Short description:

This edited collection explores the landscapes of extraction as material networks that brought people, space, and labor together in harvesting raw materials, cultivating agriculture for export-level profits, and circulating raw materials and commodities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas from 1500 to 1850.

Long description:

This edited collection examines the development of Atlantic World architecture after 1492. In particular, the chapters explore the landscapes of extraction as material networks that brought people, space, and labor together in harvesting raw materials, cultivating agriculture for export-level profits, and circulating raw materials and commodities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas from 1500 to 1850.

This book argues that histories of extraction remain incomplete without careful attention to the social, physical, and mental nexus that is architecture, just as architecture?s development in the last 500 years cannot be adequately comprehended without attention to empire, extraction, colonialism, and the rise of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the world system. This world system was possible because of built environments that enabled resource extraction, transport of raw materials, circulation of commodities, and enactment of power relations in the struggle between capital and labor. Separated into three sections: Harvesting the Environment, Cultivating Profit, and Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures, this volume covers a wide range of geographies, from England to South America, from Africa to South Carolina. The book aims to decenter Eurocentric approaches to architectural history to expose the global circulation of ideas, things, commodities, and people that constituted the architecture of extraction in the Atlantic World. In focusing on extraction, we aim to recover histories of labor exploitation and racialized oppression of interest to the global community.

The book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history, geography, urban and labor history, literary studies, historic preservation, and colonial studies.

Table of Contents:

List of figures

List of contributors 

Introduction: Building for Atlantic Extraction.

Luis Gordo-Peláez and Paul Niell

Chapter 1. Early Modern Mining Exchanges across Empires

Janna Israel

Chapter 2. Purchasing a Poisoned City: Indigenous Andeans and Urban Space in Sixteenth-Century Huancavelica

Mark P. Dries

Chapter 3. New Functions of Mining Heritage in Mexico

Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva

Chapter 4. The Ice House: Industry and Ritual in the Nineteenth-Century Frozen Water Trade

Louisa Iarocci

Chapter 5. Contesting the Colonial Illu: Sealing and Social Change in Kalaallit Architecture, 1750-1860

Kirstine M?ller and Bart Pushaw 

Chapter 6. From Ireland to Barbados: Architecture of Extraction in British Colonies

Lee Morrissey

Chapter 7. Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic World Extraction Sites: A Comparative Study of the Indigenous Diamond Hill and Black Melrose Plantations

Barry L. Stiefel

Chapter 8. Absentee Architecture: Remote Building Across the British Atlantic, c. 1800

Jonah Rowen

Chapter 9. Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana?s Botanical Garden

Lee Sessions

Chapter 10. The World?s Greatest Depot: West India Docks, Warehouses, and Flexibility

Georgios Eftaxiopoulos

Chapter 11. Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery: Samuel Blodget?s First Bank of the United States

Peter Minosh

Chapter 12. Castle Brew: Dreams Realized and Dreams Devastated

Courtnay Micots

Chapter 13. Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Context: The Case of Charleston and Rio de Janeiro

Alexander Lima Reis

Chapter 14. From Caravans to Railroads: Trails, Architecture, and Urban Networks in Rio Pardo?s Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Landscapes of Extraction

Rafael Augusto Silva Ferreira and Renata Baesso Pereira

Bibliography

Index