Architecture, Empire, and Trade

The United Africa Company

Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon , Rixt Woudstra

$180

Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Visual Arts
20 March 2025

History of architecture; African history; Colonialism & imperialism

This open access book tells a new and untold history of the architecture of West Africa in the colonial era, as revealed for the first time through the archives of the United Africa Company (UAC).

From the imperial Royal Niger Company’s charter in the 1890s through to its suave African department stores of the 1960s, the UAC – a British company firmly embedded in the economies of colonialism, extraction, and exploitation – became the largest commercial firm in West Africa, involved in almost every commercial enterprise and sector, and responsible for procuring architecture, infrastructure, and city real-estate across a vast region.

Based on unprecedented access to the UAC archives, this book pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to independence.

It reproduces an extraordinary array of newly-uncovered material – from photographs of streetscapes, buildings, and West African everyday life to civic reports and city plans – and presents these alongside critical and theoretical discussions to reveal an alternative account of the architecture of the region which stands in contrast to more conventional state-focused histories.

The book explores technological, aesthetic, and political shifts through an architectural lens, and brings to the fore an awareness of the violence and appropriation which underlie each architectural episode, showing how the UAC, as a case-study, presents a unique opportunity to investigate how architecture manifests power, culture, and identity in colonial and post-colonial contexts.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Liverpool.

By: Iain Jackson, Ewan Harrison, Michele Tenzon, Rixt Woudstra, Claire Tunstall
Imprint: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 248mm, Width: 190mm, Spine: 32mm
Weight: 1.700kg
ISBN: 9781350411319
ISBN 10: 1350411310
Pages: 520
Publication Date: 20 March 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Iain Jackson is Professor of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, UK; Ewan Harrison is Lecturer at the University of Manchester, UK; Rixt Woudstra is Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Michele Tenzon is research associate at University of Liverpool; Claire Tunstall is Global Head of Art Collections, Archives and Records Management at Unilever.

Reviews for Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company

Meticulously researched by a collaborative team this book brings to light and discusses a whole layer of new archival material that will shape not just a better awareness of colonial and post-colonial eras in Africa, but also of the nature of research itself. * Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA *