1.1 Two Pleas

Architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright is the first to examine Marrast’s remark. Marrast travelled to Morocco in 1915 at the behest of Henri Prost (1874–1959), who served as the principal urban planner under Resident-General Hubert Lyautey (1854–1943). Lyautey championed an ‘Arabizing style’ and oversaw the construction of several significant administrative and residential structures. Among these was the Palais de Justice in what is now known as the Mohammed V Square in Casablanca, designed by Marrast (Bloom and Blair, Reference Bloom and Blair2009: 546). In her 1991 book, Wright examines Marrast’s fascination with incorporating indigenous Moroccan motifs into the colonial government’s official buildings. She notes that ‘the architect saw another reason, beyond sheer aesthetic delight’, and quotes Marrast’s own words: ‘and thus, little by little, we conquer the hearts of the natives and win their affection, as is our duty as colonizers’ (Wright, Reference Wright1991: 1). What stands out in Wright’s interpretation is the suggestion that emotions played a significant role in the decision-making process surrounding the projects. Unfortunately, she does not delve deeper into this aspect, resulting in a missed opportunity for a more thorough examination of Marrast’s statement. Moreover, Marrast used the word ‘sympathie’ rather than ‘affection’: ‘Ainsi, peu à peu, se gagne le coeur des indigènes et se conquiert cette sympathie qu’il est du devoir des colonisateurs d’obtenir’ (Marrast, Reference Marrast1935: 24). Though the distinction between these terms might appear minimal, examining them within the broader context of emotions and their biocultural implications reveals that these nuances are vital for historical understanding. Wright interprets Marrast’s proposition as an attempt to ‘quell the Moroccans’ hostility toward European domination’ (Reference Wright1991: 1). However, without an examination of sympathie, Marrast’s intentions remain unclear. Since the publication of Wright’s book, many scholars have relied on her translation and interpretation, often without consulting the original source (Bentley, Reference Bentley2002: 15; Coslett, Reference Coslett and Gharipour2015: 356; Demissie, Reference Demissie2012: 1; Njoh, Reference Njoh2007: 31).Footnote ¹ Our first appeal is to pay close attention to the specific contexts surrounding emotions. Sympathie and affection are not synonymous; each has its own etymology and distinct social and cultural histories. Instead of viewing them as universal and unchanging, our analyses should be grounded and nuanced. In essence, any assessment of Marrast’s statement is lacking without understanding what he meant by sympathie and how his perspective differed from that of his English counterparts or nineteenth-century French imperialists.

Sympathy could be characterised as an affection in the early twentieth century. We elaborate on this point in the first section, but it is worth noting here that this alone demonstrates how nuances can be lost in simple translations and interpretations of emotions. Attending to the situated meanings of emotions across cultural and historical registers invites a mode of inquiry that resists straightforward comparisons across imperial geographies. Section 1 explores British colonial administrators and missionaries’ understandings of winning affection. Among them were notable figures such as Charles Metcalfe (1785–1864), Sir John Shore (1751–1834), Rev. R. Chambers (dates unknown) and Sidney Gaster (1873–1946). Although all were active in British India, their perspectives varied due to differing understandings of bodily interaction and attachment. Our analysis problematises Maja Hultman and Sophie Cooper’s call to ‘refocus the debate away from definitions’ (Reference Hultman and Cooper2023: 5). While we share Hultman and Cooper’s concern with recovering ‘resources, ambition and imagination’ of marginalised groups, we worry that their argument may not effectively deepen our understanding of those groups’ experiences. Instead, we argue that it is crucial to consider emotions (and emotional expressions) in conversation with shifting ambitions, forms of imagination and cognition (Lemmings and Brooks, Reference Brooks, Lemmings and Brooks2014: 3). It is also essential to examine the experiences of various communities in relation to their understandings of different emotions. This involves a thoughtful exploration of how they express and interpret emotions, both in themselves and in others. At the heart of Hultman and Cooper’s contention is the idea that certain resources, ambitions and imaginations are unmediated and purer. However, as Kristine Alexander, Stephanie Olsen and Karen Vallgårda (Reference Hultman and Cooper2023) have reminded us, ‘voices are always produced in relationships, and they are always performative, always mediated’. Rob Boddice, Mark Smith and Bettina Hitzer have likewise offered well-grounded critiques of the notion of authenticity (Boddice, Reference Boddice and Hitzer2022; Boddice and Hitzer, Reference Boddice and Hitzer2022: 3–23; Boddice and Smith, Reference Boddice and Smith2020: 30–31, 51–2). Simply searching for and discussing emotions is insufficient for understanding past experiences. A deeper engagement with their situated meanings and implications is crucial. When examining emotions, we must avoid assuming that their meanings are universally understood or that we can access a pure, unmediated and authentic experience.

