Conflicting Identities: Religious Architecture and Imperial Expansion in the Age of Sectarianism, c.1840–1900

Engaging recent developments in regional (‘Atlantic’ and ‘Pacific’) and World/Global historiography, including the increasingly important subject of Protestantism and its impact on the formation of British colonial society, this lecture will consider the nature and consequences of global Anglicanism and its architecture in the context of empire.

Much scholarship on the relationship between architecture and empire in the British world has dealt almost exclusively with the secular domain. However, as K. Theodore Hoppen has observed, ‘never was Britain more religious than in the Victorian age’. Many Church of England clergymen who left Britain either as missionaries or as settler clerics understood themselves to be at the forefront of what was considered a wider and on-going battle against heathenism, ignorance, non-conformism, Roman Catholicism, and even republicanism.

As part of the de facto ‘national’ church, these clerics saw themselves as not merely Miles Christi but also, and importantly, agents of a particular sense of British national civilisation and identity, essential to the maintenance of a righteous and politically liberal world order. Exactly how and why architecture emerged as one of the chief ‘appliances’ in this struggle will be elaborated by way of examples in Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.