already reached two-thirds this size, and had penetrated every corner of the known world, including Europe, North America and the Caribbean, Africa, India and south-east Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.9Estimates vary, but the general consensus is that between about 1840 and 1885 Britain’s empire went from approximately 2–3 million square miles to around 9–10 million. In the 1860s it was reckoned by some to be around 4.5 million square miles, whereas others put it at more like 8.5 million, with a total population of some 225 million. See C. Bray, The British Empire (London: Longman & Co., 1863), p. 33. Charles A. Coke, using the official government census of 1861, devised the following figures: area, 8,778,965 square miles; population, 225,802,250 people; see C. A. Coke, The British Empire: Area, Population, Government, etc., etc. (London: Harrison, 1865), pp. 336–43. Indeed, as Lord Salisbury grumbled in 1861, Britain’s empire really was one upon which the sun never set.

In the same way that Salisbury’s carp was intended to highlight the unwieldy nature of Britain’s empire, my experience of gathering research material for this book forced me to reflect upon the limitations imposed by distance. Despite this ‘tyranny’, as Geoffrey Blainey once described it,10Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966). I never lost sight of the unique opportunity that this project represented: the possibility of considering as a whole, and for the first time, the influence and impact of Anglican ecclesiology throughout the British world — a broad analytical and comparative sweep from Britain to Barbados, Newfoundland to New Delhi. Although something is undoubtedly lost in working at this scale, particularly with respect to the number of buildings included and the degree to which they can be discussed, much is also gained. This is especially true in the uncovering of those wider associations and trends that both drove and informed the export of Anglican ecclesiology abroad. It is these broader aspects, and what they reveal about architectural theory and practice in the nineteenth-century British imperial world, that might otherwise escape the attention of more localised studies. Undertaking the research for this book certainly reinforced the reality that the spread of Anglicanism was a global enterprise, and that the mid-Victorians understood it as such.11Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), pp. 198–221; Le Couteur, ‘Anglican High Churchmen’.

In considering the architectural achievement of the Anglican Church across so wide a geographical area, and over a time period of some thirty years, I found that such a study raised numerous problems concerning both methodology and terminology. These involved not only the issue of ‘centre’ versus ‘periphery’ but also the particular preoccupations of architectural history versus the much broader and more fundamental perspectives demanded by political, cultural and religious historiography.

One of the most immediate and pressing problems was the complex and, as yet, unresolved relationship between the historiography of ‘British’ architecture on the one hand, and that of ‘British colonial’ architecture on the other. Typically, these two subjects have been treated separately, both geographically and historically. But are they separate subjects, or can they be seen as integrated or even indivisible? Although there is no easy or absolute answer to this question, it was clear to me that the majority of Anglican churches I investigated for this book could not simply be labelled ‘colonial’. Not even the term ‘British colonial’ was entirely satisfactory, for that term in itself has come to indicate something much greater (culturally, politically, geographically) than what historians have generally taken it to mean.

This initial observation forced me to ask what it actually meant to speak of ‘British’ and/or ‘British colonial’ architecture. Did the term ‘British’ in reference to architecture merely pertain to an account of those buildings and monuments that existed within the political boundaries of what is today referred to as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? Or, did it include those buildings that were designed and erected by British soldiers, merchants, architects, government administrators and settlers throughout Britain’s former colonial empire?12This question might also apply to buildings designed by ‘English’ or ‘British’ architects in sovereign territories beyond British political control, such as embassy buildings. For example, see Mark Crinson’s description of W. J. Smith’s British Embassy building in Istanbul (1842–54) in Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 126–30. To put it another way, and in the context of this particular study: are the Anglican churches designed by George Gilbert Scott in Newfoundland, India, South Africa and Australia, for example, any less ‘British’ than those by him in Edinburgh, Yorkshire, Cambridge, or on the Channel island of Alderney?

