A history of architecture and trade

A History of Architecture and TradeA History of Architecture and Trade draws together essays from an international roster of distinguished and emerging scholars to critically examine th

A History of Architecture and Trade

A History of Architecture and Trade draws together essays from an

international roster of distinguished and emerging scholars to critically examine the important role architecture and urbanism played in the past five hundred years of global trading, moving away from a conventional Western narrative The book uses an alternative holistic lens through which

to view the development of architecture and trade, covering diverse topics such as the coercive urbanism of the Dutch East India Company; how slavery and capitalism shaped architecture and urbanization; and the importance of Islamic trading in the history of global trade Each chapter examines a key site in history, using architecture, landscape and urban scale

as evidence to show how trade has shaped them It will appeal to scholars and researchers interested in areas such as world history, economic and trade history and architectural history

Patrick Haughey is a Professor of Architectural History at Savannah College

of Art and Design, USA, where he teaches modern, urban and global ture history His research uses a multidisciplinary approach to architecture history, deploying world systems, economics, history and cultural geography His scholarship critiques the impacts of colonialism and finance on architec-ture and urbanism He also teaches studio, drawing and rendering for the Interior Design and Architecture Departments

architec-The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the

latest scholarship in the field of architecture The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, monographs of architects, interior design and much more By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research

For a full list of titles, please visit:

www.routledge.com/architecture/series/RRARCH

From Doxiadis’ Theory to Pikionis’ Work

Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture

Kostas Tsiambaos

Thermal Comfort in Hot Dry Climates

Traditional Dwellings in Iran

Ahmadreza Foruzanmehr

Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture

Kim Sexton

The Ideal of Total Environmental Control

Knud Lönberg-Holm, Buckminster Fuller, and the SSA

Suzanne Strum

The Architecture of Medieval Churches

Theology of Love in Practice

John A.H Lewis

A History of Architecture and Trade

Patrick Haughey

A History of Architecture and Trade

Edited by Patrick Haughey

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

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© 2018 Patrick Haughey

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haughey, Patrick, editor.

Title: A history of architecture and trade / edited by Patrick Haughey Description: New York : Routledge, 2018 |

Series: Routledge research in architecture | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017030220 | ISBN 9781138635739 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315206363 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and society—History | Commerce—Social aspects—History.

Acknowledgments vii Author biographies ix

Introduction: The architecture of trade is as old as

3 Cities of incense and myrrh: Fantasy and capitalism in

the Arabian Gulf 62

NASSER RABBAT

4 Borneo, the river effect, and the spirit world millionaires 80

MARK JARZOMBEK

5 House as marketplace: Swahili merchant houses and their

urban context in the later Middle Ages 115

THOMAS GENSHEIMER

6 An anachronism of trade: The Mercato Nuovo in

Florence (1546–1551) 128

LAUREN JACOBI

7 Merchant identity: The cartographic impulse in the

architectural sculpture of the Llotja of Palma de Mallorca 142

DORON BAUER

8 The travels of a merchant throughout the Islamic World 156

CECILIA FUMAGALLI

9 Savannah’s Custom House: A peculiar construction of

galvanized iron, apparently durable and well-adapted

11 Building the marble elephant: The creation of Philadelphia’s

iconic City Hall 208

GLEN UMBERGER

Index 223

Books like this require the effort of a number of people First and foremost,

I would like to thank my wife Without her, I cannot be who I am For all of

my work I am extremely grateful for my family and friends, who, with an abundance of patience both challenge and support me

I must thank Robin Williams, my department chair and co-director of the

2015 9th Symposium: The Architecture of Trade, for his tireless commitment

to the discipline of architectural history and to our community The Savannah Symposium was a vital bi-annual gathering of scholars from all over the world and the department of Architectural History As of now, this is the last book to be inspired by the hundreds of participants and supporters, as the symposium has been cancelled

The Savannah Symposium, my inspiration as an educator, and our ment would not be possible without the support of Savannah College of Art and Design As always, behind the scenes of the symposium and our department are some very special people including, among many: Marilyn Armstrong, Sandra Hatteberg, Susan Richards and Alice Eisner, as well as our own dedicated students and professors In addition, I received valuable edits and advice on my chapter from Professor John Carey Murphy and former architecture student Samson Johnson, among others I would also especially like to thank the editors and people at Routledge Publishers for their patience.Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues from my History, Theory and Criticism family at MIT, especially Robert Cowherd and Mark Jarzombek who helped inspired my research, as well as my other friends here in Savannah and elsewhere for supporting my decades-long history obsession I am grateful for all of the teachers in my past who have left their mark To all the authors whose contributions made this volume possible, thank you for your dedication, timeliness and support Any and all errors or misunderstandings of their contributions are of course my own doing

depart-Now more than ever, it is important that readers, scholars, schools and publishers stand up to what seems to be an endless assault against education, history and humanity.

This book is dedicated to my students, past, present and future, whose passion, insight and trust have always kept me inspired

Author biographies

Doron Bauer is Assistant Professor of Art History at Florida State University,

USA He received his PhD in 2012 from Johns Hopkins University He has received a number of awards, including Research Fellowship, Kunsthistorische Institut in Florenz (2016); Predoctoral Research Fellowship, Kunsthistorische Institut in Florenz (2011–2012); La bourse d’échanges culturels de la Conseil Général de la Vienne (2010–2011); Chateaubriand Fellowship, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2009–2010) and Singleton Graduate Fellowship, The Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe (2009–2010) He

is the co-editor of a forthcoming book, Art in the Kingdom of Majorca:

An Anthology of Sources (Universitat des les Illes Balears, 2017); ‘‘Milk as

Templar Apologetics in the St Bernard of Clairvaux Altarpiece from

Majorca” (Studies in Iconography, 36, 79–98, 2016); and “Castus Castor

(The Chaste Beaver): Some Reflections on the Iconography of the Southern

Portal of Santa María de Uncastillo” (Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies,

1, 213–230, 2009).

Aniruddha Bose is Assistant Professor of History in the History and Political

Science Department at Saint Francis University, Loretto, Pennsylvania, USA He received his PhD in History from the Department of History at Boston College, Massachusetts in 2013 He is the author of “Science and

Technology in India: The Digression of Asia and Europe,” History Compass

(February 2007) Dr Bose is currently revising a manuscript based on his doctoral dissertation tentatively titled “Modernization and Class Conflict: The British Raj on the Calcutta Waterfront.” His research for this project has been supported by generous grants from the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy in Boston College, where Dr Bose was

a Graduate Fellow (2011–2012) and by a University Fellowship from Boston College It has also been supported by grants from the Faculty Development Committee at Saint Francis University and the School of Arts and Letters at Saint Francis University The manuscript is currently under contract with Routledge

Robert Cowherd is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Wentworth

Institute of Technology, Boston, USA He was a 2014 –2015 Fulbright

Scholar pursuing research on the role of design in the social transform- ations of Latin American cities He is a board member of the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative and the author of “Cultural

Construction of Surakarta,” in The Emerging Asian City, Vinayak Bharne,

ed (2012), as well as “Identity Tectonics: Contested Modernities of

Java and Bali, in Across Time and Space: The Politics of Architecture in Modernity, Patrick Haughey, ed (2016) He holds a PhD in the History

and Theory of Architecture, an Urban Design Certificate from MIT, and a BArch from The Cooper Union His research focuses on the history and theory of architecture and urbanism in Southeast Asia and Latin America and is informed by extensive field work in the developing world; including work in post-tsunami Aceh, where his open-source model for village mapping and planning was widely applied

Dennis De Witt is Vice-Chairman and former President of the Metropolitan

Waterworks Museum in Boston, USA He holds Masters’ degrees in Architecture from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania He is currently a Commissioner of the Massachusetts Historical Commission His past academic affiliations include Head of the Department of History, Theory and Criticism at the Boston Architectural College; Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Archaeologist-Cartographer on the Broken-K Pueblo expedition for The Field Museum

In addition to helping research and develop the Waterworks Museum’s permanent exhibits, he designed and curated “Vinal/Wheelwright: The Work of Each as Boston’s Official City Architect,” 2016 and “The Art of Engineering” (concerning nineteenth-century colored-ink-wash engineer- ing drawings), 2015 De Witt was US co-curator of “Aqueducts of

Portugal,” 2014 His previous publications include: Arthur H Vinal and Edmund March Wheelwright: Architects of the Chestnut Hill High Service Pumping Station, Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, Boston, 2016; The Brookline Reservoir Gatehouse, National Historic Landmark

Nomination, 2015; “Conspicuous Iron and the Cochituate Aqueduct

Gatehouses,” The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archaeology, 2015; Modern Architecture in Europe: A Guide to Buildings Since the Industrial Revolution, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, E.P Dutton, New York, 1987; and “Neo-vernacular: eine Moderne Tradition,” Architese, 9,

1974 He also contributed to Art and Architecture of the Metropolitan Waterworks, Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, Boston, 2011 and edited and co-authored Benjamin Thompson & Associates, Process

