Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company

Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company

Jackson, Iain
Harrison, Ewan
Tenzon, Michele

Paperback

General ArchitectureGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesArchitecture History

ISBN10: 1350411353
ISBN13: 9781350411357
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Published: Mar 5 2026
Pages: 520
Weight: 3.25
Height: 1.27 Width: 7.33 Depth: 9.70
Language: English

2026 Architectural Book Award, History Category

This open access book tells a new and untold history of the architecture of West Africa in the colonial era, as revealed for the first time through the archives of the United Africa Company (UAC).

From the imperial Royal Niger Company's charter in the 1890s through to its suave African department stores of the 1960s, the UAC - a British company firmly embedded in the economies of colonialism, extraction, and exploitation - became the largest commercial firm in West Africa, involved in almost every commercial enterprise and sector, and responsible for procuring architecture, infrastructure, and city real-estate across a vast region.

Based on unprecedented access to the UAC archives, this book pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to independence. It reproduces an extraordinary array of newly-uncovered material - from photographs of streetscapes, buildings, and West African everyday life to civic reports and city plans - and presents these alongside critical and theoretical discussions to reveal an alternative account of the architecture of the region which stands in contrast to more conventional state-focused histories. The book explores technological, aesthetic, and political shifts through an architectural lens, and brings to the fore an awareness of the violence and appropriation which underlie each architectural episode, showing how the UAC, as a case-study, presents a unique opportunity to investigate how architecture manifests power, culture, and identity in colonial and post-colonial contexts.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Liverpool.

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