Although it could be argued that there is no such thing as ‘British architecture’ or, indeed, ‘British architectural history’, it would seem that the way most historians have conceptualised the subject — at least since the second World War, and particularly in the wake of the dismantling of British power structures abroad, including territorial empire — suggests that British architecture and its history have been confined largely to the British Isles. This of course raises further questions about the distinctions and correlations between the architectural traditions of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Despite this, there has never been any serious or systematic attempt to include British colonial architecture within a study of the history of British architecture narrowly defined.13Recent attempts at a similar, historiographically integrated approach have emerged in cognate disciplines such as art history. One such is Tim Barringer’s interlacing (at a discursive level) of the means of artistic production in colonial contexts with notions of craft-based labour in Britain. See ‘Colonial Gothic’ in T. Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005), pp. 243–311. As far as architecture is concerned, at least within the ‘British Atlantic world’, a more integrated approach will no doubt emerge from B. L. Herman and Daniel Maudlin’s edited volume entitled Building the British Atlantic World 1600–1850 (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press). See also Louis P. Nelson, The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Take the topic of ‘Victorian architecture’, for example. Very few, if any, books on that subject make mention of architecture in the wider British empire during the Victorian age — the one obvious exception, perhaps, being Asa Briggs’s Victorian Cities (1963), which includes a chapter on Melbourne.14Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (1963) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 277–310. Some mention of this wider context is also made in Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999), pp. 281–8. If there has been a tendency to look abroad in an effort to understand the history of British architecture in some wider geographical context, it has almost always been with reference to continental Europe or the United States.15This tendency in itself suggests a great deal about the emergent geopolitical climate that shaped global power structures in the second half of the twentieth century: the Cold War, the rise of NATO, the advent of the EU and EEC, and Britain’s retreat from empire after the Second World War. David Armitage has also observed that leftist historians during the post-war period down to the 1970s were embarrassed and suspicious of empire: David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, vol. 104:2 (1999), p. 429.

This same narrowness of scope also applies to the history of architecture in Britain’s former colonies. Histories of Australian, Canadian and New Zealand architecture, for instance, have tended to partition off the architectural heritage of their respective regions and reconstitute it within the collective history of the post-colonial nation state.16This point has also been made by Thomas Metcalf: see T. R. Metcalf, ‘Architecture in the British Empire’, in R. W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5: Historiography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), p. 594. As Julie Willis and Philip Goad have pointed out, in the case of Australia this historicising tendency has at times been accompanied by a specific agenda concerning the need for cultural self-definition and the validation of emergent Modernist forms. See Julie Willis and Philip Goad, ‘A Bigger Picture: Reframing Australian Architectural History’, Fabrications, vol. 18:1 (2008), p. 12. Although this has a great deal to do with the constraints of geography and the shaping of a subject for the purposes of publication, the apparently coherent narrative that these histories present gives the impression (but does not necessarily intend) that even buildings from the earliest colonial period may be considered ‘Australian’, ‘Canadian’ or from ‘New Zealand’. Buildings and movements from Britain and elsewhere are necessarily mentioned in such histories but usually only as points of comparison or with respect to stylistic influence, never as the basis for a historiographical argument concerning a shared or common architectural heritage.17For a recent attempt at adopting a pan-imperial approach in the Australian context, see Miles Lewis, ‘The Imperial Technology Cringe’ (1996), in A. Leach, A. Moulis and N. Sully (eds.), Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand (St Lucia: Queensland UP, 2008), pp. 81–94. It is also the intention of Julie Willis and Philip Goad’s new concise history of Australian architecture (forthcoming, Cambridge UP) to move beyond these insular and nationalist interpretations of colonial architecture. The problem with such an approach, however, is that many of the formal, spatial, technical and ideological characteristics that connect architecture in Britain to that of its colonies are lost in this partitioning — taken for granted, down-played, or completely ignored.18Joan Kerr has discussed some of the problems surrounding the idea of an authentic ‘Australian’ Gothic Revival architecture. See Joan Kerr, ‘Authentically Australian Gothic’, Transition (Spring 1988), pp. 5–13. For the broader context, see K. L. Eggener (ed.), American Architectural History: A Contemporary Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 15.

