ABSTRACT
Civil control was exercised through a colonial administration which was urban based and depended upon the police, judiciary and bureaucracy. The majority of colonial capitals were coastal in location and the link between commerce and Empire was always strong. Extensive botanical gardens formed an integral part of the plan of many of the larger colonial cities. Exotic plants were propagated 'as things of curiosity' and for the beautification of the city. Security had been one of the chief concerns of colonial administrators and merchants from the inception of colonial enterprise. Colonialism involved a high degree of administrative regulation and the imposition of a substantial bureaucracy. The key elements of government offices and housing were arranged in great variety from the apparent unplanned situation in many capitals established in the seventeenth century, to the formal designs of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitals.
