Bibliographic Essay. Rethinking British Architecture: Towards an Expanded Methodology

Bremner, G. A.

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Bibliographic Essay. Rethinking British Architecture: Towards an Expanded Methodology

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

One of the aims of this book, as mentioned in the Preface, is to reconsider some of the terminology and scholarly assumptions surrounding the study of architecture...

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G. A. Bremner

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23950

Bibliographic Essay. Rethinking British Architecture: Towards an Expanded Methodology

One of the aims of this book, as mentioned in the Preface, is to reconsider some of the terminology and scholarly assumptions surrounding the study of architecture in Britain’s former territorial empire. An abiding factor in this undertaking has been the problem of geography, which is nothing less than global in scope. To achieve this aim, methods new to the study of architecture were necessarily required in order to bring together factors pertaining to the rise of global Anglicanism and its architectural manifestations worldwide that might otherwise have been considered disparate or even unrelated historical phenomena. In this respect, much has been drawn from recent approaches to the study of empire in the cognate disciplines of New British history, as well as regional, World and Global historiographies.

In conjunction with the Preface, this bibliographic essay is intended to sketch out something of the rationale underpinning this study, discussing at length the sources drawn upon and the relevance of these to a new and extended understanding of ‘British’ architecture in the mid-nineteenth century.

Scholarly Precedent: Taking a Lesson from History

Perhaps a good place to begin such a discussion is with past scholarship in the history of architecture. One of the earliest works of scholarship to attempt an expansive history of the kind pursued here was on the art and architecture of early modern Spain and Portugal. First published as part of the Pelican History of Art series in 1959, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800 by George Kubler and Martin Soria was a colossal and visionary work that charted the development of architecture, painting and sculpture in Spain, Portugal and their colonial empires in the Caribbean and Central and South America. As impressive in its scope as this history was (no less than ten years in the making), it fell short of what the authors had originally envisioned. They had hoped the study would go so far as to ‘treat the art and architecture of the Iberian Empires from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Wars’, including ‘Asia, Oceania, Africa and the rest of Europe’.1George Kubler and Martin Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800, Pelican History of Art (Harmonsdworth: Penguin Books, 1959), p. xxv. Although overly ambitious, the fundamental premise of Kubler and Soria’s study is worth pondering, for it was a work of scholarship that saw (as a matter of course) the development of Spanish and Portuguese art and architecture as not merely an Iberian phenomenon but one that encompassed the entire known world. In other words, they considered buildings such as Jaén Cathedral in Spain and the Catedral Metropolitana in Mexico City, São Pedro dos Clérigos in Oporto and N. S. da Gloria do Outeiro in Rio de Janeiro as part of the same genealogy of forms — of Spanish and Portuguese architecture, and of ‘Iberian’ architecture more generally.

Kubler and Soria’s study should not be mistaken for ‘grand narrative’, however. Rather, it is concerned with their interest in the geography of art and its inherent complexities.2For an analysis of Kubler’s approach to the geography of art, see: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 219–38. They appreciated not only the variations in style and materials that accompanied the spread of European forms into the New World, but also, and more importantly, the social, administrative and spiritual continuities that tied these forms to a wider network of culturally specific influences and ideas. It is clear from looking at their study that they conceived of this network as constituting a complete body — a kind of web of artistic production that stretched across land and sea — connecting the empire as a whole.3A recent study that takes a similarly inclusive approach is Maria Georgopoulou’s, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). Although the subject matter of this book is largely ‘peripheral’ as opposed to metropolitan, it does make an argument for formal and ideological continuity between the architecture of Venice and its colonies. In this respect, it may be suggested that Kubler and Soria’s book achieved for the study of Iberian architecture precisely what Basil Clarke’s Anglican Cathedrals Outside the British Isles had failed to do for British architecture (see Preface, p. xi).

In looking back at Kubler and Soria’s study in this way we must also accept it for what it is. It was published in 1959 and therefore has certain limitations as far as problems in contemporary scholarship are concerned. Nevertheless, this should not detract from its fundamental premise — that is, its scope and what it was essentially trying to achieve methodologically. These are still entirely valid.

Needless to say, there is no equivalent of Kubler and Soria’s book in the study of British architecture. Although a product of its time, Sir John Summerson’s 1953 classic Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 could only manage a sixteen-page appendix on ‘English Architecture in America.’4See: ‘Appendix II: English Architecture in America’, in John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 (1953), 8th edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 512–27. Along with Scottish architecture, such a subject was clearly at the margins, both literally and figuratively.5As Marlene Heck has recently observed, Summerson’s treatment of the subject tended towards the conclusion that British colonial architecture in America was really nothing more than an inferior copy or sub-species of respectable architecture in Britain, with little or no vitality of its own. See: M. E. Heck, ‘Mind the Gap: Rewriting Sir John Summerson’s American Architectural History’, in Frank Salmon (ed.), Summerson and Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2006), pp. 117–32. To find anything like the geographical breadth of Kubler and Soria’s book one must turn to studies dealing with the pre-modern world, a time that witnessed the first imperium on British soil since antiquity, that of the Normans.

The nineteenth-century French architect and antiquary Victor Ruprich-Robert (1820–1887), for example, sought to show that the architecture of a militaristic, colonising people such as the Normans, who conquered lands in Britain, northern France and Italy, could (and perhaps should) be viewed as a single artistic tradition.6Victor Ruprich-Robert, L’architecture normande aux XIe et XIIe siècles en Normandie et en Angleterre (Paris: Librairie des Imprimeries Réunies, 1884–9). For a long while now historians have viewed the Norman empire as a culturally and geographically continuous phenomenon. See: John le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). More recent scholarship, however, has sought to complicate this view but still acknowledges the large degree of continuity. See: David Bates, ‘Normandy and England after 1066’, English Historical Review, vol. 104 (1989), pp. 851–80; Brian Golding, Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain, 1066–1100 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Although modern scholars of Norman architecture have been reluctant to cast as wide a net as Ruprich-Robert, the stylistic associations between Norman architecture in Britain and northern France are still part of modern historiography. See: Eric Fernie, The Architecture of Norman England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). Although there is no room here to discuss the Norman empire and its architecture in detail, the analogy between the development of ecclesiastical architecture throughout the Norman kingdoms during the eleventh and twelfth centuries and that of the Anglican church in the British empire during the mid-nineteenth century is striking. Although modern scholars did not follow Ruprich-Robert’s lead, a number of monographs on nineteenth-century British architects have since appeared in which some discussion of their buildings abroad has been included.7For example: Paul Thompson, William Butterfield: Victorian Architect (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); Anthony Quiney, John Loughborough Pearson (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979); and Gill Hunter, William White: Pioneer Victorian Architect (Reading: Spire Books, 2010). Even in these rare examples, however, colonial works are treated as largely incidental and are mentioned only in passing.