As the bibliographic essay at the end of this book examines further, these connections suggested to me that there could be no clear or simple division of buildings into categories such as ‘British’ or ‘colonial’. Such a division can apply — indeed, make sense — only if one maintains a strict (even arbitrary) geographical distinction between Britain and its overseas empire. Moreover, this division can be misleading, not only in its disintegration of those connections and associations that made the internal dynamic of empire possible but also, and more generally, for the way it presupposes a necessary antagonism between coloniser and colonised.19This is something that Robert Kerr observed in his preface to the third (revised) edition of James Fergusson’s History of the Modern Styles of Architecture (1891): ‘we now have to class with England on this interesting ground [architectural development since the ‘epoch of 1851’], on more equal terms than formerly, not only the sister kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland, but the whole of the Anglo-Saxon Empire. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, India, have all felt the same glad influence in different degrees and forms; and . . . have preferred to follow the course of English progress with a fidelity of kindred and indeed filial feeling that is most interesting and flattering to contemplate.’ See J. Fergusson, History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, 3rd edn, rev. R. Kerr, 2 vols (London, 1891), vol. 1, p. vii. One of the ambitions of this study is to take the discussion of British colonial architecture beyond the binary categories of ‘self’/‘other’, European/non-European, and coloniser/colonised to present a more nuanced, complex and even fractured picture of colonial agency and its architectural manifestations. European imperial powers were, of course, far from culturally homogenous or socially unified entities.20For criticism of post-colonial theory in the field of history, see R. O’Hanlon and D. Washbrook, ‘Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 34:1 (1992), pp. 141–67. In art history, see J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995). In the fields of literary and cultural studies, see Erin O’Connor, ‘Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism’, Victorian Studies, vol. 45:2 (2003), pp. 217–46, and Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994). For discussions about the contested terrain between ‘history’ and ‘theory’, see Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 24:3 (1996), pp. 345–63, and B. Moore-Gilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies and Imperial Historiography’, Interventions, vol. 1:3 (1999), pp. 397–411. Indeed, as this study demonstrates, they were sometimes confused, oftentimes ideologically diffuse, and nearly always internally competitive and politically discordant — differing in each place at each time. This does not mean, however, that particular organisational structures or forms of agency within the broader imperial project, such as Christian churches, did not have a degree of coherence according to their individually specified missions. Clearly they did, which is in large part the story of this book. But they also fought among themselves, sometimes viciously, and were frequently at loggerheads with colonial officialdom.

With this in mind, Anglican architecture, if it is to be understood properly, should not be viewed as merely an English invention that found its way to foreign shores from time to time but instead as something that had become a fundamentally global phenomenon by 1850. It may have been closely associated with home-grown movements such as Tractarianism, but Anglican architecture was also extended (and developed) beyond the British Isles through the global expansion of the English Church. This was a process that informed architectural debate as much at ‘home’ as it did in the colonies, particularly in the pages of The Ecclesiologist, and especially during the thirty-year period between about 1840 and 1870 at which time the new age of English Church expansion coincided precisely with the rise of ecclesiologically ‘correct’ forms of Gothic Revival architecture. Therefore, by tracing and recovering the sinews of nineteenth-century Anglicanism worldwide, the aim of this book is to take the study of Victorian architecture in new and exciting directions, opening up a novel methodological approach to understanding the expanded nature of British architecture.

At a more personal level, the writing of this book forced me to reflect upon my own experience of growing up in rural Australia. To me, the fact that Australia was once part of a worldwide empire — a ‘British’ empire — is given, but the process of investigation nonetheless allowed me to understand that experience in a different and more nuanced way. Many Australians today see the present and future of that country as lying firmly in the Asia—Pacific region, but only a generation or two ago Australians (such as my grandfather) could still be heard talking about the ‘mother country’. Indeed, the residue of empire still persists most conspicuously in the form of Queen Elizabeth II, who remains the head of state of a number of Commonwealth countries, including Australia. Nor could I escape awareness of the fact that being a person of Anglo-Celtic descent I was quite obviously an intruder in a land previously occupied by an indigenous people, who had arrived some 40,000 years earlier. Now based in Scotland, from where my forebears originally came, I have had what seems like a strange homecoming, having gone full circle 160 years later. Again, all of this merely served to remind me of the vast and interconnected nature of the ‘British world’ during the nineteenth century.