We acknowledge Hultman and Cooper’s call to reconsider our sources. But we maintain that revealing ‘alternative’ experiences is impossible without attending to the situated meanings of emotions. More critically, a shift away from definitions risks ‘reterritorializing’ minority experiences, treating them as ‘an ancillary or extraneous topic’ rather than recognising them as ‘objects of knowledge’ (Spillers et al., 2007; Weheliye, Reference Weheliye2014) in their own right, and for the challenge they pose to ‘core assumptions’ about the ‘environment’ and ‘human/environmental interactions’ (McMurray, Reference McMurray2021: 82). If we accept the ‘basic assumption’ that, as Boddice notes, ‘relations with the environment, the ecosystem and the city were different in the past to what we find in the present’ (Reference Boddice2018: 8), we must reflect on the meaning of environment and on the relationship between human – especially human beyond the ‘liberal humanist subject “man”’ (Weheliye, Reference Weheliye2008: 322) – and the environment. This leads us to our second plea: we cannot rely solely on delving into past experiences, memories, expectations and desires within ‘the self-referential framework of the discursive/linguistic traditions of the [post-Enlightenment] West’ (Liu, Reference Liu1993: 83) to reveal, even in fragments, local and minority experiences.Footnote ² To clarify this further, we return to Wright’s analysis of Marrast’s statement.

