The perfection of social order, life everlasting
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 8:11 am
While proclaiming that they are eternal, empires are still mindful of what a future time will think of them however anxious they are to insist that theirs is the last empire, they will last for a thousand years or even that their way is and peace on earth. Often the imperial architecture survives the fall of the imperial administration and is a monument to past glory (the British hotels and railway stations of East Asia, the Spanish churches of South America), but often the architecture is deliberately allowed by new masters to fall into disrepair.
The beautiful city of Algiers - or deliberately destroyed to erase the memory of imperial rule - the destruction of hundreds of British farms and gardens in Kenya. In what was the German Empire after phone number list 1945 nearly all still surviving architectural monuments of the Third Reich and many of the Second were removed by the puppet republican regimes installed by the Allies. The neglect and abandonment of the British country house in the 1950's appropriately coincided with the abandonment of the British Empire, of which such houses were the symbolic as well as material product. Of Ancient Carthage not one stone was left standing on another after the Third Punic War.
The empire preaches: "that which lies beyond our frontiers is stunted, unfinished, uncivilized, raw nature, undeveloped, unexplored, barbarian". Beyond the furthest outposts lie the wastelands. Here we shall build to show that civilization has finally arrived. We are going to put this place on the map. What belongs to the empire is chartered territory. Empire builders love maps: they are for ever redrawing them and colouring them in.
The beautiful city of Algiers - or deliberately destroyed to erase the memory of imperial rule - the destruction of hundreds of British farms and gardens in Kenya. In what was the German Empire after phone number list 1945 nearly all still surviving architectural monuments of the Third Reich and many of the Second were removed by the puppet republican regimes installed by the Allies. The neglect and abandonment of the British country house in the 1950's appropriately coincided with the abandonment of the British Empire, of which such houses were the symbolic as well as material product. Of Ancient Carthage not one stone was left standing on another after the Third Punic War.
The empire preaches: "that which lies beyond our frontiers is stunted, unfinished, uncivilized, raw nature, undeveloped, unexplored, barbarian". Beyond the furthest outposts lie the wastelands. Here we shall build to show that civilization has finally arrived. We are going to put this place on the map. What belongs to the empire is chartered territory. Empire builders love maps: they are for ever redrawing them and colouring them in.