Architecture, Tokyo, 1990

Cecilia Fumagalli obtained her Bachelors’ and Masters’ degrees in Architecture

at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2006 and 2009, respectively, and a Masters’ in Technology, Architecture and City in Developing Countries at Politecnico di Torino in 2012 Since 2013, she is a PhD candidate in Architecture at the Architecture, Built Environment and Construction

Author biographies xi

Engineering Department, Politecnico di Milano Her research and ing focus on the relationship between the character of the so-called Islamic city and the issues posed by the international institutions operating in the heritage field Since 2006 she has worked at the Politecnico di Milano as a Teaching Assistant and in various Architectural Design Studios as an archi-tect and urban designer Fumagalli also collaborates with international organizations in many restoration and urban rehabilitation projects in different countries—notably in Morocco, Mauritania and Malaysia

publish-Thomas Gensheimer is a Professor of Architectural History at the Savannah

College of Art and Design, Georgia, USA, where he teaches courses

in World Architecture, African Art and Architecture, and Islamic Art, Architecture and Cities He received his PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 1997, where he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship

to conduct research in Kenya on the urban history of the medieval East African coast prior to European contact Professor Gensheimer has worked

in Pakistan excavating the ancient Indus Valley city of Harappa and has lectured and published on the cities of the East African coast, as well

as Swahili medieval houses and tombs He served as co-director of the 4th, 6th and 7th Savannah Symposiums and has co-authored the edited

volume World Heritage and National Registers: Stewardship in Perspective

(Transaction Publishers, 2015) His most recent publication is a chapter

on Swahili houses for Swahili World, one of Routledge World Series

publications He also serves as a board member for the Historic Sites and Monuments Commission for the city of Savannah, Georgia

Patrick Haughey is a Professor of Architectural History at Savannah

College of Art and Design, Georgia, USA, where he teaches Modern, Urban and Global Architecture History, as well as Architecture Studio

He received his PhD in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture

from MIT in 2009 He is the editor and author of Across Time and Space: The Politics of Architecture in Modernity (Transaction Press, 2017),

derived from the 8th Savannah Symposium that he co-directed He is

also a co-author of Robin Williams ed., Buildings of Savannah (2016)

Recently, he has presented topics, including “Global Savannah: An Economic History, 1733 to the Present,” sponsored by the Society of Architecture Historians and National Endowment of the Arts for the

Reading the City series, May 4, 2016 in Savannah: “Cartel Urbanism:

Finance and the Architecture of Displacement, Towards a New History

of Urbanization.” He was Presenter and Chair of the Geographies of

Violence session at The Worlds of Violence, 9th Pan-European Conference

on International Relations, September 23–26, 2015, Catania, Sicily; “The Architecture of the Slave Economy,” MIT, May 16, 2015, Cambridge;

“The Politics of Style: Historicism and the City,” Spatial Politics, American

Association of Geographers’ Conference, April 7, 2017, Boston He is also

a member of the Andrew Mellon Foundation-funded Global Architecture History and Teaching Collaborative

Lauren Jacobi joined the History, Theory and Criticism faculty at MIT, USA,

in 2013 Her research interests focus on the history of late-medieval through pre-industrial Italian architecture and urbanism with an empha-sis on connections across the Mediterranean world She applies economic and sociological concerns to studying urban growth and transform- ation, architectural history and visual culture Prior to her position

at MIT, Jacobi was a visiting lecturer in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College She has also taught at New York University, where she completed her PhD in 2012 She is the author of publications on topics ranging from issues about how money was made to work in the late Middle Ages, to the topographic location of international and local banks in Rome, to the medallic representations of Pope Paul V’s architec-tural projects Jacobi was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy

in Rome from 2015–2016 where she has been working on a book project in which she studies the topography of money in and beyond Renaissance Florence Her research has received support from the Kress Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Dutch Institute

in Florence, the American Numismatic Society and the Morgan Library and Museum, among other institutions

Mark Jarzombek is a Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at

MIT, USA, and is one of the country’s leading advocates for global history

He has published several books and articles on that topic, including

A Global History of Architecture, Wiley Press, 2006, with co-author Vikram Prakash and illustrator Francis D.K Ching and Architecture

of First Societies: A Global Perspective, Wiley Press, 2013 His Urban Heterology: Dresden and the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History (Lund

University, 2001) rethinks the conventions of urban history, an issue he

also addresses in Krzysztof Wodiczko, City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial

(Blackdog Publisher, 2009), which he edited with Dr Mechtild Widrich

He is currently working on a new book, Architecture Modernity Enlightenment Recent scholarship includes “Architecture: The Global Imaginary in an Antiglobal World” (Grey Room, 61, Fall 2015), “The Rise of the So-called Premodern” (GSAPP Transcripts: The Urgencies of Architectural Theory, Columbia University, 2015) and “The Shanghai Expo and the Rise of Pop-Arch” (Log, 31, Spring/Summer 2014)

Jarzombek serves on the board of several journals and academic institutions including the SSRC and the Buell Foundation and has organized several major international conferences on topics such as Holocaust Memorials, Architecture and Cultural Studies, and East European Architecture He is the co-founder and Chair of the Andrew Mellon Foundation-funded Global Architecture History and Teaching Collaborative

Nasser Rabbat graduated with a Diplome of Architecture from the University

of Damascus, Syria, in 1979 He received his Masters’ of Architecture at

Author biographies xiii

University of California, Los Angeles in 1984 and his PhD in Architecture, Art, and Environmental Studies at MIT in 1991 He is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture and the Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at MIT Rabbat is a world-renowned scholar and advocate for the re-conceptualization of Islamic architecture

as a coherent, yet fluid, multifaceted, and open-minded field of study In

2007, he was a visiting professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, followed in 2009 at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris He has received The J Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship,

as well as fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, The American Research Center in Egypt Fellowship the Chaire

de l’Institut du Monde Arabe Recently, Dr Rabbat received the Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies (2011) He has

British-authored numerous books and edited volumes, including The Citadel

of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture, Leiden:

E J Brill, 1995; Making Cairo Medieval, eds Nezar AlSayyad, Irene Bierman & Nasser Rabbat, Lantham, MD: Lexington Press, 2005; The Citadel of Cairo: A Guidebook, Cairo: Supreme Council of Antiquities, 2010; in English and Arabic: Al-Mudun al-Mayyita: Durus min Madhih wa-Ru’an li-Mustaqbaliha (The Dead Cities: Lessons from its History and Views on its Future), al-Aws Publishers, 2010; Mamluk History Through Architecture: Building, Culture, and Politics in Mamluk, Egypt and Syria, London: Tauris I B., 2010) and is editor of The Courtyard House between Cultural Reference and Universal Relevance, London: Ashgate, 2010) He

has authored dozens of scholarly articles in both English and Arabic, and

is the author of the BBC’s Museum of Lost Objects series.

Glen Umberger earned a Master of Fine Arts in Architectural History

from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Georgia, USA, in 2015 His thesis, “Philadelphia City Hall: Redefining the Civic Image of the Modern American City” was awarded the Outstanding Architectural History Graduate Thesis for the 2014–2015 academic year Mr Umberger

is currently the Manager of Special Projects for the New York Landmarks Conservancy He is also an Adjunct Instructor at New York University, School of Professional Studies, Center for Applied Liberal Arts, where he teaches courses on New York City’s architectural history Mr Umberger has presented two academic papers: “Curing Architectural Amnesia:

A New Look at a Forgotten Famous Civic Masterpiece,” 2014 Annual Meeting Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH), Fayetteville, Arkansas and “Building Philadelphia’s Marble Elephant: The Economics and Politics of Creating an Iconic City Hall for the Workshop of the World,” Architecture of Trade, 9th Savannah Symposium, Savannah, Georgia Mr Umberger has also been inducted into the Gamma Eta Chapter of Tau Sigma Delta Honor Society in Architecture and Allied Arts

The architecture of trade is as

old as human history

Patrick Haughey

The exchange of manufactured goods and foodstuffs has formed an integral part of human history in almost every corner of the planet from our earliest days of our existence down to the present 1

Trade is as old as humanity Indeed, the exchange of goods may be what has always defined humans in relationship to each other While economists, sociologists, and historians have been writing about trade for centuries, trade is rarely included in the history of architecture This is itself rather surprising, as the activity of trade is often facilitated by architecture.2 More often than not, trade is what pays for architecture

In 1415, Prince Henry convinced his father, Portuguese King Joao, to conquer the Muslim North African city of Ceuta (Morocco) and launched the process of establishing a series of private trading posts down the Atlantic coast of Africa For the rest of the century, Portuguese trading posts con-trolled the trade activities of the African coast in an effort to ensure that Portuguese traders were the primary beneficiaries of the lucrative exchange; especially with the rich gold and salt mines of the Ashanti and Mossi via trading centers of the West African Gold Coast and up the Niger River to Djenne and Timbuktu

By 1440, Lisbon had a monopoly on Atlantic trade from their islands and West Africa where they traded for pepper, which came to West Africa overland from Alexandria and Mozambique They also trade for the pepper now grown in Guinea One of the great myths of history is that Venice began its decline when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453—a bias

of Christian history In fact, Venice was already in decline due to the rise of Lisbon, who were able to undercut their trade in spices by harvesting them at the western end of the Muslim trade routes in West Africa and from their newfound monopoly on cheap sugar Portugal was also the first European Empire to realize the potential of sugar indigenous to Southeast Asia, planting

it on their islands of the Azores, Goree, and the Canary Islands, although Muslim merchants had already successfully planted the crop in Sicily To make the trade work, Lisbon traded spices and sugar for grain, wool, copper,

and timber in Antwerp, which they exchanged for spices, pepper, and gold in West Africa The gold helped to finance their expeditions around Africa to the Indian Ocean and eventually the China Sea (see Chapter 2 for more).

