Overview

Small Spaces recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. It takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale. Taking the British empire in India as its primary focus, this book presents eighteen short, readable chapters to explore an array of overlooked places and spaces. From cook rooms and slave quarters to outhouses, go-downs, and medicine cupboards, each chapter reveals how and why these kinds of minor spaces are so important to understanding colonialism. With the focus of history so often on the large scale - global trade networks, vast regions, and architectures of power and domination - Small Spaces shows instead how we need to rethink this aura of magnitude so that our reading is not beholden such imperialist optics. With chapters which can be read separately as individual accounts of objects, spaces, and buildings, and introductions showing how this critical methodology can challenge the methods and theories of urban and architectural history, Small Spaces is a must-read for anyone wishing to decolonize disciplinary practices in the field of architectural, urban, and colonial history. Altogether, it provides a paradigm-breaking account of how to ‘unlearn empire’, whether in British India or elsewhere.

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9781350288201

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Reviews

This brilliantly provocative study provides an alternative, micro-scalar history of colonial and middle-class domiciles, along with an extraordinary archaeology of objects and bodies that mediated the intimacy of the rulers and the ruled—taking us on an exhilarating journey from the cellars, kitchens, dining rooms and verandahs of the imperial mansions of Calcutta to the streets, bazars and bungalows of the Bengal and north-Indian countryside. * Sudipta Sen, University of California, Davis, USA * In this erudite yet eminently accessible volume, Chattopadhyay imaginatively stitches together the overlooked worlds of fragmented and seemingly minor spaces underpinning the workings of everyday life and better regarded practices, inspiring readers, by example, to recognize their indispensability and resilience. * Zeynep Kezer, Newcastle University, UK * An original examination of empire from marginal spaces in the built environment. This book unites subalterns with the spatial medium of their agency during colonial rule. It brilliantly reveals the hidden infrastructure of empire through an architectural and social history of service, separation, and subordination. * K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University, USA *

This brilliantly provocative study provides an alternative, micro-scalar history of colonial and middle-class domiciles, along with an extraordinary archeology of objects and bodies that mediated the intimacy of the rulers and the ruled—taking us on an exhilarating journey from the cellars, kitchens, dining rooms and verandahs of the imperial mansions of Calcutta to the streets, bazars and bungalows of the Bengal and north-Indian countryside. * Sudipta Sen, University of California, Davis, USA * In this erudite yet eminently accessible volume, Chattopadhyay imaginatively stitches together the overlooked worlds of fragmented and seemingly minor spaces underpinning the workings of everyday life and better regarded practices, inspiring readers, by example, to recognize their indispensability and resilience. * Zeynep Kezer, Newcastle University, UK * An original examination of empire from marginal spaces in the built environment. This book unites subalterns with the spatial medium of their agency during colonial rule. It brilliantly reveals the hidden infrastructure of empire through an architectural and social history of service, separation, and subordination. * K. Sivaramakrishnan, Yale University, USA *

Author Information

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, with an affiliated appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

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