摘要：In this fascinating and well-written account, Louis Nelson places the domestic architecture of eighteenth-century Jamaica in the wider context of the British Atlantic world. Beautifully produced by Yale, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica aligns architecture–the production and consumption of buildings–with the production and consumption of empire. Based on extensive fieldwork, Nelson positions the design, construction and occupation of buildings, particularly housing, as evidence of the multiple flows and exchanges in capital, people and things that criss-crossed the British Atlantic Empire through the early modern period and which intersected and coalesced in Jamaica. It is a postcolonial architectural history. However, Nelson does not spell out postcolonial theory rather he presents a highly readable narrative that is imbued with but not uncomfortably dominated by theory. Throughout people are to the fore as the spaces, places and materiality of buildings are used to investigate the textures and meanings of lives lived in eighteenth-century Jamaica. In doing so Nelson approaches buildings as artefacts of human culture; manmade things that can be interpreted in order to understand a people and place better. This is a particular approach to architecture that integrates buildings, peoples and landscapes in the production of “cultural landscapes” and which reflects Nelson’s background in North American material culture studies as represented most directly by the Vernacular Architecture Forum's journal Buildings and Landscapes (of which Nelson is a former editor). Indeed, the use of character-led vignettes to introduce subjects and chapters shows the influence of writers such as Bernard L. Herman, a leading light in American buildings and landscapes studies and the vaf . No bad thing. Again, theories of material culture are evident to those who know the significance of sentences that “frame” cases studies or introduce “landscapes of…,” but this is lightly-handled and the text reads equally well for those unfamiliar with such things. Combining the lessons of material culture studies and postcolonial history, therefore, the result is not a straightforward buildings-and-dates architectural history of colonial British Jamaica but a broader, and more significant, analysis of the ways in which one particular site of human activity evolved within a wider network of other sites around the North Atlantic Rim including West Africa, North America and Britain.