In 1498, Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and introduced the relatively peaceful Indian Ocean to violence and extortion In 1510, Alfonso de Albuquerque conquered Goa and proceeded to try to conquer every port between Aden and Malacca to ensure a complete monopoly While Lisbon, for the most part, remained the political capital of the Portuguese trading empire, the region of Goa, with its port at Daman Diu, was the economic capital, controlling the vast administration of the Estado

de Indies Eventually, the global powerhouse of the Estado de Indies was challenged by their European neighbors However, Goa remained Portuguese for centuries until the newly-minted independent nation of India took it back by force in 1961

Portuguese trading ships were armed with cannon, a technology that was new to the ports along the African coast After several centuries of open trade dominated by Muslim and Chinese sea traders, the Portuguese exploited local rivalries and used cannon fired from their ships to batter lightly forti-fied port towns into submission The Cartaz trade monopoly system is named after the “cartaz,” or “letter,” certifying the payment of ‘The Royal Fifth’—a 20% tax or trade duty—to the Portuguese crown Failure to produce such

a letter could result in the confiscation of cargo, the destruction of ships, or death The original ambition of the Cartaz System was to make Portuguese merchants the sole beneficiaries of the most lucrative trade commodities, particularly pepper The market prices of spices brought through long chains

of middlemen to from the Spice Islands (Indonesia) were based on the mental price increases each time it changed hands along the way By bypass-ing as many of the middlemen as possible, Portuguese merchants limited competition and concentrated profits in their own hands

incre-The East was low-volume, but its products commanded a massively high price Returns on pepper, mace, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg in Lisbon could reach 180 times the price paid in Calicut on the Malabar Coast and reach higher than that in Antwerp, London and Bruges Lisbon’s wealth was derived from the unprecedented profits from the Portuguese domi-nance of sea-based trade routes along the Atlantic coast of Africa, the Indian Ocean and the China Sea all the way to Japan Prior to the arrival of the Portuguese under the Muslim Trading System, when pepper arrived in Europe it was more valuable than gold The arrival of the Portuguese fleet

in the Indian Ocean and their virtual monopoly of the spice trade to Europe

by 1580, as well as the slave trade from the Captaincy of Angola to their American colonies, paid for a number of impressive architectures and infra-structure back in Lisbon, including the Tower of Belem and the Monastery

of Saint Jerome

The Tower of Belem was built from 1510–1514 to protect the Portuguese Fleet as it departed for Africa and later, India It is also a reference to the

Introduction 3

endless crusade to return the “Holy Lands” to Christianity at the behest of the 15th-century Papal Bulls and in the aftermath of the conquest of the Turks Only seven ships made the trip out of Lisbon to Goa in the early years, so protecting them from European competitors was important, as was ascending Lisbon’s dominance over trade not only north to Antwerp, but into the Mediterranean due The Tower of Belem (a reference to Bethlehem), is an exemplary architecture of both power and the multiple cultural influences on the Iberian peninsula The naming of the Tower, if not its form, from scripture would come to play an important role in the both the Estado de Indies and the Americas under Portuguese rule Towers to protect valuable harbors were not new to the region, as they were prominent throughout the coastal lands controlled by Muslim rulers for centuries, as well as the many others, from the Visigoths to the Carthaginians and Romans What is relatively unique about the Tower is that it was designed and built by Fransisco Arruda, who studied architecture across the straits in North Africa The tower is built with what is known as the Manueline style (after the King) The style is a hybrid of the Byzantine-Islamic style typical

of Umayyad and Almohad Al-Andalucia and North African structures, with delicate horseshoe arches, details and stonework Much of the architecture

Figure 0.1 Jeronimos Monastery, before 1755 (first half of the 18th century (PD)).3

in both Portugal, Spain and their colonies overseas is influenced by the long ties with both Byzantine and Arabic craftsman, many of whom converted to Christianity by force, or to avoid the Inquisitions that begin in the middle of the 15th century, rather than be forced away from their homes You can also see similar features in the cloister of the Monastery of Saint Jerome, as well

as in the remnants the Palace of the King that was later remodeled to imitate French Versailles in the 17th century, after the devastating earthquake the destroyed the city in 1755

The Monastery of Saint Jerome (1516–1544) is also known as the “Pepper Cathedral,” despite the fact that it was largely built with a tax on non-pepper spices (Figure 0.1) King Manuel originally funded the project with money obtained from the Vintena da Pimenta, a 5% tax on commerce from Africa and the Orient, equivalent to 70 kilograms (150 pounds) of gold per year Pepper, cinnamon and cloves went untaxed because those profits went to the crown With the influx of riches, the architects built one of the largest build-ings in Europe The narrow columns on the interior are adorned with the representations of the riches from the Indies, including the important pep-percorns The ornamentation also illustrates images of navigation instru-ments as well as “exotic” plants and animals from the colonies Vasco de Gama, whose navigation around the Cape of Good Hope allowed the Portuguese fleet to the exploit the Indian Ocean and the modern poet Luís

de Camões, who commemorated de Gama’s achievements, are buried here

in elaborate tombs In 1833, the Monastery was secularized; its art stripped and the space abandoned before restoration began in 1863 that has com-pletely altered its exterior appearance, demolished significant portions of the building, and relocated the tombs

By the turn of the century, the Monastery of Saint Jerome became a secular temple for the burial and commemoration of a few nationalist poets,

as well as for Dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, who was interned there for ten years in 1951 before his body was moved to a new memorial The Tower and the Monastery are in the neighborhood of Belem, where for the past four centuries, Portugal has used monuments and architecture to commemorate its discoveries while eliminating the violence of its exploita-tion Included here are the Praça do Império, built in 1938 to commemorate the dictatorship and new 1933 Constitution of the Estado Nova, which permanently enshrined Portugal’s “civilizing powers” beyond its European boundaries The Praça briefly held an exposition celebrating the triumphs of Portugal’s age of exploration.4

As other European powers reduced Portugal’s influence on the East, Lisbon increasingly relied on the violent exploitation of Angola and Brazil’s slave-based economies for its wealth Indeed, Angola spans around 481,226 square miles along the southwest coast of Africa and is notably rich in mineral reserves, including oil, iron, copper, bauxite, diamonds and uranium After the loss of Goa in 1961, the Captaincy of Angola was the primary source of Portugal’s wealth However, by the 1970s, the collapse of oil

Introduction 5

prices, the postcolonial tensions throughout much of Africa and the civil wars from Algeria to Angola, created a complex and violent rupture in the last remaining large colony of the former Portuguese empire, from which the host country and its leadership in Lisbon never fully recovered

While the 1938 exposition was temporary, the fountain with the crests

of the families from that era remains along with Salazar’s 1960s monument

to Henry the Navigator, the Padrão dos Descobrimentos The endless remodelling of the large former monastery continued into the 1960s when the Maritime Museum was added to the building, completing the Monastery’s role as a centuries-long monument to Portugal’s once vast Trading Empire

Chapter summary

This volume owes its existence to the generous work and research conducted

by its authors and, of course, the hard work of its publisher Indeed, we hope that this volume serves as an inspiration for the renewal of research into how architecture influences and participates in trade on a global and local scale across time It is not intended to be comprehensive; rather each chapter is a specialized look at trade through the lens of eleven Architectural Historians Indeed, much of what historians and economists have written about trade unfairly privileges a Eurocentric model Yet the emergence of this European trading world—particularly the new financial innovations such as banking, bond markets, and currency arbitrage that paid for and gave birth to the art and architecture of the “Italian” Renaissance, exists precisely because it was at the intersection of the European textile trade and the centuries-old Muslim Trading World that spanned from Cordoba to East Africa and the China Sea.5