More promising has been the work undertaken on Britain’s most celebrated architects of empire, Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker. The scholarship of Robert Irving, in particular, has presented the work of these architects in its proper imperial context, highlighting the very real and significant political agenda embodied in buildings such as Lutyens’s Viceroy’s House in New Delhi.8R. G. Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1981); R. G. Irving, ‘Architecture for Empire’s Sake: Lutyens’s Palace for Delhi’, Perspecta, vol. 18 (1982), pp. 7–23; R. G. Irving, ‘Bombay and Imperial Delhi: Cities as Symbols’, in Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp (eds), Lutyens Abroad: The Work of Sir Edwin Lutyens Outside the British Isles (London: British School at Rome, 2002), pp. 169–80. See also Jane Ridley, ‘Edwin Lutyens, New Delhi, and the Architecture of Imperialism’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 26:2 (1998), pp. 67–83. Equally encouraging has been the research into certain British architects who migrated to the colonies during the nineteenth century. This work has done much to call attention to the strong architectural and ideological ties between Britain and its colonial empire with respect to ‘ecclesiology’ and the Gothic Revival.9Margaret H. Alington, Frederick Thatcher and St. Paul’s: An Ecclesiological Study (Wellington: New Zealand Historic Places Trust, 1965); Joan Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect: Edmund Thomas Blacket (1817–1883) (Sydney: National Trust of Australia, 1983); Ian Lochhead, A Dream of Spires: Benja min Mountfort and the Gothic Revival (Christchurch: Canterbury UP, 1999). For recent scholarship on British architects who were involved in designing buildings for the colonies but did not emigrate, see: Brian Andrews, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin at the Antipodes (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2002); and J. N. Mané, ‘Gilbert Scott’s Colonial Churches’, in Margaret Belcher and Helen Deben-ham (eds), Australasian Victorian Studies Association: Conference Papers 1987 (Christchurch: University of Canterbury for the AVSA), pp. 31–42. Included here is Phoebe Stanton’s The Gothic Revival & American Church Architecture (1968), which is somewhat similar to Kubler and Soria’s enterprise. Although her book is primarily a study of church building in the United States, Stanton couches her subject within the wider geographical context of Anglican ecclesiology during the mid-nineteenth century, and includes a chapter on the British colony of New Brunswick.10Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival & American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840–1856 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968). Here too may be mentioned George L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972). In addition to these may be counted a handful of books that have appeared over the past two decades on certain architectural styles and movements from Palladianism to the Gothic Revival. Although much more general in their treatment, these books have made some attempt to consider the wider geographical and cultural reverberations of these styles and movements within the British colonial world. For instance, see: Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999); M.J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002); Robert Tavernor, Palladio and Palladianism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991); and Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998).

But perhaps the most significant contribution to a wider and more inclusive understanding of British architecture in recent years has come from the study of ‘colonial cultures’ and their engagement with architecture and urbanism as instruments of change. This type of scholarship is different in scope and intent from more orthodox studies of the history of architecture, and has emerged in response to the rise of post-colonial theory and especially the work of the Marxist historian Anthony D. King and the literary critic Edward Said.11There are too many such studies to mention them all, but some of the initial and most noteworthy include: A. D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge, 1976); T. R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (London: Faber and Faber, 1989); the essays in Nezar AlSayyad (ed.), Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992); and Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996). For Said, see E. W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), and E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). Although studies of this kind have been better at conceptualising the colonial encounter and therefore presenting architecture as a form of cultural practice — imbued with all the prejudices and preconceptions of the societies that produced it — they too have been reluctant to assert the interconnectedness of British domestic and colonial architecture as a methodological imperative.

Anthony King’s The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (1984) is perhaps the only study that has taken seriously the global nature and implications of an essentially British architectural form.12An excellent recent addition to this approach, although on a reduced geographic scale (taking an ‘Atlantic’ rather than a global perspective) is Louis P. Nelson’s The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). In many respects Nelson’s book presents a precursor to this study regarding the spread of Anglican culture and its architecture throughout Britain’s colonial empire. B. L. Herman and Daniel Maudlin’s edited volume entitled Building the British Atlantic World 1600–1850 (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press) will also add to this broader perspective. His book is singular in its outlook and methodology, effectively tracing the origins and proliferation of this unique form from seventeenth-century British India to other parts of the modern world, including Britain. In so doing, it highlights the largely inseparable trajectories of empire, architecture and what King has called ‘cultural globalisation.’13See also King’s recent comments on this form in: A. D. King, ‘Imperialism, Colonialism and Architects of the Arts and Crafts in Britain’, Chapter 10 in A. D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 161–86.

Among the numerous outcomes of adopting this enlarged perspective (and the deep-seated relationships between architecture and imperial culture it reveals) has been a shift of focus back to the metropolis (that is, Britain). For a long while the metropolis, especially its capital city, London, was conspicuous for its absence in the study of British imperial and colonial architecture. In recent years, however, architectural historians, urban geographers and landscape historians have begun re-examining the buildings and landscapes of Britain in new and diverse ways, uncovering the various political, cultural and economic agendas that lay behind building campaigns in London and the country estates of the British aristocracy.14For London, see Felix Driver and David Gilbert, ‘Heart of Empire? Landscape, Space and Performance in Imperial London’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 16 (1998), pp. 1–17; Federico Freschi, ‘The Fine Art of Fusion: Race, Gender and the Politics of South Africanism as Reflected in the Decorative Programme of South Africa House, London (1933)’, De Arte, no. 71 (April 2005), pp. 14–34; G. A. Bremner, ‘Nation and Empire in the Government Architecture of Victorian London: The Foreign and India Office Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, vol. 48:3 (2005), pp. 703–42; G.A. Bremner, ‘“Some Imperial Institute”: Architecture, Symbolism, and the Ideal of Empire in Late Victorian Britain, 1887–93’, JSAH, vol. 62:1 (2003), pp. 50–73. For country estates, see James Walvin, ‘The Colonial Origins of English Wealth’, Journal of Caribbean History, vol. 39:1 (2005), pp. 38–53; Patrick Eyres, ‘Neoclassicism on Active Service: Commemoration of the Seven Years’ War in the English Landscape Garden’, New Arcadian Journal, no. 35–36 (1993), pp. 62–122. For other accounts on the various relationships between architecture and imperialism in capital cities, see M. H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London, 1851–1915 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995); Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: Tie Imperial Metropolis (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999); and the essays in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999).

