El Chami, Y. orcid.org/0000-0002-0055-3639 (2024) A mutual project: architecture and the imperial foundations of American missionaries in nineteenth-century Beirut. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 83 (4). pp. 481-504. ISSN 0037-9808
Abstract
This article focuses on the construction of the Syrian Protestant College from its foundation in 1863 to the beginning of the twentieth century and resituates American missionaries as covert imperial actors in nineteenth-century Beirut. It examines the close relationship between the missionaries’ increasingly imperial ambitions and their architectural establishment in the city, as evidenced by the private correspondence of the college’s founders. Here, architecture was neither a simple projection of “American” or evangelical culture nor a materialization of direct colonial control. Rather, architecture was tasked with multiple evolving roles as the missionary project grew more secure. This article traces the development of the college and its campus through three phases to illustrate how architecture and the missionaries’ imperial ambitions became mutually constitutive over time. In elucidating the nineteenth-century imperial foundations of the Syrian Protestant College it reconsiders both the nature of American imperialism in the Middle East and the central role of architecture in its construction.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Society of Architectural Historians. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Beirut; Ottoman Empire; British Empire; American imperialism; American missionaries; missionary architecture |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Architecture and Landscape |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 03 Dec 2024 08:28 |
Last Modified: | 04 Dec 2024 15:21 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | University of California Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1525/jsah.2024.83.4.481 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:220293 |