In the first chapter, Patrick Haughey cites architectural evidence and history to prove that the features of contemporary global capitalism were in existence long before Adam Smith theorized its existence or Karl Marx offered his widely-read critique What is more, it has been operative on a global scale centuries before the emergence of the neoliberal post-World War order of the late twentieth century “Legacies of Colonialism: Towards

an Architectural History of Capitalism,” argues that contrary to popular belief, the origins of what we now think of as financial capitalism and its mythical “free-market” ethos can be traced to the coercive and violent laws that enabled an on-going 500-year global war over resources for profit originat- ing in the late 16th century, with colonialism by profiteering shareholders

in English charter companies, as well as in the simultaneous systems of consumerism, slavery, and coercion that underwrote both the Industrial and

“American” Revolutions

In Chapter 2: “Spices, Spies, and Speculation: Trust and Control in the early Batavia-Amsterdam System,” Robert Cowherd reveals the coercive and violent origins of capitalism through the architectural and urban lens of the Dutch East India Company Cowherd examines the specific formal-spatial

conflicts of Dutch Batavia (Jakarta) and offers insights to these larger sets of instrumental forces that constitute a set of prerequisites for the operations

of early European adventures in expanded trade relations Batavia exemplifies

an architecture of control characteristic of the widely-dispersed type of the European fortified port town For several centuries, Europeans were driven

by religious imperative and greed to break the tightly held Muslim spice trade monopolies supplying Venice from then mythical locations far to the east Among the multiple elements that figure prominently into the 16th- and 17th-century history of discovery, capture, defense, and control of the transcontinental networks of exchange is the architecture of an interconnected series of fortress-port-factory-towns Like the technologically sophisticated ships shuttling goods, munitions, priests, soldiers, laborers, finance, and information between ports of call, the port towns themselves were designed

to minimize the labor needed to move goods and secure the town against all threats, whether external or from the population of the town itself One of the lasting legacies of these port towns is the strategy of strict physical segregation and social fragmentation, permitting a handful of Europeans to guard against insurrection

Nasser Rabbat, in Chapter 3: “Cities of Incense and Myrrh: Fantasy and Capitalism in the Arabian Gulf,” notes that trade can persist for millennia, transforming the landscape between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf over time, adapting along the way to invent and reinvent systems of trade as architecture and urbanism As Rabbat writes, in the second and first millennium BCE, the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile Crescent witnessed the emergence of highly efficient cities as commercial emporia along the trade routes bringing the luxury goods of Asia to the consumption centers

of Antiquity along the Mediterranean Over time, these legendary cities, Babylon, Byblos, Dura-Europos, Palmyra, Petra, Alexandria, Sanaa, Mokha, Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul, which rose and fell with the rise and fall of empires, became the subject of myth This fairy tale image survived their political and commercial decline and tinged the monumental architecture of their Middle Eastern urban heirs in the modern age with an aura of Oriental mystery and opulence Nowhere is this more evident than

in cities of the Arabian Gulf—Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Manama—which have become the contemporary “fabled cities of the East” by design.Trade, even as it is mobile, leaves its traces in both architecture and memory For Mark Jarzombek in Chapter 4: “Borneo, the River Effect, and the Spirit World Millionaires,” the absent elite architecture of Borneo is contrasted with traces left in the landscape that reveal a long ignored yet crucial aspect of global trade For that reason, Borneo is rarely mentioned in discussions about the development of architecture and cities in Southeast Asia However, that Borneo was targeted early on by Indian traders because

it possessed an extraordinary litany of wealth-producing commodities, from gold, diamonds, camphor, and pearls, which were interesting to the Indian traders to tortoise shells (used by the Chinese as oracle bones), hornbill

Introduction 7

ivory (which the Chinese value above true ivory, or even jade, to make belt buckles for high officials), rhinoceros horn (used to treat fever, rheumatism, gout, and other disorders), and edible bird’s nests, a food item so valuable that it was reserved only for the family of the Chinese emperor

Thomas Gensheimer, in Chapter 5: “House as Marketplace: Swahili Merchant Houses and their Urban Context in the Later Middle Ages,” describes the vibrant, yet often neglected role of the East African coast in this global trade The port cities of the East African coast had served as centers of commercial exchange centuries before the Portuguese arrived at the end of the 15th century For over a thousand years, traders from Persia, India, and southern Arabia ventured to the coast, providing the economic foundation for the development of an indigenous and prosperous Islamic urban culture whose cities shared many architectural features common throughout the western Indian Ocean basin Despite the importance of trade, the presence of extensive bazaars, characteristic of cities throughout the medieval Muslim world, appears to be largely lacking along the Swahili coast Indeed, Gensheimer explains how, due to the nature of the luxury trade, Swahili domestic structures served as a substitute arena for facilitating inter-regional exchange between foreign merchants and local elites

While much has been written about the art, architecture, and philosophy

of this “Italian” Renaissance era, it was trade and banking that paid for this largess.6 Indeed, due to competition from the Portuguese and the new trade monopoly imposed by the Ottoman Empire, much of the power of this region faded by the late 16th century Yet, many of the banking families remained powerful Indeed, by the middle of the 16th century the mercantile loggia, a relic of an earlier period of Tuscan power, re-emerged as a building type that was once again used to demarcate places of trade in Florence and areas of Tuscany under the Medici’s control Lauren Jacobi, in Chapter 6:

“An Anachronism of Trade: The Mercato Nuovo in Florence (1546–51),” argues that this architecture, designed by Giovanni Battista del Tasso between 1546 and 1551 to encourage gold and silk trade, was deliberately anachronistic in its modality, at a time when Florence’s elite paradoxically sought to distance themselves from a connection to commerce

Doron Bauer, in Chapter 7: “Merchant Identity: The Cartographic Impulse

in the Architectural Sculpture of the Llotja of Palma de Mallorca,” reminds us that Spain also had a vibrant and architecturally significant role in trade His chapter focuses on the closely related Llotja of Palma de Mallorca and the Llotja of Valencia The two late-medieval gothic buildings were commissioned

by merchant guilds in prominent port cities in the western Mediterranean to function as stock markets as well as the seat of the College of Merchants (and

in Valencia also of the Consulate of the Sea) Bauer notes that both cities feature large and impressive commercial halls where commodities were brought and their prices were subjected to negotiations

In Chapter 8, Cecilia Fumagalli brings us back to the architecture of the Muslim Trading World with “The Travels of a Merchant throughout

the Islamic World.” Indeed, for Fumagalli, the Islamic urban world is based

on the idea of the market, which is arguably the visible part of the urban ture for visitors The towns of the entire Islamic world are connected to each

struc-other through caravan routes, where goods travel up to suqs and bazars,

which are the arrival point of a broader territorial system Therefore, to stand the Islamic urban and territorial structure, Fumagalli insists that it is from the perspective of the merchant traveling from town to town that we witness how the architectural, urban, and land structures of the Islamic city are shaped to accommodate the merchant during his travels

under-While global trade systems and their regional and urban impacts dominate this volume, in Chapter 9, Dennis De Witt introduces new structural evidence

on an architectural typology crucial to global trade: “Savannah’s Custom House: A Peculiar Construction of Galvanized Iron, Apparently Durable and Well-Adapted to a Southern Climate.” De Witt reminds us that architecture must be built, and often it must deploy an innovative structure Further, his scholarship is a reminder that architectural history is forever unfinished Indeed, as De Witt argues, these structural innovations embodied

in the Savannah’s Custom Custom House and its relationship to the Boston Merchants Exchange is quite possibly unique in the history of United States architecture

Aniruddha Bose challenges the Western narrative of industrialization, by reminding us that much of the colonial world was at the forefront of trade innovation in Chapter 10: “The Modernization of a Port in British India: Calcutta, 1870–1880.” In the 19th century, the Calcutta port was not only the most important trading center in eastern India; it was the capital of the British Raj From around 1860 to 1910, the British Indian government invested considerable sums to upgrade the port’s infrastructure Throughout this period, thousands of men, women, and children labored, loading and unloading the cargoes passing through the port This chapter examines records from 1860–1870 in order to understand the impact of these changes

on the port’s workforce The significance of this research is threefold First,

it sheds light on the processes of class formation in British India, while demon- strating that violence and coercion are embedded in trade Second, it com- plicates our understanding of the relationship between technology and subaltern populations in British India Third, it demonstrates the scale of the Calcutta waterfront, thereby underlining the importance of trade in the architecture of urban India

Finally, in Chapter 11 Glen Umberger introduces us to an understudied, yet significant late-19th century monument in “Building the Marble Elephant: The Creation of Philadelphia’s Iconic City Hall.” Umberger considers how political resolve managed to produce a monumental municipal building symbolizing the city’s image of itself as the manufacturing capital of the world, without any mortgage, liens, or encumbrances and how, in spite of its cost and size, it is still one of the most overlooked architectural landmarks in the United States For the next thirty years, Philadelphia would be involved

Introduction 9

in the construction of the New Public Building, which was designed by a dedicated small group of world-class architects and artists whose goal was

to create an iconic architectural masterpiece that “in some far off future day

be all that remains to tell the story of our civilization, and to testify to the dignity and public spirit of our people.” Boasting a didactic sculptural program designed “to express American ideas and develop American genius,” the new City Hall featured a multitude of allegorical representa-tions including commerce, industry, and trade Remarkably, although con-ceived during the national financial crisis surrounding the Panic of 1873, the city officially completed their monumental task in July 1901, producing the largest and most expensive municipal building in North America

Notes

1 Charles Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800

(Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010), 68.