Others have moved in the opposite direction, away from the metropolis to the emerging communities of the colonial and post-colonial world. With the increasing emphasis placed on the study of material culture (and the ‘deep readings’ of site-specific objects), this move has seen a desire among some scholars to eschew wider connections and to argue for ‘exceptionalism’ with respect to colonial architecture. This is particularly evident in scholarship on the history of architecture in colonial North America, and is exemplified by the work of historians and archaeologists such as Dell Upton and James Deetz.15For example, see the introduction to Dell Upton (ed.), America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups that Built America (New York: Preservation Press, 1998), pp. 7–15.

However, as good as these studies have been at identifying particular ethnic and regional traits, and at probing the boundaries between national and international forms, their approach tends towards what Michael Warner and Jack P. Greene have described as a preoccupation with ‘localism’ at the expense of wider, transatlantic contexts of empire, identity and trade.16M. Warner, ‘What is Colonial about Colonial America?’, in R. Blair St. George (ed.), Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000), p. 50; J. P. Greene, ‘Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem’, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 64:2 (2007), pp. 235–50. For a broader critique of the exceptionalist thesis in North American historiography, see Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History’, Journal of American History, vol. 89:4 (2003), pp. 1431–55. Despite their insistence on difference, these studies are necessarily based on the implicit acknowledgement that even vernacular forms have developed from, and are derivative of, customs and practices brought from elsewhere, however remote their echoes may appear to us today. Contemporary trends in imperial scholarship now demand that we keep these broader connections constantly in view.

Reframing the Subject: Influences and Historiography

The particular approach developed in this book concerning the nature and extents of Anglican ecclesiology has been informed by three major considerations: the contemporary context; the relationship between Britain and its empire during the mid-nineteenth century; and recent advancements in British imperial and domestic historiography. Although it is worth commenting on these considerations individually, it is not my intention here to sketch out a complete intellectual genealogy. Instead, I wish simply to discuss each briefly, highlighting those aspects that have been important in shaping the evolution of the present study.

The first of these considerations, evident throughout the course of this book, concerns the observation that many of the architects and clergymen (and their sponsors) associated with the Anglican cause worldwide were closely related, either through family ties, social and political connections, educational background or professional networks.17For example: Howard Le Couteur, ‘Using the “Old Boys” Network: Bishop Tufnell’s Search for Men and Money’, paper delivered at the Australian Historical Association conference, Hobart (1998); Austin Cooper, ‘Forgotten Australian Anglican: Edward Coleridge’, Pacifica, vol. 3 (1990), pp. 257–67; Susan Walton, ‘Edward Coleridge and the Eton Connection’, in Susan Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 147–53. The connections between Selwyn and many of his colleagues at Eton and Cambridge are also mentioned in Warren E. Limbrick, ‘“A most indefatigable man’”, in Warren E. Limbrick (ed.), Bishop Selwyn in New Zealand, 1841–68 (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 1983), pp. 13–15. Moreover, nearly all were interested to some degree or other in architecture and the role it played in the growth and consolidation of Anglican discipline and spirituality. Periodicals such as The Ecclesiologist and the Colonial Church Chronicle, both of which enjoyed a worldwide reputation and distribution, sustained these ties, keeping colonial clergymen not only in touch with ‘home’ but also informed of the activities of their colleagues abroad.18Pamela Welch, ‘Constructing Colonial Christianities: With Particular Reference to Anglicanism in Australia, ca 1850–1940’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 32:2 (2008), p. 249. These considerations alone were enough to make me rethink the historiographic divide between colony and metropole with respect to architecture, and are loosely based on a prosopographic conception of ‘Anglican lives’ within Britain’s empire. As my research progressed, it became clear that the organization and maintenance of these connections revealed Britain and its empire to be a continuous field of Anglican activity and agency.19Under the general compulsion of Anglican renewal, the Church of England was not only reaching out to the farthest parts of the British empire but was also organising ‘home missions’ and ‘church extension’ in Britain, especially in Cornwall and Devon, Wales and certain parts of London. Like the colonies, parts of east London were at times described in contemporary accounts as ‘terra incognita’ and ‘this new country’. See C. F. Lowder, Ten Years in St George’s Mission (London, 1867), p. 5. See also Church Builder (1862–1916). For a detailed account of this phenomenon in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 170–98. Indeed, agency and networking have become major themes in the study of empire in recent years. Clergymen were of course as reliant as anyone else on these factors in extending their influence.20For example, on networking and empire see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008); John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009); Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); and Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010). This point has also been made by J. H. Elliott in ‘How They Made the Empire’, New York Review of Books, vol. 58:13 (2011), p. 22.

The second consideration, which follows naturally from the first, concerns the way in which the bond between Britain and its colonies was perceived during the mid-nineteenth century. Although there was considerable debate at the time as to the fiscal and administrative relationship that Britain ought to maintain with its colonial empire, there was little doubt that the colonies were perceived to be, as William Huskisson observed, ‘kindred in blood, in habits, and in feeling’, especially the so-called ‘settler’ dominions.21Huskisson quoted in A. G. L. Shaw, ‘British Attitudes to the Colonies, ca. 1820–1850’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 9:1 (1969), p. 83. This was observed by Huskisson as early as 1828. For accounts of these debates, attitudes to imperial expansion, and the significance of imperial sentiment in mid-Victorian Britain, see: Ged Martin, ‘“Anti-Imperialism” in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and the Nature of the British Empire, 1820–70’, in Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin, Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 88–120; A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies (London: Macmillan, 1959); C. C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone & Disraeli, 1868–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); J. S. Galbraith, ‘Myths of the “Little England” Era’ (1961), in A. G. L. Shaw (ed.), Great Britain and the Colonies, 1815–1865 (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 27–45; John Gallagher and Ronald E. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, vol. 6:1 (1953), pp. 1–15; and more recently, John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, vol. 112 (1997), pp. 614–42. It is hardly surprising, therefore, to find a high church grandee like A. J. B. Beresford Hope (1820–1887) drawing extensively on examples from Britain’s colonies in his book The English Cathedral of the Nineteenth Century (1861). After all, Hope believed, the colonies were ‘that great England beyond the seas’.22A. J. B. Beresford Hope, The English Cathedral of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 19.

This perception, although somewhat naive, was an increasingly common (if unevenly distributed) one during the nineteenth century, representing the social and cultural ties that were seen to connect the ‘mother country’ to its colonial ‘offspring’. The British and other European emigrants who ventured out to all parts of Britain’s empire, forging new societies in their wake, were often described, according to this familial metaphor, as ‘sons’, ‘daughters’, ‘children’ or, as the clergy preferred, ‘brethren’. For the most part the sentiment was reciprocal. As the travel accounts of Englishmen such as Charles Dilke and Anthony Trollope reveal, most colonists were happy to identify themselves as ‘Britons’ in some form or other, and to view the British Isles as ‘home’.23For instance, see what Trollope had to say about colonists in New Zealand (and elsewhere) regarding their sense of ‘Englishness’ in Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1874), pp. 631–2. See also: C. W. Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867 (London: Macmillan, 1868). In this sense, the object of colonisation was, as J. A. Robuck succinctly put it, ‘the creation of so many happy Englands’.24Robuck quoted by W. E. Gladstone in ‘An Address delivered to the Members of the Mechanics’ Institute, at Chester, November 12, 1855’, repr. in Paul Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 202. In fact, some settlements, such as Canterbury in New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, Adelaide in South Australia, were precisely this: concerted experiments in the creation of more congenial forms of English society abroad, architecture included.25Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the father of ‘systematic colonisation’, was quick to point out that the Canterbury Settlement was made up of ‘not merely a nice, but a choice society of English people’. Wakefield quoted in Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 92. Both Canterbury and Adelaide were based on Wakefield’s principles of systematic colonisation. The Canterbury Settlement, in particular, was envisioned as a Church of England colony. See L. C. Webb, ‘The Canterbury Association and Its Settlement’, in James Hight and C. R. Straubel (eds) A History of Canterbury, vol. 1 (Christ-church: Whitcome and Tombs, 1957), pp. 135–233. See also Marie Peters, ‘Homeland and Colony’, in Colin Brown, Marie Peters, and Jane Teal (eds), Shaping a Colonial Church: Bishop Harper and the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch, 1856–1890 (Christchurch: Canterbury UP, 2006), pp. 19–34.

Not everyone of course was an enthusiast of empire or an ‘imperialist’. Empire had its critics. Moreover, the majority of people living in Britain at the time had neither the knowledge nor the experience to make sense of their nation’s involvement in empire, or to understand how it affected their lives.26Although somewhat overstated, Bernard Porter’s point that a large proportion of Britain’s population was essentially ignorant of empire and its implications is valid. See Bernard Porter, ‘“Empire, what empire?” Or, Why 80% of Early- and Mid-Victorians Were Deliberately Kept in Ignorance of It’, Victorian Studies, vol. 46:2 (2004), pp. 256–63; Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004). But the establishment and maintenance of the British empire was never a populist enterprise. It was something presided over by the élite and educated classes whose confidence in Britain’s social, legal and political institutions, and their self-evident reproducibility, compelled them to adopt these whenever and wherever they could. It was this trust in the apparent universal validity of English culture that is often referred to as Britain’s imperial ‘mission’, and it applied to all parts of the empire, including India. Even after the horrors of the great Sepoy Revolt (Indian Mutiny) of 1857, the British government knew that it could not simply walk out on India and its people. It felt morally obliged to continue its self-appointed course of ‘civilisation’.27On this point C. C. Eldridge has noted: ‘To the mid-Victorian generation the empire entailed a duty, and for many the imperial idea was beginning to assume a sense of mission.’ See Eldridge, England’s Mission, p. 40. This sense of unabashed obligation accorded precisely with the Church of England’s renewed concern for the propagation of the Anglican faith abroad, as both a national and institutional responsibility.

But the connections between Britain and its empire ran deeper still. The economic ties that linked the two were seen to engender a ‘special relationship’ of their own. We get some sense of what this relationship might have meant to the mid-Victorian generation in the view expressed by John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy (1848). In Book III Mill writes:

[Britain’s colonies] are hardly to be looked upon as countries, carrying on an exchange of commodities with other countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing establishments belonging to a larger community. Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries, with a productive capital of their own. If Manchester, instead of being where it is, were on a rock in the North Sea (its present industry nevertheless continuing), it would still be but a town of England, not a country trading with England; it would be merely, as now, a place where England finds it convenient to carry on her cotton manufacture. The West Indies, in like manner, are the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee, and a few other tropical commodities.28J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, new edn, ed. W. J. Ashley (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), pp. 685–6.

In this view Britain’s colonies were not, as Mill explains, considered to be independent countries but, again, part of a ‘larger community’, however variegated it may have been.29The summation of this idea in the ‘official mind’ is captured eloquently in a passage from Herman Merivale’s lectures on colonisation delivered at Oxford between 1839 and 1841: ‘May we not conceive England as retaining the seat of the chief executive authority, the prescriptive reverence of her station, the superiority belonging to her vast accumulated wealth, and as the commercial metropolis of the world; and united, by these ties only, with a hundred nations, — not unconnected, like those which yielded to the spear of the Roman, but her own children, owing one faith and one language? May we not figure to ourselves, scattered thick as stars over the surface of this earth, communities of citizens owing the name of Britons, bound by allegiance to a British sovereign, and uniting heart and hand in maintaining the supremacy of Britain on every shore which her unconquered flag can reach?’ See Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, new edn (London, 1861; repr. London: Oxford UP, 1928), p. 634. Dilke’s concept of ‘Greater Britain’ is also applicable here. For an excellent recent account of this idea, see Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007). Although referring specifically to the economy of production, Mill’s concept has implications for the way we might perceive the corporate nature of missionary Anglicanism and its architectural achievement worldwide.