Wright suggests that ‘the design did win the affection of the city’s residents, if not their souls’ (Reference Wright, Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll1994: 233). This suggestion is unfounded, as it overlooks how winning sympathie through local architectural motifs was mediated through culturally specific modes of perception. It reflects a broader tendency in scholarship to treat the relationship between emotions and the built environment through universal and timeless lenses, rather than in relation to specific contexts. In Section 2, we address the critical need to historicise this relationship, unsettling the works of phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), architectural and art historians and feminist geographers (Clark, Reference Clark2015; Listerborn, Reference Listerborn and Bondi2002; Tsiftsi, Reference Tsiftsi2017). These works are valuable, particularly in their emphasis on the ‘lived space’ of architecture over its physical dimensions. However, much of this scholarship tends to universalise the body–brain–world relationship. Our plea for historicisation resists viewing buildings unequivocally as emotional prescriptions or as ‘materialities of the social’ (Barclay, Reference Barclay and Broomhall2017: 169). After all, what constitutes sociality? As R. A. Judy has argued, ‘a determinate discursive sociality’, rooted in the ‘etymon of person in the Latin term persona’, was used to ‘severe the captive enslaved body from its motive will and active desire.’ (2020: 4). Our plea also extends the work of historians of emotions, who have explored the relationship between the built environment and emotions (Großmann and Nielsen, Reference Großmann and Nielsen2018; Pernau, Reference Pernau2014, Reference Pernau2015b). These scholars contend that the ‘connection between an emotion and a particular building can change over time’ as bodies ‘bear the imprint of the spaces they are moving through and have moved through’ (Pernau, Reference Pernau2014: 541). While we acknowledge this argument, we emphasise that how bodies bear such imprints can only be comprehended through attention to the diverse ‘ways of being bodies’ in the world (Kuriyama, Reference Kuriyama1999: 13). These include embodied, embrained, ‘disembodied mind’ (Harris, Robb and Tarlow, Reference Harris, Oliver, Tarlow, Robb and Harris2013: 172), ‘ensouled’ (Paster, Reference Paster2004) and ‘a psycho-physical casual one’ (Taylor, Reference Taylor1989: 188–89), among others. There is certainly nothing ‘natural’ or ‘innate’ about objects. However, if we rely solely on embodiment to understand the connection between bodies and the built environment, we risk overlooking the historical contexts in which people navigated and inhabited their surroundings. There is a historicity to the act of moving through, and by extension, to the ‘relationship between materiality and subject’ (Barclay, Reference Barclay and Broomhall2017: 170), which is deeply entangled with histories of science, religion, race, gender, technology and globalisation. Some art and architectural historians have emphasised the ‘deeply historical character’ of the way people interact with their surroundings (Crary, Reference Crary2001; Klonk, Reference Klonk2009, Reference Klonk1996). In his discussion of embodiment, culture and environment, David Howes have similarly gestured towards this historical character by noting the shift from bodily ways of knowing such as ‘skin knowledge’ to ‘mechanised ways of knowing’, which are enormously important to Westerners and other ‘“wired” societies’ understanding of perception (Reference Klonk2005: 30). Additionally, Sigrid de Jong has explored the emergence of architectural experience in the second half of the eighteenth century (de Jong, Reference de Jong, van Eck and de Jong2017), while Karen Burns has examined the appearance of ‘new environmentalism’ in Christian high culture from the late 1830s, which led to new conceptions of ‘art as a medium of sensory effect’ (Burns, Reference Burns2016). These studies have often been sidelined in favour of the universal and ahistorical notion of ‘emotion-landscape mingling’ (Lam, Reference Hon2018).Footnote ³ A biocultural whole model, or a body–brain–world dynamic model, proposed particularly by Rob Boddice, calls for a mutable and unstable understanding of the relationship between the built environment and emotions. This model demands a move beyond the ahistorical and pre-cultural framing of building-emotion mingling.

1.2 Against ‘Beyond Reason’

Historians have often been reluctant to reassess the divide between emotion and reason within the context of histories of imperialism. When Wright published her book examining Marrast’s statement on ‘sympathie’, Ann Laura Stoler had begun to question the ‘superiority of reason’ and to argue for an ‘affective genealogy of security’ (emphasis in the original) (Reference Stoler2016: 205). This contention has remained central to her work ever since. But as we (the authors) reviewed Stoler’s extensive scholarship spanning four decades, we were confronted with a challenging question: does her work collapse the dichotomy between reason and emotion? The answer is unresolved to us. In her writings from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, Stoler focuses primarily on how ‘intimate domains – sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing – figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule’ (Reference Stoler2001: 263). Her emphasis lies in exploring the entanglements between colonisers and the colonised and the intersections of the political with the personal and the public with the private, rather than in directly interrogating the emotion–reason binary. We learn about domesticity, sexuality and the shifting interpretations of what it meant to be and remain European men and women, and the close attachments of various kinds and their management in the making of imperial domination.Footnote ⁴ When Stoler speaks of ‘the education of desires’, she highlights the colonial states and imperial figures’ vested interest in shaping private lives. Affect, sense and sensibilities become ‘the real stuff of official archives’ (2010: 12) within the confines of private and intimate lives. Much like the turn to intimacy, gender, emotions and everyday life among social scientists in the 1970s and the 1980s (Brooks, Reference Brooks, Lemmings and Brooks2014: 52–4),Footnote ⁵ her analysis positions the ‘intimate’ as another criterion besides evidence of rationality, reason and progress, rather than affect, emotions or sensibilities, at the centre of historiographical practices. It is the intimate that deepens our understanding of identity, race, gender and class in imperial formations rather than emotions.