2 Parts of this introduction were written with Robert Cowherd for the Andrew Mellon Foundation funded Global Architecture History and Teaching Collaborative It has been edited and modified for publication.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jer%C3%B3nimos_Monastery#/media/File: Mosteiro_dos_Jer%C3%B3nimos_antes_de_1755.png.

4 Elen Sapega, “Remembering Empire/Forgetting the Colonies: Accretions

of Memory and the Limits of Commemoration in a Lisbon Neighborhood,”

History and Memory v.20, n.2, 2008, 19 –24.

5 “Italian” is in quotes because there was no such thing as Italy until the 19th century conquest first of northern Italy by Napoleon, followed by the decades-

long invasion southwards of Victor Emmanuel during Risorgimento Indeed,

from around 586 to 1815, what we think of as Italy was a series of shifting territories, Papal States, and Kingdoms.

1 Legacies of colonialism

Towards an architectural

history of capitalism

Patrick Haughey

A brief history of economics and enlightenment philosophy

The origins of capitalism, as opposed to other forms of exchange, has a murky history Most economists and historians pinpoint its emergence between its diagnosis by Adam Smith in the late 18th century and its cri-tique by Karl Marx in the late 19th century Historians attempting to under-stand the relationship of capitalism have followed this pattern The eminent

American Historian, Joyce Appleby published The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism in 2010 She notes admirably that to claim a start

date for capitalism is arbitrary and that it is cultural as well as economic Despite noting the influence of the Portuguese, Spanish, various Papal decrees and even the Dutch, she claims these only bolster the case for English exceptionalism For Appleby, capitalism begins in England “with the con-vergence of agricultural improvements, global explorations, and scientific advances.”1 Indeed, she insists their experience was “unique,” all while she admits that people in Africa, the Middle East and India had capitalism

“thrust” upon them; yet, while there is little mention in her book of tion” against state-sponsored violence, she does mention the relationship between the Natural philosophers and economic justification and cites the usual suspects in her introduction: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Thomas Paine, Max Weber, and others.2 She notes Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776)

“revolu-is the first diagnos“revolu-is of nearly two centuries of h“revolu-istory, yet still finds the origins of English capitalism to occur around this moment This chapter is going to take her at her word The English did create capitalism, but not in the way she and many others have seen it.3 Appleby’s “global explorations” required state-sponsored violence The agricultural improvements and scientific advancements leading to the industrial revolution were the result

of law and privileged landed power

Even Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century

(2014) places the origins of capitalism, in his twist, the beginning of wealth inequality at this moment Piketty pairs the classical natural philosophy

of England with its late 18th-century emergence in France under the guise of enlightenment and the rapid explosion of its population He also unpacks

Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 11 Thomas Malthus’ infamous Essay of 1798 and David Ricardo’s Principles

of Political Economy (1817) Without statistical proof, they were both

concerned with rising land rent in the face of demographic and resource pressures Ricardo introduces the principle of scarcity within the context of supply (land) and demand (resources): if land and its resources are only in the hands of a few, then the solution must be state intervention in the form

of taxation Ricardo assumed land would rise faster than goods, wrongly, according to Piketty, bringing about an apocalypse.4 Piketty goes on to insist

that Karl Marx, Das Capital (1867), took Ricardo’s principle of scarcity

and applied the principle of infinite accumulation through an analysis of industrial manufacturing Piketty goes on to insist that Marx predicts an apocalypse where capitalism inevitably fails unless there is a revolution.5

Piketty, using statistics, generates a plausible, but much critiqued, method of demonstrating how infinite accumulation creates an ever-growing wealthy class Yet, like most economists, he forgets that math is only part of the story.Historians of architecture are no different when they pay attention to

capitalism at all Peggy Deamer, in Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (2014), determines the origins of capitalism following the model of

economic history:

The first consideration, the time frame and sequence, is determined

by the advent of industrial society and with the self-conscious awareness

of the working of capitalism While this ostensibly begins with Adam

Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776, its connection with the built

environment comes to the fore in the nineteenth century with the work

of John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (1848), and Karl Marx, Das Capital (1867).6

Deamer insists on a critically important point following her determination

of time where she notes that architecture and its relationship to capital are necessarily unstable This is due in large part to the impact money has on design, where intentions are compromised by the desires of the supplier of capital Yet, like many historians, she takes the origin of its emergence for

granted Indeed, the authors assembled by Deamer, rather than look at tecture, or the “built environment,” as is mentioned in the introduction, actually attempt to diagnose how architects respond to capitalism, from

archi-Henry Cole to Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaas This is an excellent exercise However, it masks how architecture is created by and is embodied in the operation of capitalism.7 Perhaps a more apt title would have been “Architects and Capitalism.” The timeline embraced in this book largely ignores the roles colonialism, industrialization, urbanization, finance and slavery play in the origins and perpetuation of capitalism In summary, architectural historians tend to take the narrative of economists for granted

What all the authors above have in common is either a deliberate or un- intentional neglect of 500 years of colonialism—legacies which continue to

impact the world Indeed, colonialism and mercantilism then, as now, have

a major role in supplying very fabric of architecture Iron, stone, concrete, oil, copper, timber: these extractive processes at the heart of historical and contemporary architecture are embedded in capitalism and global trade This resource dependence is often ignored in the practice of architecture and the writing of its history

When Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776, he was imposing

a Newtonian naturalist universe on an economic system that existed for well over a century Isaac Newton provides a method for the empirical observation

of the natural world.8 Smith imports Newton’s methods to observe the

“natural” phenomena of productivity and labor, which he assumes are only regulated by the value of inputs (commodities), inaugurating the idea of Supply and Demand For Smith, natural philosophy provides science as a means for diagnosing the principles of what is now known to economic historians as the beginning of Classical Political Economy The universal laws of Newtonian nature provide a clean model for how social and political forces of capitalist market economics operates in the world.9 However, following Smith, observation of the natural world no longer is necessary as its philosophical premise is firmly established, where technological and therefore, scientific progress is linked to capitalism Thus, the Enlightenment assumes that the state of the world where Europe is dominant at the turn of the 18th century is the result of natural, and therefore inevitable causes, correctly diagnosed through its own use of reason However, this rationalist scientific philosophy swiftly becomes racial with the publications of Jean-

Baptiste Lamarck’s Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (1801), followed by Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon’s Types

of Mankind (1858) Reason and nature are thus deployed, along with

religion, to justify slavery and violent colonialism

In the 1870s, economists, having established their universal and thus inevitable, roots in Enlightenment natural philosophy, begin to deploy mathematics in what is known as the Marginal Revolution William S Jevons and Leon Walrus apply math to the study of human behavior Jevons explains, “I have attempted to treat Economy as a calculus of Pleasure and Pain [therefore] it must be a mathematical science in matter if not in language.”10 Leon Walrus, in Elements of Pure Economics (1874) provides the economic discipline’s a priori assumption of the Theory of General

Equilibrium, where on balance the cost of pain imposed is canceled out

by the benefits of pleasure, just as later economists would insist that supply and demand must, eventually equal out to zero The preservation of this

“beneficial” equilibrium becomes the primary task of the 19th-century nation-state.11 According to Arne Heise:

Leon Walrus’ intention was to show (or, rather, to prove mathematically) that there may exist a system of relative prices (a price vector) which will simultaneously equilibrate all markets – for consumer goods,

Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 13

capital goods, labor and money, i.e to create a general equilibrium In such an equilibrium state, where supply equals demand, excess demand must necessarily be zero.12

Walrus’ Law remains the cornerstone of orthodox economics and its model for the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, which is the generally accepted economic principle that ‘‘there can be no overall excess supply or excess demand in an economy comprised of markets where goods, labor, capital, bonds and money are exchanged freely.”13

John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1935), while often seen as refutation of Walrus, proposed that

Walrus, while correct on structure, missed the role of debt and credit, and the existence of a monetary economy and that market forces work for every commodity, except that it requires involuntary unemployment.14 Keynesian

“liberal” economists do not question the equation; they merely demand that the power of the state is used to minimize public pain in a crisis.15 Indeed, Heise, through a blistering array of equations, cannot help but conclude, trapped in math, that Keynes remains valid after years of confronting the defense and assault on Walrus This conflict is why architectural history is necessary, as the economists’ reliance on numbers has caused their struggle

to zero-out the equation when the concept of the idea of limited resources

or the spatial, political and demographic forces make equilibrium in a Walrus market impossible

