Review: Empire Builders: 1750–1950

Abstract

Empire Builders: 1750–1950 Victoria and Albert Museum, London 30 November 2013–15 June 2014 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain established the largest territorial empire the world had ever known. Stretching around the globe from Norfolk Island near Australia to Newfoundland, it covered, at its peak, roughly one-quarter of the earth’s landmass. It is often said, as the Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley quipped, that this empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind. But this is to understate, if not downplay, the intense and systematic way in which the imperial enterprise was pursued, particularly during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Empire had become more than just an economic strategy; it had acquired the status of a “mission” for which responsibility had to be taken, for “civilizational” as much as political and economic reasons. As the British empire, virtually from the outset, was predicated upon colonial settlement, it necessarily followed that architecture and urbanism were fundamental components of its success. As British soldiers, explorers, and settlers continually extended the boundaries of Britain’s empire, buildings of all types and sizes were required to facilitate and maintain the power structures put in place by the massive cultural and political transformations that ensued. The built infrastructure that accompanied this enterprise was immense. The Empire Builders: 1750–1950 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum was therefore, if nothing else, a welcome foray into the architectural history and legacy of this “great fact” of modern world history, as Seeley would have put it. To date, too little has been …