Introduction

Building the British Atlantic World is an introduction to the ocean-going culture of the British Atlantic world as interpreted through its buildings, landscapes and settlements, exploring the extent, diversity, and sameness of the architecture built by the British overseas across their North Atlantic colonies. It explores the many meanings that buildings held for the colonists-and colonized-who built and occupied them and reflects on the profound architectural connections that were maintained between the colonies and Britain. As such, the book draws upon expertise from the fields of art and architectural history, archaeology, historical geography, folklore, environmental history, material culture and vernacular architecture studies, museum curation, cultural history, and economic history in order to present an overview of British Atlantic culture through its built spaces and places. Driven by imperial expansion, religion, trade and migration from Canada to the Caribbean, from West Africa to the thirteen colonies, and the passage back to Britain, the cultural space of the British Atlantic world was mapped onto the landscapes of the northern Atlantic oceanic rim. Through periods of discovery and establishment in the seventeenth century, maintenance in the eighteenth century, and eventual dismantlement and decline in the nineteenth century, this world was made, seen, and experienced through its buildings: those built in distant, different lands and those built at "home." Today, across the vast expanse of this former Atlantic empire, buildings and towns remain as highly visible reminders of British colonial rule. Equally, throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, other buildings stand today as monuments to the impact of the Atlantic colonies on Britain. Whether forts in Bermuda, churches in New England, plantation houses in South Carolina, or farms in Canada, historic buildings are markers of a historic British presence, artifacts of a coherent but complex Atlantic culture. While individual buildings and urban centers were fundamentally made in order to facilitate functions and activities-defense, prayer, shelter-they also served as important communicators of meaning and of the values and ideals held by that culture, which we can interpret in the attempt to understand that world better. Buildings were expressions of power, authority, dominion, oppression, resistance, and rebellion; of concepts such as religious faith; of ethoi such as modernity, progress, identity, and improvement; or expressions of social concerns such as self-fashioning, status, wealth, taste, social conformity, familiarity, belonging, and exclusion.