The irony of this mathematical purity is that the frictionless mathematics that justifies capitalism through the “pain” equation occurs in what Mark Twain dubbed the Gilded Age During this period emerging monopolies swallow competitors and reduce the “friction” of labor on the movement

of capital through violence, all while protected by law.16 Railroad riots, restrictive immigration laws, company towns and extravagant mansions are the architectural and historical evidence of power and control during this period The credit event that caused the Long Depression at the end of the nineteenth century prophetically coincided with massive assets gains concen-trated in few hands This condition inspired reform-minded philosophers like Thorstein Veblen to consider the effect of unfettered or privileged asset

acquisition on the broader economic landscape in his Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899) and his later essays on

absentee ownership The economist Michael Hudson, reviewing Veblen noted that “inherited privilege, monopoly power and land ownership rights were rewarded more than labor The largest asset in every economy was still real estate.” For Hudson, “the key to understanding Veblen’s 1923 essay

on ‘Absentee Ownership’ and indeed, the Reform Era, is to analyze land rent, and how urban real estate speculation was becoming not only the fastest way to get rich but also the major customer of banking and high finance Thus Veblen became justly famous for describing small towns as real estate

promotion projects [and] he described America’s rapid urbanization as

a great [zero-sum] real estate game.”17

Systems persist over long periods of time, even as localized sites adapt or transform in response As Michel de Certeau writes, “The making of history

is buttressed by power which creates a space proper (walled city’s, nations, etc.) where the will must write (construct) a system.”18 From an economic standpoint, especially in contrast to trade, capitalism is a relatively new system designed to create wealth from invested capital and compound interest alone, without possessing a tradable skill, inventing technology or providing the labor for production

Yet, this new form of wealth is increasingly visible long before Adam Smith and can be found in the architecture and history of the colonial era What is more, the recovery of capitalism’s long history is vital to under-standing the emerging modern city One aspect of colonial capitalist systems

is that the benefits of wealth are largely returned to and concentrated in particular cities, financing growth at both ends of the system, in Amsterdam

or London at the expense of territories governed in the colonies ruled from cities such as Batavia and Calcutta.19 What is more, it has grown exponen-tially, through wars, shifting borders and every manner of governance since the 16th century to allow very few people to control vast portions of wealth

in today’s global world.20 In short, the economics of pain versus pleasure are not equally distributed as capital or architecture

Capitalism in the colonial era, and after, therefore is more than a financial innovation It is a system that has altered the inhabitable world and thus its architectural history It begins when emerging monarchies and later, nation-states, outsource the extraction and exploitation of conquered territories to for-profit companies in exchange for a fixed fee, taxes and dividends paid

to elite power brokers and the state’s treasury What is more, charter nies relied on a number of financial innovations that predate this period Banks and the emerging bond markets invented in the city states of the so-called “Italian” Renaissance allowed merchants, nobles and sovereigns to borrow money to invest in better ships and new routes

compa-Much that we take for granted in contemporary finance was a creation of Florentine banking: denominated currency, checks, receipts and double-entry bookkeeping With the rise of textile manufacturing in Florence and other bank and trade dominated city-states of the Italian peninsula, came a demand for credit to buy supplies and to pay workers Banking arrives to meet this demand Florence becomes the dominant banking site for Mediterranean and European trade routes The Florentine gold coin, the Florin, was the benchmark currency of Europe for centuries Florentine banks had agents in cities throughout Europe and into the Middle East, as far away as London, Lisbon, Moscow, Cairo and Damascus Florentine bankers were the major lenders to the Papacy and kings and nobles throughout Europe Florentine banking families eventually became the new nobility of the city, forcing out the old feudal nobility.21 This wealth produced the wonders of art and

Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 15

architecture we call the “Italian Renaissance.” The word “credit” derives

from the Latin credere, which means “to believe.” Faith is thus the origin of

modern financial markets

The rulers of Venice deployed a unique form of credit finance, borrowing from its citizens in order to repel the advances of the more powerful Ottoman Empire as well as its competitors in Florence and Genoa Selling bonds (promises) to its wealthy citizens allowed the city-state to access a pool of capital that was roughly proportional to the entire economy of Venice (versus merely the contents of the treasury) and forced its citizens to be

“invested” in the success of their military defense.22 The bond market was also an outlet for surplus capital Less risky than merchant voyages and more predictable than farming, bonds are also easier to manage Bonds pro-vided much-needed funding to the city and later nation-states primarily to finance war while guaranteeing a fixed return for the bond investor, who

is now invested in the economic growth of his debtor state The investor is now invested in the stability of the state in order to receive the promised return on capital Bond markets improve the ability of an affluent popula-tion to build wealth without doing anything besides loaning money to a sovereign entity for a guaranteed return or allowing banks to use their deposits for further lending at interest Bond investors today are the largest source of finance for cities, states, nations and companies They remain a legally protected class who can hold the citizens or stakeholders of any indebted entity hostage for their guaranteed returns

The stock market, invented in the early 17th century, allowed new nies to sell shares to other owners, both raising capital and diversifying risk, the key advantage companies had over sovereign-funded fleets The risk of a single voyage could be pooled among many owners rather than bankrupt

compa-a fcompa-amily As compa-a stockholder, you could hold onto the shcompa-ares compa-and receive either goods or a dividend paid at a fixed time upon the conclusion of a voyage, or sell your shares to somebody else for a profit or loss Shares and goods were liquidated after each voyage, with new shares issued for each new venture The commodities themselves were worth money in a direct sale or on a future sale at a fixed price, in what is now known as the “futures” market You could purchase an option to buy or sell a given item at a fixed price at some date in the future, thus guaranteeing a known price and pre-funding the acquisition of the product for the merchant

For defenders of Efficient Market Theory, this is the best thing about capital markets: they allocate capital efficiently to the best-performing com-panies, rewarding success, and with fewer barriers erected to stifle this flow (regulations or cost of labor), the more efficiently the capital will be allo-cated The Enlightenment assumption behind this idea is that capital alloca-tors are rational people Smith’s Homo Economicus, “will never make poor decisions in their own self-interest.” This is where John Stuart Mill, in his

Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book I, Chapter 2 (“Of Unproductive

Labor”) describes the division of labor using bread as his example Bread,

the most useful of foods, must somehow cost enough to provide for its means of production, from tools, to harvest to transportation.23 Mill, con-cludes that no matter the labor, it must be subservient for its compensation

to production, and in the process, notes that this gives rise to architecture:This gives rise to another mode in which labour not employed directly about the product itself, is instrumental to its production; namely, when employed for the protection of industry Such is the object of all buildings.24

In “Of Unproductive Labor,” Mill lays his trap whereby he measures the

production of labor by its measurable utility He admits that he can only use material wealth and then make the following astounding claim:

All labour is, in the language of political economy, unproductive, which ends in immediate enjoyment, without any increase of the accumulated stock of permanent means of enjoyment And all labour, according to our present definition, must be classed as unproductive, which terminates

in a permanent benefit, however important, provided that an increase of material products forms no part of that benefit The labour of saving a friend’s life is not productive, unless the friend is a productive labourer, and produces more than he consumes.25

For Mill, it is consumption that makes labor useful The next chapter is

“Capital.” For Mill, capital is neither money nor wealth It is there to make sure the conditions for labor, money, and wealth exist:

What capital does for production, is to afford the shelter, protection, tools and materials which the work requires, and to feed and otherwise maintain the labourers during the process As whatever of the produce of the country is devoted to production is capital, so, conversely, the whole of the capital of the country is devoted to production.26

In Mill’s narrative, the logic of capital must be linked to the progress of the state, whereby Mill defends British rule in India as “Tolerant Imperialism.”27

Stock companies combined with new banking innovations and technological innovation (machines) allowed emerging European nation-states to finance growth and, according to Western history, achieve progress.28

This financial innovation also allows nation-states to finance local structure and endless war with other competitor states over global resources,

infra-as dividends and imported commodities are recycled into war through tariffs, and eventually taxes In addition, many companies are often structured

as limited liability companies This structure legally shields the majority owners and operators from the consequences of the company actions by law The corporation is a legally separated from its agents A few companies

Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 17

received a monopoly from their home country, in theory, to allow them to remove the “friction” of competition (the mythical essence of the Free Market hypothesis) Monopoly power allows them to grow without worry Most importantly, charter companies had the means and license to wage war on behalf of their stockholders’ interests and their state This requires the architecture of forts, ports and cities The protected right to trade and ensure shareholder profits at home was always enforced by violence elsewhere

By exerting power, territorial violence and resource extraction, the limited liability company is the essence of colonialism and modern capitalism Historian Sven Beckert calls this form of trade “war capitalism.”29 Contrary

to mathematics and popular belief, capitalism never operates in a vacuum of frictionless exchange It always relies on violence at some point, whether physical and deadly or implied through the force of law From the perspective

of the Enlightenment myth of rationalism, this is the ghost behind Smith’s

“free hand of the market.” Law has to be enforced, creating the conditions for violence Jacques Derrida reminds us that “law is always an authorized force, a force that justifies itself or is justified in applying itself, even if the justification may be judged from elsewhere to be unjust No law without force, as Emmanuel Kant recalled with great rigor.”30