As discussed throughout this book, by 1840 a great deal of anxiety had built up around the Church of England’s responsibility vis-à-vis the spiritual needs of empire. Accordingly, it launched itself headlong into missionary activity abroad, not only for the sake of ‘harvesting’ souls (as important and essential as this was) but also for reasons of imperial security.30For instance, see Samuel Wilberforce’s many sermons between 1840 and 1870 relating to the missionary activities and responsibilities of the Church of England in Henry Rowley (ed.), Speeches on Missions by the Right Reverend Samuel Wilbeforce, D.D. (London: William Wells Gardner, 1874). See also Documents Relative to the Erection and Endowment of Additional Bishoprics in the Colonies, 1841–1855 (London: SPCK, 1855); and J. C. Wynter, Hints on Church Colonization (London: J. W. Parker, 1850). For an excellent account of the politics surrounding Church of England expansion into the empire, see Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), pp. 198–221. Indeed, with the assistance of a newly invigorated Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the establishment of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund (1841), the Anglican Church went global. With these mechanisms in place, and its moral conscience somewhat mollified, the Church of England was able to proclaim with no small satisfaction that ‘the sun now never sets upon the Kingdom of the Saviour’.31C. T. Longley (1794–1868), bishop of Ripon, quoted in Daniel O’Connor et ah, Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000 (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 47.

This sense of duty that the mid-Victorians maintained towards empire necessarily transformed my perception of Anglican ecclesiology and its extension abroad. The need to plant ‘correct’ and worthy church buildings wherever the English Church went was no mere afterthought; rather, it was a faithful attempt at proffering a particular set of architectural forms and practices within a ‘Greater Britain’. This is precisely what John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb meant when they declared that the Ecclesiological Society bestrode ‘the narrow world like a Colossus’.32Eccl., vol. 1 (Jan. 1845), p. 24. In 1851 they further observed: ‘We are a “large party,” and the world fear us.’ See Eccl., vol. 9:46 (Feb. 1851), p. 1. To them, architecture, culture, religion and empire went hand in hand.

This leads me onto the third consideration that has influenced the thesis developed in this book, which is New British history.33I have also been influenced significantly in this approach by the expansive methodological perspectives developed over the past few years in so-called Atlantic history. For some definitions of this method of historical analysis and its resonances with this study, see David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 11–27; and Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American Historical Review, vol. 111:3 (2006), pp. 741–37. This approach first emerged in a series of ground-breaking articles published between 1974 and 1982 by the New Zealand historian J. G. A. Pocock, in which he sought to redefine what was meant by the term ‘British history’. His initial observations had led to the conclusion that there was nothing that could properly be described as ‘British history’, and that what generally passed for the history of Britain, or the British Isles, was in fact the history of England.34J. G. A. Pocock, The Limits and Divisions of British History (Studies in Public Policy, no. 31, University of Strathclyde, 1979), p. 7. In his opening salvo, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, published in the New Zealand Journal of History in 1974, Pocock noted of this problem that ‘when one considers what “Britain” means — that it is the name of a realm inhabited by two, and more than two, nations, whose history has been expansive to the extent of planting settlements and founding derivative cultures beyond the Four Seas — it is evident that the history of this complex expression has never been seriously attempted.’35J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 8:1 (1974), p. 5. In short, Pocock’s principal contention was that British history, in its most plural and comprehensive sense, was an ‘unknown’ subject.

Clearly, from where Pocock was standing, British history was not only something different from the history of England but also something far more expansive, both geographically and historiographically. This included not only English political and cultural expansion and domination within the British Isles — what Pocock refers to as ‘the Anglo-Norman transformation of the Atlantic Archipelago’ — but also expansion beyond this into North America, India and Australasia. This was essentially Pocock’s challenge to the modern historian: that one can ‘conceive of “British history” no longer as being an archipelagic or even an Atlantic-American phenomenon, but as having occurred on a planetary scale’.36J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review, vol. 87:2 (1982), p. 319. Here Pocock also observes that: ‘“British history,” both cultural and political, is discovered to have exceeded even the archipelagic and Atlantic dimension and to have established itself in a number of areas in the southern hemisphere. The history of these settler nations . . . makes a claim to be considered part of “British history” and to enlarge the meaning of that term.’ For the same argument in a related context, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary’, American Historical Review, vol. 104:2 (1999), pp. 490–500.

At first Pocock’s thesis proved controversial.37See the criticisms of Pocock’s initial thesis by A. J. P. Taylor, Gordon Donaldson and Michael Hechter, as well as his own reply to those criticisms, in the Journal of Modern History, vol. 47:4 (1975), pp. 601–21. He was asking historians who had hitherto taken a very insular and Eurocentric view of English history to re-evaluate their position fundamentally, and to consider both the intra- and extra-archipelagic events that shaped the modern nation state as being part of the same historical record.38On this point Pocock notes that: ‘Some fifteen years ago, there appeared among English scholars and publicists a strong tendency to assert that England — or Britain if they happened to use the word — had always formed part of Europe and the history of Europe; and this was plainly a myth — like all myths containing much incidental truth — designed to accompany the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community. The decision to seek this entry was as we know founded upon the proposition that Britain’s independent role as an imperial power was now irretrievably lost. The accompanying myth — the insistence on the inherently European character of British history — conveyed the message that the history of that imperial role either had never happened, or had never counted and could now be forgotten.’ See Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History’, p. 2. Although it might be argued that Pocock’s historiographical agenda was accompanied by no small amount of post-imperial anxiety, his conclusions were such that they could only have been reached (indeed, appreciated) by a scholar looking from the outside in, especially from the margins of Britain’s former colonial empire. Nevertheless, his ‘plea’, as it were, certainly reminds one of J. R. Seeley’s observation of a hundred years earlier — that empire was ‘the great fact of modern English history’ — and was the first trenchant articulation since Seeley’s time of the now largely accepted thesis that neither the domestic nor the imperial histories of Britain can be fully appreciated in isolation.39J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 12. For further reflections on Pocock’s thesis, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005). Although, as David Armitage has recently suggested, Seeley and Pocock were approaching the same problem from different perspectives, and at radically different moments in history, the conclusions they reached were essentially the same: that it is vital to integrate the history of the state and the empire if the history of Britain is to be properly understood. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 20–1.

