Building the British Atlantic World is the first book to articulate the shared architectural history of the British Atlantic world; the first to consider British, North American, Caribbean and African colonial architectures, spaces and places together as the products of a common British Atlantic culture. Atlantic History is a well-established field, however, of the numerous studies available buildings and their fundamental role in framing and maintaining public and private space are rarely considered. Building the British Atlantic World is architecture’s overdue contribution to Atlantic Histor ... More

Building the British Atlantic World is the first book to articulate the shared architectural history of the British Atlantic world; the first to consider British, North American, Caribbean and African colonial architectures, spaces and places together as the products of a common British Atlantic culture. Atlantic History is a well-established field, however, of the numerous studies available buildings and their fundamental role in framing and maintaining public and private space are rarely considered. Building the British Atlantic World is architecture’s overdue contribution to Atlantic History. From the pioneer colonists of the early seventeenth-century through to American Independence and the maintenance of a very different, much smaller, disparate British Atlantic in the nineteenth century, this book introduces a shared history of building and buildings that transcends national narratives in order to outline a set of complex cultural exchanges between Britain (England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales), America (the North, Mid and Southern Atlantic states), Canada, the Caribbean, Bermuda and West Africa. The ‘British Atlantic World’ and ‘transatlanticism’ are relatively new terms to architectural history but are well-established fields/approaches within social and political History and Literary Studies. Therefore, a further aim of the book is to set out these concepts and, through case studies, demonstrate their value to architectural history.