The iron skeleton and the imperial skin : iron and the construction of modernity in colonial port cities

Abstract

This dissertation examines the history of iron architecture in colonial-era Hong Kong and Singapore to understand not simply the material’s circulation between Britain and these two imperial outposts and its effects on local building practices and culture, but the extent to which it catalysed broader movements of physical objects, building expertise, and architectural practices around the imperial British sphere between the late 19th through the early 20th centuries. My research explores how iron served as a key material component in structures beyond those typically considered as constitutive of the built environment, including quotidian infrastructure such as lighthouses, quarantine stations, godowns for storage, markets, as well as religious and cultural edifices such as churches and printing houses. These iron structures, as my study argues, also emerged as a crucial mediator between different constituencies of colonial societies throughout Asia, including between native merchants and colonial administrators, foreign missionaries and their local congregations, as well as western-trained building professionals and Asian craftsmen, among other relationships. As such, this thesis goes beyond recounting a history of iron as a key material for these imported structures and emergent technologies. Instead, I study the material culture of iron to expand the perceived purview and limitation of iron’s influence in architectural history. In doing so, my work reexamines the significance and developmental trajectory of the material, and reveals why it should be reconsidered and given more attention within not only architectural history, but the history of colonial port cities. Iron’s unique material, structural, and representational properties, including its superior compression and tensile strength, its ability to span longer distances compared to other materials, as well as its lower probability of fire damage, made it a vital connective force not simply in architecture, but as an essential scaffolding to support the vast communication and mobility networks facilitating the movement of tangible goods, people, and capital, as well as intangible knowledge and ideas between sea and land since the 19th century. My research challenges deterministic models of architectural development entrenched in architectural historiography, and in particular, the entrenched notion of iron’s development primarily focused on Britain and Europe, with Asian colonies serving as passive and peripheral receivers of this material and building technology. By tracing a much more complex trans-regional history of how the social and urban environments of Singapore, Hong Kong, and other port cities were negotiated and shaped through maritime and trade connections, my work expands beyond our current understanding of iron’s influence on global architectural production beyond the Eurocentric spatiotemporal framework of the Industrial Revolution. As I argue, iron acquired a range of positive attributes over time related to presumptions of dependability and durability, including progress, mobility, security, grandeur, and sanitation. Such representational elasticity made iron a vital and uniquely modern material in the literal and figural construction of mercantilism systems and colonial governance in the 19th and early 20th centuries.