I was also reminded, while conducting my research, of the rather fragile, even artificial, nature of colonial culture. The tension between the natural world (that is, ‘wilderness’ or ‘outback’) and ‘civilisation’ in a place like Australia was, and to a certain extent still is, one of the defining characteristics of that country’s landscape. This tension or ‘edge condition’ played itself out in many aspects of Australian life, from domestic politics, settlement patterns and sport through to literature, the arts and architecture. The way buildings are situated in the landscape in many parts of Australia, even today, gives one a heightened sense of architecture as an act of intervention. This is particularly evident, for instance, in the paintings and drawings of early colonial artists such as John Glover and Conrad Martens, where buildings are depicted in uneasy juxtaposition to the densely forested wilderness beyond. As far as church architecture is concerned, this condition — in all its earnestness and, at times, misplaced optimism — has been captured most vividly in more recent times by Peter Carey in his novel Oscar and Lucinda (1988). Carey’s trope of the glass church in the environmental context of Australia points up the over-burdensome promise of permanence and stability that was to be realised not only through religion but through architecture as well (in a material, spiritual and social sense). As I shall demonstrate throughout this study, the ever present tension between faith and folly was, in reality, close to the mark for many Anglican clergymen and their circumstances.

It is the experience of architecture as such, not just in Australia but throughout the former British colonial world, that revealed to me both architecture’s essential character and its central task in the process of British imperial expansion. In this sense, as Mark Crinson has observed, architecture echoed, inflected and was integral to many of the other practices and relationships that empire required for its furtherance.21Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 4. As we shall see, Anglicanism and its architecture were very much bound up in this process.

ALEX BREMNER

Edinburgh, July 2012

1 John Betjeman, Foreword, in Basil F. L. Clarke, Anglican Cathedrals Outside the British Isles (London: SPCK, 1958), p. xxi. »

2 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 18:3 (1959), pp. 119–20. George Hersey delved a little further into the subject in 1972, but even this was only based on what he could glen from The Ecclesiologist. See George L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972). »

3 Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004); David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005); and, more lately, Jeffrey Cox, The British Missionary Enterprise since 1700 (London: Routledge, 2008); Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Hilary Carey, God’s Empire: Religion and Colonialism in the British World, c. 1801–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010). See also Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002). This global perspective on the expansion of Christianity has also begun to shape the study of Roman Catholicism. For example, see Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008). »

4 Two outstanding exceptions to this are Sara H. Sohmer, ‘Christianity without Civilization: Anglican Sources for an Alternative Nineteenth-Century Mission Methodology’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 18:2 (1994), pp. 174–97; Howard Le Couteur, ‘Anglican High Churchmen and the Expansion of Empire’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 32:2 (2008), pp. 193–215. »

5 Pamela Welch, ‘Constructing Colonial Christianities: With Particular Reference to Anglicanism in Australia, ca 1850–1940’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 32:2 (2008), pp. 237–9. »

6 See also W. M. Jacob, The Making of the Anglican Church Worldwide (London: SPCK, 1997); and D. O’Connor et al. (eds), Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000 (London: Continuum, 2000). »

7 Andrew Saint, ‘The Late Victorian Church’, in T Sladen and A. Saint (eds.), Churches 1870–1914, themed issue of Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design, vol. 3 (2011), p. 7. »

8 The same could be said of the Roman Catholic Church as it began branching out into all parts of Britain’s empire, following the passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829, and consolidating its prior missionary holdings in those places that were now under the sway of the British crown. For example, for A. W. N. Pugin and the Roman Catholic Church in Tasmania, see Brian Andrews, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin in the Antipodes (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2002). »

9 Estimates vary, but the general consensus is that between about 1840 and 1885 Britain’s empire went from approximately 2–3 million square miles to around 9–10 million. In the 1860s it was reckoned by some to be around 4.5 million square miles, whereas others put it at more like 8.5 million, with a total population of some 225 million. See C. Bray, The British Empire (London: Longman & Co., 1863), p. 33. Charles A. Coke, using the official government census of 1861, devised the following figures: area, 8,778,965 square miles; population, 225,802,250 people; see C. A. Coke, The British Empire: Area, Population, Government, etc., etc. (London: Harrison, 1865), pp. 336–43. »

10 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966). »