In her later works – specifically Along the Archival Grain, Duress and Interior Frontiers – Stoler moves past examining the intimate sphere to address the complexities surrounding the binary of reason and emotion. While her intention appears to be dismantling these distinctions, her argument treats sentiments as ‘the very opposite’ of reason (2007: 58). In these texts, she challenges the notion of ‘Enlightenment-as-imperialism’ and ‘the ready distinctions between sentiment and political rationality’. She not only contends that ‘the sentiments and passions’ were central to Enlightenment thought, attitudes and practices, but also asserts that ‘Reason’, with a capital R, is ‘an elusive – indeed, moving – target, mobile in meaning, unfettered by scale, historically contingent, radically altered by context’ (Reference Stoler2016: 214).Footnote ⁶ Nevertheless, she tends to position sentiments and passions in a space characterised as ‘beyond reason’. Her formulation is more concerned with the inadequacy and failure of reason than with exploring how sentiments and emotions were theorised and experienced. When Stoler states in chapter one of Along the Archival Grain that the ‘political rationalities’ were grounded in the management of ‘affective states’, she goes on to assert that ‘colonial states “kept watch” through a fuzzier set of conceptual distinctions that the rubrics of “reason” versus “passions” imply – through a blurred rather than a sharp Cartesian lens’ (Reference Stoler2009: 60). Yet ultimately, her introduction of emotions and sentiments as being as important as reason and rationality and her reference to them as ‘other criteria’ or as part of a ‘history in a minor key’ preserves the emotion and reason duality, offering them, at best, a ‘shared space of governance’ (Stoler, Reference Stoler2009: 5, 52, 66).

We do not wish to downplay the importance of Stoler’s otherwise thought-provoking works. We share her unease with the dominant focus on ‘the superiority of reason’ in the writing of imperial histories.Footnote ⁷ Her argument has been central to our work, and our point of departure aligns with hers. Nevertheless, our approach differs in that we do not identify a distinct ‘affective genealogy of security’. Instead, we see genealogies of emotions as entangled within broader systems of knowledge production, fundamental to imperial practices and to the construction of environments and the world. What is striking, when reading across Stoler’s oeuvre, is the absence of the history of emotions literature.Footnote ⁸ This literature shows that the heart was considered the seat of emotions in Europe from the classical period up until the nineteenth century, encompassing soul, mind and the body in a complex union. Shifting medico-scientific understandings gradually relocated the site of emotions to the brain from the nineteenth century onwards (Alberti, Reference Alberti2010: 16–40; Harris, Robb, Tarlow, Reference Harris, Oliver, Tarlow, Robb and Harris2013: 164–95). Stoler’s analysis overlooks these significant transformations. By employing the term ‘carnal knowledge’, she locates the site of emotions invariably in the body, disregarding how contemporaries thought about the body and its relationship to knowledge. The shift towards viewing emotions as rooted in the brain marked a crucial ‘regime of truth’ (Stoler, Reference Stoler2002: 2) that shaped colonial discourses and policies. This perspective underpinned arguments about the supposed inferiority of indigenous populations, who were believed to lack the advanced frontal brain development attributed to the average European (McCulloch, Reference McCulloch1995: 47).

