1 The Architecture of Empire in Modern Europe was published a year after Groten’s doctoral dissertat (...) 1Few would dispute that the imperial past is visible in the built environment of European cities today. Sweeping changes to the urban fabrics of European metropoles in the second half of the nineteenth century dovetailed with the rise of republics and the new political concept of “nation,” the (by now ugly) convergence of ethnicity, language, culture, and borders demarcating majority polities. The tenuously built, unapologetically proud new nation states of Europe built their self-image not just on energetically crafted national cultures, but on their far-flung exterior possessions too. A mania for cultural compartmentalization took hold, where the cities of Europe competed to flaunt their cosmopolitanism with selective stylistic aspects of their extra-national interests (colonies). In everyday terms this meant that each city was many. Paris was also Casablanca and Saigon. Amsterdam was Batavia or Suriname. London was Delhi, Ceylon, Singapore. You get the picture. All manner of buildings marketed their mondialité through colonial architectural gestures that referenced extra-national trade and commerce, philanthropy and altruism, mastery and control, curiosity and intrigue. These were the new architectural orders of the day, and have for decades provided fertile soil for historians interested in Europe’s elsewheres without having to leave the continent. The selectivity over which bits of colony made it to the metropole, and the metropolitan imagination of what that colony meant to the individual was fiercely contested terrain, the discourse of which is taken up by Miel Groten’s The Architecture of Empire in Modern Europe: Space, Place, and the Construction of an Imperial Environment, 1860-1960.1

Skirting typical periodization, the book is organized around five sites, four of which are single buildings, that each take center stage in a chapter of its own: the Basler Mission of the Evangelical Mission Society in Basel (built 1858-1860); the Glasgow City Chambers (1883-1889); rice mills of the Zaan region (those built between 1870 and 1914); the HAPAG shipping company’s head offices in Hamburg (1899-1903 and 1912-1920); and the Musée des colonies in Paris (1928-1930). Each of the five physical structures is introduced by a theme: missionization; political posturing in civic space; agricultural networks; trade offices; and museums. Groten has several criteria for his choice of buildings. That they are still standing today, that they provide a multinational set of sources, that there is an opportunity for comparison (in order to follow how imperial culture was constructed across national borders) and that they are, aside from the Musée des colonies, lesser-studied examples of imperial urban culture. The overarching reason for these choices, however, is their being nodes of far-reaching imperial networks. Each chapter begins with a thematic introduction, which is followed by the longer in-depth case study of the building itself, or rather the discourse that surrounded its coming into being. This creates a neat setup, though the sites are wide in range, their presentation as case studies allows one to easily traverse imperial time and space on the continent. The Architecture of Empire in Modern Europe would therefore be very easy to teach with, given that each chapter also functions as a self-contained study, each chapter even receives its own abstract and bibliography. For some, this may already be too many cases to really provide a thorough analysis or deeper conceptual investigation, but what it lacks in depth, it makes up for in the opportunity for cross-comparative gestures. That the cases are explicitly and cohesively brought together in this study means that Groten has the advantage of contrasts across a spectrum: rather than colony to metropole, the reader is confronted with metropole to metropole.

Specters of comparison and circularity create some of the most interesting moments in this book, where the reader can see how the imperial everyday permeated Europe. That, for example, students at the Basel Mission House would eat curry every Sunday, for, citing the missionary Josef Haller, “[w]hoever does not like currie [sic] and rice cannot become a missionary in India” (p. 68). Or, in a chapter on the rice mills of the Zaan region of the Netherlands, that the Staff Association of the Wessanen mill organized a Javanese Art Night for the workers in the 1930s that included a trio of Indonesian artists who performed Wayang puppet plays (p. 157-158). Another colonial circularity is found in the example of Léopold Senghor’s admiration for the ethnographic museums of Paris that he visited in 1928, enabling “a generation of black students from Africa and the Caribbean to ‘discover’ themselves” and demonstrating how a museum’s imperial ideology could be overturned in favor of building connections between Black communities (p. 269). Bringing the imperial home often made for unexpected juxtapositions. The fact that the board of the Basler Mission even named the cluster of buildings the “mission colony and compound” echoed the concept of the mission developed overseas in colonial Ghana and India as forming an extra-urban network (a point that is unfortunately not elaborated on), bringing it home to Switzerland (64). These details are striking in their innocence, they destabilize assumptions around how imperialism usually depicted itself and its other. Some of the finest material in this book is in the third chapter on rice mills in the Zaan region (north of Amsterdam). Though they are, according to Groten, “not particularly architectural,” the chapter is the most spatially diverse, has the most interesting photographs, and Groten has carried out oral histories with the families of former mill workers, this in addition to the widest range of primary materials under analysis: packaging, brochures, events, and even staff meetings. Perhaps due to his closeness with the material, the analysis is deeper and more reflective, revealing the range of scales that the commodity of rice flowed through between Java and Zaan—from warehouses to intricately designed packaging to sumptuous advertising campaigns, and the everyday experiences of rice mill workers themselves.

Of course, stereotypical examples of imperial architecture abound throughout this book. Racial tropes of colonized peoples in entryway caryatids (at the HAPAG offices) or in friezes (at the London Exchange, or the Glasgow City Chambers, or at the Musée des colonies) “readily distinguished in person as well as costume” as Mogg’s 1838 travel guide to London would put it, appear throughout Groten’s study, and are to be expected in a book describing imperial architecture in Europe (p. 134-135 cf. 91). So frequent are these examples, and so similar to one another across the continent, that I wondered if this book really did “go beyond the obvious” in making imperialism “part of the cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, from which it has long been excluded” (p. 27). Groten can be praised for drawing on such a wide set of literary sources for his discursive analysis of these buildings. Yet it is not always clear what is being cited, or from where the source originates, or why it was chosen, giving the impression that any sources may well have made it into his analysis abstracted from context and positionality. I often had a sense of historical disorientation reading the chapters, losing track of who was saying what, which voices Groten was paraphrasing and which was his own. Secondary sources are frequently mixed with primary in the same sentence, and even in the footnotes no year is provided, forcing the reader to flip back and forth to the bibliography.

2 Patricia A. Morton, “National and Colonial: The Musée des Colonies at the Colonial Exposition, Par (...) 5However, the bigger problem with this stylistic quirk is that it contributes to a curious lack of reflection pervading the book. Whether this is because of the breadth of examples and lack of space to discuss them theoretically it is hard to tell. But it has consequences in terms of the way the material is presented back to the reader. Groten often cites shockingly racist material, most notably in the fifth chapter on the Musée des colonies and its infamous administrator Hubert Lyautey (p. 256). It made me wonder, what scholarship does Groten believe he is contributing to in tepidly reciting such language without critical reflection? Is it so uncomfortable to properly address that it must be included but left undiscussed? In the chapter Groten describes a painting by Louis Bouquet that depicted the museum’s architect surrounded by his representational partners, all of them white men wearing suits. Except one of them is not. Describing the painting in Art Bulletin in 1998, Patricia Morton says “she is not identified, nor does she belong to any of the ‘noble’ professions represented by the men around her. She is a bare-breasted black woman who resembles Josephine Baker, the patron saint of négrophilie, the fascination with black culture, between the wars.”2 The presence of this woman staring directly back at the viewer among men who look away is striking, and it is what I often felt was missing from Groten’s book, which presents impressively researched material in four languages that is impassively described back to the reader. That is, the position of the subject, whether the occupant of these buildings or the colonial subject that they so often depicted, is left ignored staring back at the viewer.