Pocock’s ideas have since found resonance in much scholarship on British domestic and imperial history, and the ‘enlarged’ perspective that his work represents has flourished more generally.40See note 3 in J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Field Enlarged: An Introduction’, in Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, p. 48. This especially applies to histories of Britain such as ‘Three Kingdoms’ and ‘Four Nations’. For example, see Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (1989), 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). Scholars such as David Armitage, C. A. Bayly, Duncan Bell, Linda Colley, Richard Drayton, Catherine Hall, David Hancock and Andrew Thompson, to name but a few, have sought to highlight the intimately entwined and therefore largely inseparable conditions of British domestic and imperial history.41On this point Hall has recently confessed that ‘in order to understand the specificity of the [British] national formation, we have to look outside it’, while Bayly has argued that ‘all local, national, or regional histories must, in important ways, . . . be global histories. It is no longer really possible to write “European” or “American” history in a narrow sense.’ See Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 9; and C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 2. See also Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2000), pp. xiii–xv. As architecture is one of the most immediate and conspicuous forms of cultural production, it would seem that this approach and the insights it offers have much to recommend them to the study of architecture broadly conceived, and might just as easily apply to ‘British architecture’ as they do to ‘British history’.42In fact, as Bayly has noted, a global perspective on modern history must also include the numerous forms of cultural practice and production, including architecture. See: Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 1, 384–5.

Unfortunately, the discipline of architectural history has been much slower in taking up this challenge. Very few scholars of architecture, apart from those already mentioned, have been either willing or able to place regional and national histories in a genuine dialogue with the spread and development of architectural forms worldwide, particularly with respect to European imperialism. Although much work has been done on the various ways in which British architecture has been influenced by ideas from abroad, this is not the same as proposing or insisting upon a historio-graphically integrated approach. Extensive bodies of literature have been built up around the study of British domestic and colonial architectures respectively, but, as mentioned, there has been no serious attempt as yet to make a methodological connection between the two. However, as I have tried to argue here, there is no reason why the histories of British domestic and colonial architecture should be treated separately; or why the subject cannot be seen as a ‘unitary field of analysis’, to borrow a phrase from Bernard Cohn, especially when it comes to the extension of an institution such as the Church of England.43Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), p. 4. To return finally to the insight of Pocock: if colonial history is British history in the sense that nearly all its determinants are the product of British expansion, then cannot the same be said for colonial architecture? This has been the underlying concern of the present book.

1 George Kubler and Martin Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800, Pelican History of Art (Harmonsdworth: Penguin Books, 1959), p. xxv. »

2 For an analysis of Kubler’s approach to the geography of art, see: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 219–38. »

3 A recent study that takes a similarly inclusive approach is Maria Georgopoulou’s, Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001). Although the subject matter of this book is largely ‘peripheral’ as opposed to metropolitan, it does make an argument for formal and ideological continuity between the architecture of Venice and its colonies. »

4 See: ‘Appendix II: English Architecture in America’, in John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 (1953), 8th edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 512–27. »

5 As Marlene Heck has recently observed, Summerson’s treatment of the subject tended towards the conclusion that British colonial architecture in America was really nothing more than an inferior copy or sub-species of respectable architecture in Britain, with little or no vitality of its own. See: M. E. Heck, ‘Mind the Gap: Rewriting Sir John Summerson’s American Architectural History’, in Frank Salmon (ed.), Summerson and Hitchcock: Centenary Essays on Architectural Historiography (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2006), pp. 117–32. »

6 Victor Ruprich-Robert, L’architecture normande aux XIe et XIIe siècles en Normandie et en Angleterre (Paris: Librairie des Imprimeries Réunies, 1884–9). For a long while now historians have viewed the Norman empire as a culturally and geographically continuous phenomenon. See: John le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). More recent scholarship, however, has sought to complicate this view but still acknowledges the large degree of continuity. See: David Bates, ‘Normandy and England after 1066’, English Historical Review, vol. 104 (1989), pp. 851–80; Brian Golding, Conquest and Colonisation: The Normans in Britain, 1066–1100 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Although modern scholars of Norman architecture have been reluctant to cast as wide a net as Ruprich-Robert, the stylistic associations between Norman architecture in Britain and northern France are still part of modern historiography. See: Eric Fernie, The Architecture of Norman England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000). »

7 For example: Paul Thompson, William Butterfield: Victorian Architect (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); Anthony Quiney, John Loughborough Pearson (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979); and Gill Hunter, William White: Pioneer Victorian Architect (Reading: Spire Books, 2010). »

8 R. G. Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1981); R. G. Irving, ‘Architecture for Empire’s Sake: Lutyens’s Palace for Delhi’, Perspecta, vol. 18 (1982), pp. 7–23; R. G. Irving, ‘Bombay and Imperial Delhi: Cities as Symbols’, in Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp (eds), Lutyens Abroad: The Work of Sir Edwin Lutyens Outside the British Isles (London: British School at Rome, 2002), pp. 169–80. See also Jane Ridley, ‘Edwin Lutyens, New Delhi, and the Architecture of Imperialism’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 26:2 (1998), pp. 67–83. »

9 Margaret H. Alington, Frederick Thatcher and St. Paul’s: An Ecclesiological Study (Wellington: New Zealand Historic Places Trust, 1965); Joan Kerr, Our Great Victorian Architect: Edmund Thomas Blacket (1817–1883) (Sydney: National Trust of Australia, 1983); Ian Lochhead, A Dream of Spires: Benja min Mountfort and the Gothic Revival (Christchurch: Canterbury UP, 1999). For recent scholarship on British architects who were involved in designing buildings for the colonies but did not emigrate, see: Brian Andrews, Creating a Gothic Paradise: Pugin at the Antipodes (Hobart: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2002); and J. N. Mané, ‘Gilbert Scott’s Colonial Churches’, in Margaret Belcher and Helen Deben-ham (eds), Australasian Victorian Studies Association: Conference Papers 1987 (Christchurch: University of Canterbury for the AVSA), pp. 31–42. »

10 Phoebe B. Stanton, The Gothic Revival & American Church Architecture: An Episode in Taste, 1840–1856 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968). Here too may be mentioned George L. Hersey, High Victorian Gothic: A Study in Associationism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972). In addition to these may be counted a handful of books that have appeared over the past two decades on certain architectural styles and movements from Palladianism to the Gothic Revival. Although much more general in their treatment, these books have made some attempt to consider the wider geographical and cultural reverberations of these styles and movements within the British colonial world. For instance, see: Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999); M.J. Lewis, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002); Robert Tavernor, Palladio and Palladianism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991); and Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998). »