Stoler’s articles and books rank among the most cited in the field. Catherine Hall has described Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power as ‘captivating’ and recognised it as ‘a must for all scholars of colonial rule’ (Reference Stoler, Nugent and Vincent2004: 532). However, historians of modern European imperial architecture have largely disregarded Stoler’s call for an affective genealogy of security, even when they engage with her work (Lagae and Holst, Reference Lagae and Holst2023; Tennakoon, Reference Tennakoon2023). Meanwhile, historians of imperialism have yet to challenge the authority of reason as forcefully as Stoler might have hoped. Critics of her earlier works have asked ‘what’s love got to do with it’, accusing her of neglecting ‘violence and discrimination’ in favour of ‘colonizing the hearts and minds of women, children, and men’ (Gutiérrez, Reference Gutiérrez2001: 869). Ramó Gutiérrez’s note is telling: Stoler’s ‘method will surely help us write affective histories, devoid of the blood and sweat and tears of which colonial conquests and racists regimes were made in the past and still are maintained’ (Gutiérrez, Reference Gutiérrez2001: 869). While commentaries on her later works are less dismissive, they tend to acknowledge her emphasis on ‘affective knowledge’ as adding another layer or dimension to an otherwise ‘one dimensional picture of the European colonial project’ or praise her for identifying and stressing a previously overlooked category (Gouda et al., Reference Gouda, Raben, Nordholt and Stoler2009). In his examination of sympathy, state-building and the experience of empire, Danilyn Rutherford highlights Stoler’s scholarship for establishing that ‘empire is an affair of the heart, as well as the head’ (Reference Rutherford2009: 4). We are left with the impression that one can talk of the rationality and emotionality of imperial rule or write an ‘intellectual’ and ‘emotional’ history of imperialism (Berg and Ramos-Zayas, Reference Berg and Ramos-Zayas2015: 663). Until these dualities are called into question, emotions will continue to be treated as a separate category, leading to their persistent marginalisation in favour of what is assumed as reason and rational decisions.

To illustrate the idea that ‘the distribution of compassion, sympathy, and pity … was pivotal to the workings of imperial formations’, Stoler prompts us to ask, ‘who had them [compassion, sympathy, and pity] and to whom they were rightly directed’? (Stoler, Reference Stoler2016: 54) and ‘which kinds of knowledge of peoples and their passions were required for “reasons of state”’ (Stoler, Reference Stoler2009: 59). We can begin to undo the separation of emotion and reason by posing further inquiries: how some came to have emotions, how they chose to channel those feelings towards particular groups and how some knowledge of people’s emotions was perceived as more important than others.Footnote ⁹ Asking these questions opens a pathway for considering how the application of emotions involved judgments. It also raises subsequent questions about the sources of those judgments, leading to a more situated understanding of emotions. These questions echo Sara Ahmed’s exploration of the interrelation between race, gender, power and happiness: ‘how happiness is associated with some life choices and not others, how happiness is imagined as being what follows being a certain kind of being’ (Reference Ahmed2010: 2). Ahmed’s examination is as wide-ranging as it is situated. She carefully shows how happiness acquired new valences in relation to changing notions of progress, well-being and welfare. Her statement that the history of happiness is ‘a history of associations’ succinctly captures the core of her exploration (2010: 2). What we learn is that ‘utilitarian happiness’, rather than happiness per se, served to justify the imperial mission (123). Ahmed’s formulation clearly shows the correlation between what emotions are and what emotions do.

2.1 Winning Affection

Our analysis of affection considers Charles Metcalfe (1785–1846), Sir John Shore (1751–1834), the Rev. R. Chambers (dates unknown) and Sidney Gaster (1873–1946). While their perspectives were not definitive, they allow us to illuminate similarities and differences in understandings of affection. Metcalfe serves as a key case study due to his prominent role in the early nineteenth-century history of British India; he became acting general governor of India in 1835. A contemporary of Metcalfe, Shore held the position of Governor-General of Bengal from 1793 to 1798. We have selected Shore particularly for his role as the founder and first president of the British and Foreign Bible Society, serving from 1804 to 1834. Though less prominent, Chambers and Gaster are also important case studies as a missionary and a medical missionary, respectively. Chambers was appointed Chaplain at Agra in 1835, and Gaster joined the Punjab and Sindh Mission in 1900. All four individuals referenced the idea of winning affection, each from their unique perspective.