In order understand the capitalist system, there has to be an account of violence beyond the mathematics of pain in the service of equilibrium

It requires a more accurate description of capitalism Rarely in a capitalist system is any form of exchange for profit completed without violence or coercion at one point in the system, from harvest through production to consumption Most of the growers, harvesters and crafts people who pro-duced any valued commodity that created the vast wealth were slaves, chattel labor or serfs As historian C.A Bayly wryly notes:

The final competitive advantage enjoyed by parts of Europe lay in the relationship between finance and war Crudely, the Europeans became much better at killing people The savage European ideological wars in the Seventeenth Century had created links between war, finance and commercial innovation.31

Bayly notes the irony of the emergence of the Enlightenment and cial companies during this period of savage, expensive maritime war The expensive cost of maintaining a global fleet to protect one commodity, sugar, from competition required the cane plantation colonies in the Caribbean to be immensely profitable Maintaining the architecture of capitalism—forts, ports, shipyards and ironworks for canon—is incredibly costly, as is the forcible relocation of millions of people to harvest the cane and process it on the plantations The same expensive architectures are also deployed for spice routes, timber routes, silver routes, or from a contemporary perspective, oil, copper and food This is why it is necessary

commer-to consider slavery, capitalism, industrialization, urbanization and the Enlightenment together They are self-reinforcing systems that emerge during the same period.32

Capitalism and violence: The East India Companies,

the Bengal Famine and the American Revolution

Back to England In 1591, Queen Elizabeth granted permission for three ships to sail to the Arabian Sea, following the paths traced (violently) by the Portuguese a century earlier They returned in 1594 loaded with spices and luxury goods Each voyage raised money through stock, which was sold upon return Voyages were intensely risky, long, and rarely successful in the early years Therefore, a new group of investors was granted a 15-year monopoly company charter by the Queen for the Governor and Company

of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies in exchange for a fixed fee to the Kingdom, thus yoking the fortunes of the Crown to the success of the company The English East India Company that will emerge from these early endeavors received its charter from Queen Elizabeth on December 31,

1600 Though not the first chartered company in England, the East India Company (EIC) helped to pioneer, along with the contemporary Dutch East India Company (VOC), the concept of joint stock ownership as a way of raising the capital needed for a successful overseas trade, as well as manag-ing the risk of a voyage The capital and profits were underwritten by the monopoly guaranteed by the state In the beginning, the companies rented the ships and sent them off on their stately journeys with one trip out and one trip back in each year before vertically integrating the shipbuilding process within the EIC itself.33

Gradually the funding methods changed, and by the 1650s, the EIC became

a joint stock company managed by a board of shareholders, governed by a Chair with a handful of trading posts along the west coast of India In 1657, the company was formalized as a continuous, unlimited investment without reference to individual voyages This is the date that an English company becomes a joint stock limited liability company The EIC kept its monopoly

by paying an increasingly large fee to the Crown and so had a well-established system in place when the British government finally decided to remove the monopoly and allow open competition for a period coinciding with the English Civil War and Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the Directorate back

in England.34

Beginning in 1670, the restored Catholic King Charles II of England passes a series of acts returning the monopoly to the company in exchange for his annual fee.35 The new law turned the company into a quasi-state, allowing it to acquire territory, build forts, mint money, negotiate alliances, make war and adjudicate over its territories without recourse to the crown

In 1682, the EIC deployed its new power to negotiate with the local Bengal

Nawab for a firman (unlimited permission to trade for a fee) that covers all

Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 19

of Bengal, but they are rejected In 1685, the East India Company requested soldiers from King Charles II to protect and build a walled factory on the river Hooghly (one of the many outlets of the Ganges delta)

In 1688, England experiences its “Glorious Revolution.” Dutch Burgher William, the nephew of Charles II, comes to power, permanently shifting the religion of the crown from Catholic to Protestant The following year, a Mughal fleet retaliates for the company, arming itself and attacking the com-pany’s factory town of Bombay on the west coast, where the EIC has most of its trading operations After a year, they surrender by prostrating themselves before the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb with a large ransom In 1690, an administrator of the East India Company, Job Charnock, arrives at a village named Sutanuti, near the mouth of the Hooghly River, and decides the loca-tion is ideal for a trading post In 1698, Sutanuti, along with two nearby villages, are bought by the EIC from a local landowner The new factory is named Calcutta and stealthily fortified This was the original Fort William (named after the new Protestant King of England), William III At the end of the 17th century, the EIC had a total of twenty-three trading posts in India

In 1707, Aurangzeb, the last powerful Mughal ruler of India died, ing a power vacuum among local lords and the competing European compa-nies Ten years later, Bengal ruler Shaista Khan abolishes customs duties to raise money to the great advantage of the company factors Feeling under threat from locals and other competing companies, Governor Hedges secures soldiers from Fort St George in Madras, down the coast, to protect his resi-dence in Hooghly-Chinsurah, and asks the local ruler if he can build a new fort to protect Calcutta Shaista Khan denies his request and imposes a new 3.5% tax Company warships arrive, and soldiers ransack the town Five hundred houses are destroyed by the constant bombardment The Emperor evicts the EIC from Bombay and Hooghly-Chinsurah to the delight

creat-of the Dutch VOC and the French in Pondicherry The company retreats to their walled outpost of Calcutta and other factories

Over the next decade, they recover in part by muscling in on the tea trade out of Canton This rapid expansion came at a steep cost By 1750, many of the EIC agents were highly indebted to Indian moneylenders, in many cases using local loans to finance the purchase of goods, especially for lucrative tea from China.36 While the goods fetched a very profitable price back in England, it could take months or years to get reimbursed back in Bengal Specie (coin) from sales and the stock dividends often stayed at home Under pressure from the rising trading prowess of the French upriver from Calcutta

in Chandernagore and Plassey, and the increasing competition from the Dutch VOC, the EIC shares and dividends began to plummet in the markets

of London

In 1751, EIC agents begin to cut out the local merchants, who were by now the wealthy middlemen negotiating the movement of locally produced products into the hands of the English This had the added benefit of bypass-ing the trade tax introduced by the Nawab, who, like the Mughal Emperor,

was already under siege from multiple fronts Having lost important revenue used to finance his own wars to the west and the south, the Nawab responded

by going to war with the EIC, capturing their fortified factory outpost of Calcutta in 1756 The French and Dutch also begin to attack the EIC’s hold-ings along the east coast of India

When news reaches London, the company shares plummet once again However, everyone underestimated the ruthless military skills of the 31-year-old Director General Robert Clive Clive, with his legal mercenary army and help from the British Fleet, ignores Calcutta and heads north to assault the French enclave upriver at Plassey where he massacres both a Mughal army and most of the French population Once that is complete he turns south, and with no army at his back, he ruthlessly recaptures Calcutta, killing most of the native population Clive then turns his forces east to wrestle control of the opium trade in Bengal from the Dutch, permanently displacing the Dutch from India, before moving back down the east coast of India to retake the port of Madras from the French In two years, Clive and his army, with the help of massive British naval bombardment, are able to temporarily remove both of their European rivals and weaken the centuries-old Mughal domination of Bengal In 1758, a new Fort William was built to protect Calcutta from future attack Back in London, the company celebrated its growing power with a new building in the Classical style on Leadenhall Street in 1760 (Figure 1.1) During this period, the buildings of the East India Company expanded to fill the entire block between Leadenhall Market and Lime Street creating a new capitalist center for London.37 The following year, at the Battle of Buxar, Clive defeats the joint forces of Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal, the Nawab of Awadh and the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II The following year, Clive extorts a new demand from the now

weakened ruler With the firman already guaranteeing them indefinite trading rights, Clive goes further, demanding the diwani over Bengal from the Mughal Emperor The diwani is only given to loyal Nawabs and allows

them to have autonomous control over taxes, laws, and governance in their territory in exchange for a fixed monthly fee The Emperor agrees to not

only give the EIC the diwani but to rent out his own “sepoy” soldiers for

their use.38 The EIC then forbids local lords from maintaining their own armies, forcing them to turn to the company for protection When they either could not pay or refused to pay, the company took land as payment.The EIC is now a state with complete control over Bengal, including admin-istration, laws, taxes, prices and a well-trained army It is in the aftermath of

1765 that one of the very first Hindi words enters the English language—

“loot.”39 News of the EIC’s triumphal conquest of Bengal causes the stock price to soar from its depths back in England, and within a few years the revenues from the EIC make up nearly a quarter of the total revenue of Britain

In the decade that followed, Bengal was plundered of its ageless tivity The diverse and fertile region of the Ganges Delta was reshaped by the EIC First to go were the traditional textile towns that had been the

produc-Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 21

backbone of Bengal’s global influence for centuries to secure the emerging textile industry back in England Food crops were replaced with monocul-ture crops for profit such as cotton, opium, and indigo Cotton is the only trade item China accepts for its valuable tea, other than coin Tea is now the Company’s most profitable product back in England The EIC then raises the land tax on agricultural products to 50% and forced formerly independ-ent weavers into what amounted to chattel slavery In addition to cotton, the EIC planted thousands of acres of indigo in Bengal Indigo produced the rare color of blue, used to dye fabric for royalty and the wealthy in Europe for centuries With cotton, indigo and opium taking up vast amounts of land through the EIC territory, there is little space for traditional agriculture, placing a strain on remaining arable land