11 There are too many such studies to mention them all, but some of the initial and most noteworthy include: A. D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London: Routledge, 1976); T. R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (London: Faber and Faber, 1989); the essays in Nezar AlSayyad (ed.), Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992); and Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996). For Said, see E. W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), and E. W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). »

12 An excellent recent addition to this approach, although on a reduced geographic scale (taking an ‘Atlantic’ rather than a global perspective) is Louis P. Nelson’s The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). In many respects Nelson’s book presents a precursor to this study regarding the spread of Anglican culture and its architecture throughout Britain’s colonial empire. B. L. Herman and Daniel Maudlin’s edited volume entitled Building the British Atlantic World 1600–1850 (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press) will also add to this broader perspective. »

13 See also King’s recent comments on this form in: A. D. King, ‘Imperialism, Colonialism and Architects of the Arts and Crafts in Britain’, Chapter 10 in A. D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 161–86. »

14 For London, see Felix Driver and David Gilbert, ‘Heart of Empire? Landscape, Space and Performance in Imperial London’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 16 (1998), pp. 1–17; Federico Freschi, ‘The Fine Art of Fusion: Race, Gender and the Politics of South Africanism as Reflected in the Decorative Programme of South Africa House, London (1933)’, De Arte, no. 71 (April 2005), pp. 14–34; G. A. Bremner, ‘Nation and Empire in the Government Architecture of Victorian London: The Foreign and India Office Reconsidered’, Historical Journal, vol. 48:3 (2005), pp. 703–42; G.A. Bremner, ‘“Some Imperial Institute”: Architecture, Symbolism, and the Ideal of Empire in Late Victorian Britain, 1887–93’, JSAH, vol. 62:1 (2003), pp. 50–73. For country estates, see James Walvin, ‘The Colonial Origins of English Wealth’, Journal of Caribbean History, vol. 39:1 (2005), pp. 38–53; Patrick Eyres, ‘Neoclassicism on Active Service: Commemoration of the Seven Years’ War in the English Landscape Garden’, New Arcadian Journal, no. 35–36 (1993), pp. 62–122. For other accounts on the various relationships between architecture and imperialism in capital cities, see M. H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London, 1851–1915 (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1995); Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: Tie Imperial Metropolis (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1999); and the essays in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999). »

15 For example, see the introduction to Dell Upton (ed.), America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups that Built America (New York: Preservation Press, 1998), pp. 7–15. »

16 M. Warner, ‘What is Colonial about Colonial America?’, in R. Blair St. George (ed.), Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000), p. 50; J. P. Greene, ‘Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem’, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 64:2 (2007), pp. 235–50. For a broader critique of the exceptionalist thesis in North American historiography, see Joyce E. Chaplin, ‘Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early American History’, Journal of American History, vol. 89:4 (2003), pp. 1431–55. »

17 For example: Howard Le Couteur, ‘Using the “Old Boys” Network: Bishop Tufnell’s Search for Men and Money’, paper delivered at the Australian Historical Association conference, Hobart (1998); Austin Cooper, ‘Forgotten Australian Anglican: Edward Coleridge’, Pacifica, vol. 3 (1990), pp. 257–67; Susan Walton, ‘Edward Coleridge and the Eton Connection’, in Susan Walton, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 147–53. The connections between Selwyn and many of his colleagues at Eton and Cambridge are also mentioned in Warren E. Limbrick, ‘“A most indefatigable man’”, in Warren E. Limbrick (ed.), Bishop Selwyn in New Zealand, 1841–68 (Palmerston North, NZ: Dunmore Press, 1983), pp. 13–15. »

18 Pamela Welch, ‘Constructing Colonial Christianities: With Particular Reference to Anglicanism in Australia, ca 1850–1940’, Journal of Religious History, vol. 32:2 (2008), p. 249. »

19 Under the general compulsion of Anglican renewal, the Church of England was not only reaching out to the farthest parts of the British empire but was also organising ‘home missions’ and ‘church extension’ in Britain, especially in Cornwall and Devon, Wales and certain parts of London. Like the colonies, parts of east London were at times described in contemporary accounts as ‘terra incognita’ and ‘this new country’. See C. F. Lowder, Ten Years in St George’s Mission (London, 1867), p. 5. See also Church Builder (1862–1916). For a detailed account of this phenomenon in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 170–98. »

20 For example, on networking and empire see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995); Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008); John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009); Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); and Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010). This point has also been made by J. H. Elliott in ‘How They Made the Empire’, New York Review of Books, vol. 58:13 (2011), p. 22. »

21 Huskisson quoted in A. G. L. Shaw, ‘British Attitudes to the Colonies, ca. 1820–1850’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 9:1 (1969), p. 83. This was observed by Huskisson as early as 1828. For accounts of these debates, attitudes to imperial expansion, and the significance of imperial sentiment in mid-Victorian Britain, see: Ged Martin, ‘“Anti-Imperialism” in the Mid-Nineteenth Century and the Nature of the British Empire, 1820–70’, in Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin, Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 88–120; A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies (London: Macmillan, 1959); C. C. Eldridge, England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone & Disraeli, 1868–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973); J. S. Galbraith, ‘Myths of the “Little England” Era’ (1961), in A. G. L. Shaw (ed.), Great Britain and the Colonies, 1815–1865 (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 27–45; John Gallagher and Ronald E. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review, vol. 6:1 (1953), pp. 1–15; and more recently, John Darwin, ‘Imperialism and the Victorians: The Dynamics of Territorial Expansion’, English Historical Review, vol. 112 (1997), pp. 614–42. »

22 A. J. B. Beresford Hope, The English Cathedral of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Murray, 1861), p. 19. »

23 For instance, see what Trollope had to say about colonists in New Zealand (and elsewhere) regarding their sense of ‘Englishness’ in Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1874), pp. 631–2. See also: C. W. Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867 (London: Macmillan, 1868). »

24 Robuck quoted by W. E. Gladstone in ‘An Address delivered to the Members of the Mechanics’ Institute, at Chester, November 12, 1855’, repr. in Paul Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 202. »

