Call for Papers: Building the Scottish Diaspora: Scots and the Colonial Built Environment, c.1700-1920.
International Symposium, Edinburgh, 17-18 November 2017.
The Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies (University of Edinburgh), in conjunction with the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, is to host a two-day symposium (17-18 November 2017) on Scottish contributions to the built environment of Britain’s empire.
This event will ask questions about Scottish involvement and agency in the creation of the buildings and infrastructure that both facilitated and maintained Britain’s global empire.
The symposium will take as a point of departure, colonial cultures of Scottish entrepreneurship operating and building in the hemispheres of the Atlantic and the India-Pacific from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In most accounts of British imperial and colonial architecture little or no effort is made to distinguish Scottish from English, Irish, or Welsh agency; nor is it ever asked how, if at all, Scottish building culture and practice consequently affects our appreciation of ‘British’ colonial architecture. This is despite the fact that the legacy of Scottish enterprise across the Atlantic and India-Pacific regions includes a substantive material presence in architecture (civic, ecclesiastical and domestic) and building (wharves, stores, mills, factories, agricultural infrastructure etc.) that spatialised that involvement. Together, these buildings can be understood as elements in a global and imperial arrangement of corporate and private acquisition, speculation and investment spanning Europe and the Americas, India and Australasia, the Pacific and beyond.
This symposium will consider the nature of Scotland’s contribution to this environment, and ask how we might understand it in a geographically continuous and expansive capacity.
For more information and for the full call for papers please visit the symposium website. Abstracts submission deadline: 24th July 2017.