Modern Europe and its colonies marks the largest expansion of a civilisation prior to the contemporary globalisation process. Thanks to its extent and its “classical” architecture, it gives us an Ariadne’s thread to follow in reconstructing a decisive moment in world history and to better understand which were the reasons and the results of past encounters between cultures often very different from one another.

     The use of the expansion of Western Civilization to track world history is properly suspect, as it can easily fall victim to “Eurocentric” thinking, but this risk has not stopped world historians from observing the impact of Europe’s hold over the world’s economy, as evidenced by the map of Europe’s dealings throughout the world contained in Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme by the historian Fernand Braudel, which serves to illustrate “Rise of the West” after 1500 c. e. Recent examinations of European influence, which here we will consider from a strictly architectural point of view, are well-aware of the pitfalls of cultural determinism (whether Eurocentric, Afrocentric or Sinocentric) and most exhibit due care when considering broad Western political-economic-social processes such as the “civilisation” project, Europe’s global commercial dealings in commodities (silk, spices, etc.), the spread of Western Christianity, and the virtually world-wide presence of European languages or words with Latin roots.

     Unlike some of these processes, architecture is a clearly identifiable factual datum that we can follow like a trail through the course of Western expansionism and/or empire. In fact, it has often been used by ruling powers as a recognizable manifestation of their power aimed at non-Western peoples; all the more so when the colonial power seeks to leave an easily identifiable sign of their presence in newly conquered territories. This is true in the case of even less concrete situations, where by “colonization” we mean not a physical event, like the founding of a city, but rather deep cultural changes designed to promote the taste of one nation in favor of another. This was the case of ancient Greece on the coasts of Southern Italy, or England’s “classical” architectural program in the 1700’s, Lord Wellesley’s “building programme” in India at the beginning of the 1800’s, and Nazi pseudo-classical architecture in the twentieth century.  

Citations:

https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/20/colonialism-and-architecture/