25 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the father of ‘systematic colonisation’, was quick to point out that the Canterbury Settlement was made up of ‘not merely a nice, but a choice society of English people’. Wakefield quoted in Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 92. Both Canterbury and Adelaide were based on Wakefield’s principles of systematic colonisation. The Canterbury Settlement, in particular, was envisioned as a Church of England colony. See L. C. Webb, ‘The Canterbury Association and Its Settlement’, in James Hight and C. R. Straubel (eds) A History of Canterbury, vol. 1 (Christ-church: Whitcome and Tombs, 1957), pp. 135–233. See also Marie Peters, ‘Homeland and Colony’, in Colin Brown, Marie Peters, and Jane Teal (eds), Shaping a Colonial Church: Bishop Harper and the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch, 1856–1890 (Christchurch: Canterbury UP, 2006), pp. 19–34. »

26 Although somewhat overstated, Bernard Porter’s point that a large proportion of Britain’s population was essentially ignorant of empire and its implications is valid. See Bernard Porter, ‘“Empire, what empire?” Or, Why 80% of Early- and Mid-Victorians Were Deliberately Kept in Ignorance of It’, Victorian Studies, vol. 46:2 (2004), pp. 256–63; Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004). »

27 On this point C. C. Eldridge has noted: ‘To the mid-Victorian generation the empire entailed a duty, and for many the imperial idea was beginning to assume a sense of mission.’ See Eldridge, England’s Mission, p. 40. »

28 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, new edn, ed. W. J. Ashley (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), pp. 685–6. »

29 The summation of this idea in the ‘official mind’ is captured eloquently in a passage from Herman Merivale’s lectures on colonisation delivered at Oxford between 1839 and 1841: ‘May we not conceive England as retaining the seat of the chief executive authority, the prescriptive reverence of her station, the superiority belonging to her vast accumulated wealth, and as the commercial metropolis of the world; and united, by these ties only, with a hundred nations, — not unconnected, like those which yielded to the spear of the Roman, but her own children, owing one faith and one language? May we not figure to ourselves, scattered thick as stars over the surface of this earth, communities of citizens owing the name of Britons, bound by allegiance to a British sovereign, and uniting heart and hand in maintaining the supremacy of Britain on every shore which her unconquered flag can reach?’ See Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, new edn (London, 1861; repr. London: Oxford UP, 1928), p. 634. Dilke’s concept of ‘Greater Britain’ is also applicable here. For an excellent recent account of this idea, see Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007). »

30 For instance, see Samuel Wilberforce’s many sermons between 1840 and 1870 relating to the missionary activities and responsibilities of the Church of England in Henry Rowley (ed.), Speeches on Missions by the Right Reverend Samuel Wilbeforce, D.D. (London: William Wells Gardner, 1874). See also Documents Relative to the Erection and Endowment of Additional Bishoprics in the Colonies, 1841–1855 (London: SPCK, 1855); and J. C. Wynter, Hints on Church Colonization (London: J. W. Parker, 1850). For an excellent account of the politics surrounding Church of England expansion into the empire, see Rowan Strong, Anglicanism and the British Empire, c.1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007), pp. 198–221 »

31 C. T. Longley (1794–1868), bishop of Ripon, quoted in Daniel O’Connor et ah, Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701–2000 (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 47. »

32 Eccl., vol. 1 (Jan. 1845), p. 24. In 1851 they further observed: ‘We are a “large party,” and the world fear us.’ See Eccl., vol. 9:46 (Feb. 1851), p. 1. »

33 I have also been influenced significantly in this approach by the expansive methodological perspectives developed over the past few years in so-called Atlantic history. For some definitions of this method of historical analysis and its resonances with this study, see David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 11–27; and Alison Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’, American Historical Review, vol. 111:3 (2006), pp. 741–37. »

34 J. G. A. Pocock, The Limits and Divisions of British History (Studies in Public Policy, no. 31, University of Strathclyde, 1979), p. 7. »

35 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, New Zealand Journal of History, vol. 8:1 (1974), p. 5. »

36 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’, American Historical Review, vol. 87:2 (1982), p. 319. Here Pocock also observes that: ‘“British history,” both cultural and political, is discovered to have exceeded even the archipelagic and Atlantic dimension and to have established itself in a number of areas in the southern hemisphere. The history of these settler nations . . . makes a claim to be considered part of “British history” and to enlarge the meaning of that term.’ For the same argument in a related context, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The New British History in Atlantic Perspective: An Antipodean Commentary’, American Historical Review, vol. 104:2 (1999), pp. 490–500. »

37 See the criticisms of Pocock’s initial thesis by A. J. P. Taylor, Gordon Donaldson and Michael Hechter, as well as his own reply to those criticisms, in the Journal of Modern History, vol. 47:4 (1975), pp. 601–21. »

38 On this point Pocock notes that: ‘Some fifteen years ago, there appeared among English scholars and publicists a strong tendency to assert that England — or Britain if they happened to use the word — had always formed part of Europe and the history of Europe; and this was plainly a myth — like all myths containing much incidental truth — designed to accompany the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community. The decision to seek this entry was as we know founded upon the proposition that Britain’s independent role as an imperial power was now irretrievably lost. The accompanying myth — the insistence on the inherently European character of British history — conveyed the message that the history of that imperial role either had never happened, or had never counted and could now be forgotten.’ See Pocock, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History’, p. 2. »

39 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 12. For further reflections on Pocock’s thesis, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005). Although, as David Armitage has recently suggested, Seeley and Pocock were approaching the same problem from different perspectives, and at radically different moments in history, the conclusions they reached were essentially the same: that it is vital to integrate the history of the state and the empire if the history of Britain is to be properly understood. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 20–1. »

40 See note 3 in J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Field Enlarged: An Introduction’, in Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, p. 48. This especially applies to histories of Britain such as ‘Three Kingdoms’ and ‘Four Nations’. For example, see Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (1989), 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006). »

41 On this point Hall has recently confessed that ‘in order to understand the specificity of the [British] national formation, we have to look outside it’, while Bayly has argued that ‘all local, national, or regional histories must, in important ways, . . . be global histories. It is no longer really possible to write “European” or “American” history in a narrow sense.’ See Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 9; and C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 2. See also Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2000), pp. xiii–xv. »

42 In fact, as Bayly has noted, a global perspective on modern history must also include the numerous forms of cultural practice and production, including architecture. See: Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 1, 384–5. »

43 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996), p. 4. »

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