11 Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c. 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), pp. 198–221; Le Couteur, ‘Anglican High Churchmen’. »

12 This question might also apply to buildings designed by ‘English’ or ‘British’ architects in sovereign territories beyond British political control, such as embassy buildings. For example, see Mark Crinson’s description of W. J. Smith’s British Embassy building in Istanbul (1842–54) in Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 126–30. »

13 Recent attempts at a similar, historiographically integrated approach have emerged in cognate disciplines such as art history. One such is Tim Barringer’s interlacing (at a discursive level) of the means of artistic production in colonial contexts with notions of craft-based labour in Britain. See ‘Colonial Gothic’ in T. Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2005), pp. 243–311. As far as architecture is concerned, at least within the ‘British Atlantic world’, a more integrated approach will no doubt emerge from B. L. Herman and Daniel Maudlin’s edited volume entitled Building the British Atlantic World 1600–1850 (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press). See also Louis P. Nelson, The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). »

14 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (1963) (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 277–310. Some mention of this wider context is also made in Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999), pp. 281–8. »

15 This tendency in itself suggests a great deal about the emergent geopolitical climate that shaped global power structures in the second half of the twentieth century: the Cold War, the rise of NATO, the advent of the EU and EEC, and Britain’s retreat from empire after the Second World War. David Armitage has also observed that leftist historians during the post-war period down to the 1970s were embarrassed and suspicious of empire: David Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’, American Historical Review, vol. 104:2 (1999), p. 429. »

16 This point has also been made by Thomas Metcalf: see T. R. Metcalf, ‘Architecture in the British Empire’, in R. W. Winks (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5: Historiography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), p. 594. As Julie Willis and Philip Goad have pointed out, in the case of Australia this historicising tendency has at times been accompanied by a specific agenda concerning the need for cultural self-definition and the validation of emergent Modernist forms. See Julie Willis and Philip Goad, ‘A Bigger Picture: Reframing Australian Architectural History’, Fabrications, vol. 18:1 (2008), p. 12. »

17 For a recent attempt at adopting a pan-imperial approach in the Australian context, see Miles Lewis, ‘The Imperial Technology Cringe’ (1996), in A. Leach, A. Moulis and N. Sully (eds.), Shifting Views: Selected Essays on the Architectural History of Australia and New Zealand (St Lucia: Queensland UP, 2008), pp. 81–94. It is also the intention of Julie Willis and Philip Goad’s new concise history of Australian architecture (forthcoming, Cambridge UP) to move beyond these insular and nationalist interpretations of colonial architecture. »

18 Joan Kerr has discussed some of the problems surrounding the idea of an authentic ‘Australian’ Gothic Revival architecture. See Joan Kerr, ‘Authentically Australian Gothic’, Transition (Spring 1988), pp. 5–13. For the broader context, see K. L. Eggener (ed.), American Architectural History: A Contemporary Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 15. »

19 This is something that Robert Kerr observed in his preface to the third (revised) edition of James Fergusson’s History of the Modern Styles of Architecture (1891): ‘we now have to class with England on this interesting ground [architectural development since the ‘epoch of 1851’], on more equal terms than formerly, not only the sister kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland, but the whole of the Anglo-Saxon Empire. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, India, have all felt the same glad influence in different degrees and forms; and . . . have preferred to follow the course of English progress with a fidelity of kindred and indeed filial feeling that is most interesting and flattering to contemplate.’ See J. Fergusson, History of the Modern Styles of Architecture, 3rd edn, rev. R. Kerr, 2 vols (London, 1891), vol. 1, p. vii. »

20 For criticism of post-colonial theory in the field of history, see R. O’Hanlon and D. Washbrook, ‘Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 34:1 (1992), pp. 141–67. In art history, see J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995). In the fields of literary and cultural studies, see Erin O’Connor, ‘Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism’, Victorian Studies, vol. 45:2 (2003), pp. 217–46, and Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994). For discussions about the contested terrain between ‘history’ and ‘theory’, see Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 24:3 (1996), pp. 345–63, and B. Moore-Gilbert, ‘Postcolonial Cultural Studies and Imperial Historiography’, Interventions, vol. 1:3 (1999), pp. 397–411. »

21 Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 4. »

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