“Lonely Dots”: John Thomas Arundel and the Architecture of Greater British Enterprise in the Pacific

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Victorian idea of a globe-spanning Greater Britain has been largely obscured by more recent discussions about “anglobalisation” and the so-called “Anglo World.” This paper proposes, however, that the political and philosophical positions vested in the idea of Greater Britain can have significant repercussions for understanding the historical relation between architecture and the state. It presents an architectural history of Greater British enterprise, arguing that, in the late-nineteenth-century Pacific, British imperial power relied both on liberal systems of law and politics, as well as the development of the capitalist economic system as a mode of governance in and of itself. The discussion follows the figure of John Thomas Arundel (1841-1919), an English businessman and trader, as he amassed significant interests in the guano and copra industries from the early 1870s on. To consider Arundel’s business empire is to shuttle between multiple scales, traversing the various islands, companies and infrastructures involved in the extraction of certain raw materials over time. As the discussion intends to demonstrate, the spoils of this extraction were always designed to run along British lines, between British states and in the name of British ascendancy as the empire looked towards a new century of global governance.