Architectures of Colonialism positions the built environment as a decisive terrain where colonial histories are constructed, obscured, contested, and reactivated. Its central proposition is that colonial architecture cannot be treated as inert heritage or stylistic residue, because buildings, monuments, infrastructures, settlements, internment camps, and urban schemes continue to organise memory, violence, identity, and political belonging long after formal colonial rule has ended. The volume develops this argument through a methodological bridge between architectural history, archaeology, and heritage studies, insisting on archival troubling, positional reflexivity, oral testimony, material evidence, and attention to marginalised actors whose experiences are often absent from official records. Its case synthesis is deliberately global: from Bombay’s Victoria Terminus, Pretoria’s Voortrekker Monument, Angola’s Dundo, Maputo’s post-independence spatial redress, Ceuta, Goa, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sámi mining territory, Berlin’s colonial traces, and the Half Moon prisoner-of-war camp near Berlin, each chapter shows how colonial forms are repeatedly reused, conserved, demolished, aestheticised, denied, or re-signified. The book’s decisive contribution lies in rejecting neutral expertise: heritage conservation becomes a political act, and “shared heritage” is interrogated wherever asymmetrical histories make sharing ethically unstable. Its conclusion is that decolonial architectural history must not merely add forgotten cases to an existing canon, but transform the evidentiary, ethical, and participatory conditions through which memoryscapes are made.
