Building Calcutta: construction trends in the making of the capital of British India, 1880-1911

Calcutta of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century enjoyed global stature and connections as a consequence of its position within the British Empire as the capital of India. This study of Calcutta’s buildings aims to comprehend the architectural legacy of the period in terms of its construction history. The proposed thesis underlying the research is that Calcutta’s built environment bore witness to the intense traffic of ideas, people and goods characteristic of the era. The significance of the research is two-fold. It enjoys the distinction of being the first attempt to undertake a wide-ranging investigation into the construction history of a city in the Indian subcontinent, and indeed possibly anywhere in the world. Concurrently, the study endeavours to suggest a methodological approach for similar forthcoming studies in India and elsewhere, especially considering that the discipline of construction history is as yet at a nascent stage and such studies are only expected to multiply in number and scope in the coming years. The research effort trains its attention on two key aspects of construction history – human resource and material resource. The former is manifested in investigations into the training and work contexts of the professionals engaged in construction activity, i.e. the engineers and the architects. The latter takes the form of research into source and application of the commonly used construction materials. The methodology employed in the study encompasses a range of disciplines and related sources, especially drawing on architectural, urban, social and economic histories. Addressing the proposed thesis has necessitated directing research efforts towards situating developments in Calcutta in the context of and with reference to the metropolitan milieu. The analysis of the research findings and the conclusions thus drawn have served to corroborate the proposed thesis highlighting the incessant flux distinctive of the construction environment in Calcutta in the period of this study. The dissertation is expected to facilitate an enhanced understanding of Calcutta’s built environment for those entrusted with its care, especially those in the heritage and conservation sector, as well as contribute to the available pool of free knowledge furthering our understanding of human civilization

Roundtable: the archives of global history in a time of international immobility

Reading the acknowledgements section of any book that might be categorized as global history, one comes across a long and impressive list of archives, frequently spanning multiple continents. These books often historicize structures that facilitate or constrain global connections, mobility and interactions, and they often present narratives that are less Eurocentric than those they write against. But they rarely raise the question of who gets to be a global historian. After all, the use of multiple archives across national borders has always relied on the possession of a strong passport and the funding of a wealthy institution. When these once marginal issues suddenly gained traction in March 2020 amid national lockdowns and restrictions on international travel, we were puzzled. Why did such issues become ‘global’ only when they started to impact particular scholars – notably those who had previously enjoyed the greatest access to resources and freedoms? Why did funding bodies start to think about these issues only once the pandemic hit? What does it mean to ‘do’ global history in a deeply unequal world? It was during an e-conversation about these questions that the idea for a seminar series entitled ‘The archives of global history in a time of international immobility’ was born

The space of diplomacy

This thematic section of ABE features contributions on the role and meanings of embassies and other structures designed for diplomacy, in urban fabrics situated east and south of the Mediterranean. Albeit inherently representative objects, embassies are seldom considered as architectural signifiers, or as parts of the cultural landscape of a city. Starting from Addis Abeba and moving on to Ankara, Kabul and Beijing, the four papers of the section show that while the architecture of diplomacy displaces a fragment of the nation beyond its territorial borders, this movement is never limited to the transfer of technologies and architectural styles. The making of diplomatic landmarks can be assessed as a dialogic process of space production, entailing negotiation and domestication in the foreign context, appropriation and reworking of local symbolic and material resources, interaction with the surrounding social and physical landscape