ABSTRACT
The development of the Atlantic World after 1492 led to an explosive growth in cities, agricultural districts, populations, trade, and material wealth because of mining, agricultural, and manufacturing industries that linked Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas together in completely new ways. This process happened in and through a built environment that enabled resource extraction, transport of raw materials, circulation of commodities, and enactment of power relations. The myriad needs of the extraction economy drove construction in a variety of forms, from buildings and technologies indispensable for the mining and processing of natural resources to the architecture of storage, commercial exchange, and coining. Colonial industries were made possible by another complementary architectural body: the residential quarters of those who labored in or benefited from this landscape of extraction. There were also the infrastructures designed to provide some modicum of physical care in labor districts such as hospitals as well as churches, ostensibly tending to the spiritual needs of laborers while reifying dominant social relations in landscapes of extraction. The present volume argues that histories of extraction must consider the social, physical, and mental nexus that is architecture, just as architecture’s development in the last 500 years cannot be adequately comprehended without attention to empire, extraction, and colonialism.