In 1769, a massive two-year drought devastated Bengal Without the fertile agricultural lands, food was scarce Where in the past, the Emperor and his agents would have fixed food prices, punished hoarders and invested in water infrastructure, the EIC agents hoarded grain, increased taxes and charged high prices for ever-scarcer food and water, increasing their reported revenue back in England This increase in revenue leads to an increase in demand for their stock, driving the price higher

Figure 1.1 “East India House,” by Thomas Malton the Younger (1748–1804)

Watercolour over an etched outline 8 1/2 in x 11 15/16 in (21.6 cm x 30.3 cm) Courtesy of the Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (PD) 40

When the news of the EIC’s acquisition of the diwani arrives in London in

1765, the stock is in high demand People leverage lands and homes for credit

to buy ever-dwindling supplies of stock in what appears to be an easy way to get rich Despite a volatile stock price history, the company had a hundred year history of a double-digit dividend The lack of stock supply (restricted

by the Board and the Government) to meet the increased demand drives the price up over 200% in less than two years Then, it all comes to an end.News of the famine arrives in London, and the stock crashes on the potential prosecution of Clive and demands in Parliament by merchants

to eliminate the company’s monopoly Everyone rushes to sell to buyers who

no longer exist The crashing price sets up a classic panic For those who used borrowed money to buy stock, “margin calls” are made by lenders

to quickly recoup losses When nobody can pay, as most wealth is tied to now illiquid stock and investments in hard-to-sell resources located overseas

or land, bankruptcies explode, and tax revenues plummet Banks that lent money to purchase the stocks fail by the hundreds Lands are foreclosed on, and England plunges into a deep recession as thousands of people, including many nobles and important government officials are on the verge of being wiped out (Figure 1.2)

By 1773, after the recession incurred by the stock crash, the EIC and England are in dire financial straits England relied on the company to help

Figure 1.2 Contrary to popular belief, the price of stock is not a function of rational

market expectations of profits and margins or supply and demand Rather it reflects irrational sporadic human behaviors from panic to euphoria as they respond to everything from gossip and local minutiae to global events 41

01Jan1720 01Jan1740 01Jan1760

News of the Famine arrives in London

Recovery after 1773 bailout, the end of the American Revolution and opium smuggling

News of the Diwani arrives in London

News of the Burning of

Calcutta arrives in

London

01Jan1720 01Jan1740 01Jan1760

News of the Famine arrives in London

Recovery after 1773 bailout, the end of the American Revolution and opium smuggling

01Jan1780

Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 23

finance its global war against competitors in the Indian Ocean and its American colonies through the payment of monopoly fees and import tariffs

on tea The company was important to Britain First, the company was the only source of England’s income from the East Second, the company provided nearly a quarter of the State’s revenue in addition to the wealth it brought to England through dividends and services.The EIC paid £400,000 annually to the government to maintain its monopoly, as well as a large dividend to its shareholders, many of whom were members of Parliament Yet the EIC had been unable to meet its dividend commitments since 1768 after of the loss of tea sales to America This was due to an unwise import tax imposed on the Americas in 1767 that caused colonists to buy black market tea from the Dutch Although the tax was swiftly repealed, the EIC never regained trust This loss was now compounded by a massive stock crash, as its debt obligations were backed by the value of its stock The Bank

of England and the British Government lent the company money to keep it afloat with the hope of recouping its already massive losses from prior investments However, the EIC owed money to both the Bank of England and the Government, and it had 15 million pounds of tea rotting in British warehouses and thousands of pounds more en route from China

Despite protests, Lord North and Parliament decided to bailout the company Lord North overhauled the management of the EIC with the 1773 Regulating Acts The Acts set up a system where Parliament supervised and regulated the operations of the company They cut the dividend to 6% until the Government was repaid its massive loan This is the beginning of direct intervention into the EIC from Parliament Now the former company turned autonomous state and financier to the Kingdom, becomes a State agent The Acts did nothing to undermine its autonomous authority in India, nor was anyone imprisoned

To help the EIC recoup its losses, Lord North allowed the EIC to sell its tea at lower prices in the Americas to undercut the illegal Dutch tea and other English merchants Desperate to save the EIC, the London import tax, which provided a source of revenue for the Crown, was lowered from 12.5% The export tax from London was eliminated and replaced by yet another import tea tax on the colonies This import tax had been tried before and inevitably led to massive boycotts of English tea Given the massive drop in price due to oversupply the English government calculated that the reintroduction of the tax would not be noticed Four ships headed to Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, and Boston The tea tax was moved from the company onto the British colonists in the Americas for the second time

Despite the lower price, this was the last in nearly a century of mercantilist provisions designed to restrict the economy of the British Americas for the benefit of England, including bans on anvils of a certain size, fishing quotas and dozens of restrictions on manufacturing In addition, there was always

a shortage of actual coin, as most of what existed made its way around the world to China Colonists who were not Lords of Parliament were heavily restricted in terms of economic activity (aside from slavery, which was present in all 13 colonies at the time); they were also short of currency When the tea arrived, Lord North turned out to be wrong Broadsides against Lord North and the Crown’s restrictions on the colonies, already

in circulation for years, became more intense, listing grievances as many colonists once again felt fleeced by their government without any way to influence law back in London In the end, the American Revolution, contrary

to popular belief, was not inspired by a single tax and one night in Boston

It was the result of one hundred years of mercantile restrictions in the British colonies without recourse to representation in Parliament, a massive famine

in Bengal, and the unintended consequences of the first corporate bailout by

a sovereign nation in history Unfortunately, most people only remember the tea, the tax, and only in Boston

In 1773, Calcutta becomes the official center of the EIC’s administrative operations and will remain the capital of British India until 1917 In 1784, the Pitts India Act restructured the company, solidifying its ties to the English Government By 1799, after seven years of constant wars over trade and territory under the command of Sir Eyre Coote, the EIC eliminates all of its rivals, including the newly emboldened Maratha and the Mysore The Company secures the valuable Malabar coast below Goa, as well as the east coast of India and all of Bengal They celebrate with a brand new palace for the Governor in Calcutta built for the recently arrived new Governor, Lord Wellesley, the brother of the Duke of Wellington The palace was designed

by a soldier, Charles Wyatt, who was related to influential architects back in England (Figure 1.3).42 Wellesley was an advocate for a conservative new

“forward policy” in Parliament, whereby India would not just be governed

by British laws, it would also abide by Christian values The country would

be ruled and redeemed In 1796, the East Company House was refreshed by architects Richard Jupp and Henry Holland The EIC is now the largest company in the world with a private navy, army and civil service larger than that of most countries Once again, it is the largest source of income for the ever-expanding British Empire

The lesson of the EIC is that there is no such thing as efficient or less” markets The economic benefits of Walrus’ pleasure through profits require devastating pain, death, and wholesale reshaping of the world that includes architecture at every scale Further, laws and governance matter Companies and their shareholders are always beholden to the state for per-mission and the ability to use law and violence to increase returns The EIC, among the many other charter companies, as well as 15th-century financial innovations, should permanently banish the myth detailed in the intro-duction that capitalism is a recent and relatively harmless market-based phenomenon.43

“friction-Colonialism, architecture, and capitalism 25

Laws matter: The Enclosure Acts, tithing and origins

of industrialization

In parallel to the emergence of the East India Company is the birth of the Industrial Revolution in England From purely a technical standpoint, the Industrial Revolution involved a new form of steam power that involved the ability to burn fuel in order to make heat The heat turns water into steam which then exerts a force on a lever, which can be attached to a wheel to turn

a machine This invention, in theory, replaces human muscles and labor with mechanical muscles From a labor standpoint, this is the invention of mass production This was famously diagnosed as “the division of labor” in Adam

Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations: “The greatest improvement in the

produc-tive powers of labor seem to have been the effects of the division of labor.”Technological improvements, however, are not linear, and only proceeded incrementally, with little foresight into their future The first steam engine, known as the Atmospheric Fire Engine, was invented by iron worker Thomas Newcomen in 1712 This was invented to pump water out of tin and coal mines that as they went ever deeper in search of the needed resource and thus were prone to flooding Coal becomes the most important fuel for the Industrial Revolution when it is transformed from a way to heat houses, as

it had been for most of human history, into a fuel used first to produce mechanical, then electrical energy.45

Edmund Cartwright designed what may be the first power loom in 1784, along with the Sir Richard Arkwright’s water loom in 1775, revolutionizing

Figure 1.3 1860s view of 1799 Charles Wyatt, Palace of the Governor, Calcutta

(nga.gov) 44

FPO