For Export: Buildings for Colonial Commerce in the Asia Pacific

Abstract

ABSTRACT A lasting legacy of 19th-century colonialism in the Pacific and Southeast Asia is the fragmented historiography of the region’s colonial architecture. Historical studies of the built environment continue to adopt geographical frameworks corresponding to nation-states that emerged from colonial empires, overlooking the region’s intricate interconnectivity in the late nineteenth century. The establishment of industrial agriculture and commercial shipping routes opened up territories facilitating movement of goods, labour, capital and ideas. Crossing colonial boundaries, networks developed by commercial entities transformed the Asia Pacific region, leaving behind traces in buildings for trade, travel and export-oriented agriculture. This paper focuses on the architectural infrastructure of the interregional operations of the Australian firm Burns Philp, particularly its engagement with large-scale agricultural production: kapok manufacture in Java, copra estates in the Pacific, and wool production in Australia. Trade operations of Burns Philp and other major shipping companies including the Dutch Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij facilitated not only industrialisation of agriculture in Asia Pacific but also the development of tourism. Drawing on two collections of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the paper examines images of mostly anonymous commercial built forms and reflects on how their production was informed by interconnectivity and movement.