Metcalfe did not see much political value in winning affection. As he put it, ‘we are here by conquest, not by the affection of our subject’ (Mr. Wilks, 1833: 12). In contrast, Shore adopted a different stance, believing that affection could play a crucial role in empire building. In 1834, he expressed concern that ‘the bond of attachment [between East India Company’s sepoys] would soon be dissolved, and disaffection and aversion be substituted for subordination’ (Lord Teignmouth, Reference Teignmouth1843: 281). Importantly, his concern stemmed primarily from the influence of missionaries and their ‘aggressive evangelism’, although missionaries were preoccupied with winning the affection of ‘the natives’.Footnote ¹² Some, like Chambers, believed they were cultivating affection not only towards missionaries but towards all ‘English’ people:Footnote ¹³ ‘you cannot imagine how delightful it was to see their warm affection and confidence in their kind Pastor, and, in a measure, toward all their English visitors’ (Brief Reviews of the Past History of the Missions, 1850: 208). Several of Gaster’s colleagues, such as Dr Theodore Pennell (1867–1912), expressed similar views (Honarmand Ebrahimi, Reference Honarmand Ebrahimi2023a: 182–92). Historians of the British Empire have highlighted the connections and frictions between religion and empire (Etherington, Reference Etherington2005; Porter, Reference Porter2004). While it may be tempting to dismiss the varied interpretations of affection by Metcalfe, Shore, Chambers and Gaster as mere reflections of these tensions, it is essential to recognise that their insights cannot be solely attributed to shifting imperial policies. Revaluating affection in each context shows their distinct understandings of the term. The interplay of cultural, social and religious expectations, alongside changing beliefs about the body, race and gender, combined with political dynamics, shaped the specific appreciation of affection in each case.

The British Empire, as several studies have shown, was not a singular and coherent power or ‘project’ (Darwin, Reference Darwin2009; Wilson and Dilley, Reference Wilson and Dilley2023). But why did Metcalfe and Shore, both prominent colonial administrators, hold such different views? And why did Shore, a devoted Evangelical and a close friend of Charles Grant (1746–1823), an ardent supporter of the evangelisation of India in the final decades of the eighteenth century, express concern that missionaries might disrupt the bonds of affection, even though missionaries believed they were cultivating affection towards all ‘English’ people? And did Chambers and Gaster share a similar mindset? To begin with, it is essential to bear in mind that when Metcalfe, Shore and Chambers used the word affection, the term ‘emotion’ had not yet replaced affection as the name for ‘a category of mental states’ (Dixon, Reference Dixon2012: 338). Distinguished from passion, affection was viewed as milder and less troubling. This distinction traces back to ancient debates between Stoicism and Christianity. For two influential figures of Western Christian thinking, St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, the intellect was tasked with controlling passions or outwardly and earthy appetites directed at objects (Dixon, Reference Dixon2002). While this distinction underwent changes throughout the centuries, it remained largely intact until the late nineteenth century. The word emotion entered the English lexicon in the late sixteenth century, though it was initially used in ‘an irregular fashion’ to denote ‘movement or disturbance’ (Barclay, Lemmings and Walker, 2020: 1–2). In 1813, physician and philosopher Thomas Cogan (1736–1818) published a five-volume work on passions and affections. In its opening chapter, he distinguished ‘passion’ from ‘affection’, linking the former to ‘the evil propensities’ and the latter to ‘virtuous propensities; as the social, friendly, parental, filial affections’ (Reference Cogan1813: 3). This study suggests that affection encompassed diverse states of feeling. Affection and sympathy were not synonymous. Sympathy could be characterised as an affection during this period, but was not synonymous with it.

Histories of happiness, pain, sympathy and loneliness have laid a solid foundation for historians of imperial architecture to revisit their examination. These studies encourage us to ‘reconstruct the world around an emotion word’ (Boddice, Reference Boddice2018: 35): to explore linguistic and non-linguistic repertoires available to historical actors, examine the rules that guided their behaviour and consider what mattered most to them. Traditional Christian thought (incorporating philosophy and anatomy) shaped the perspectives of Metcalfe, Shore, Chambers and Gaster. However, by the second half of the eighteenth century, ‘the Cartesian “moment” had come and gone’, and the beliefs in the unity of body, mind and soul had begun to wane. As noted by Oliver J. T. Harris, John Robb and Sarah Tarlow, ‘many authors were employing the new philosophical tools of the Enlightenment to proclaim their distance from the earthy ties of the body, whether to conduct “pure” research or just to be “pure” theologically’ (Reference Harris, Oliver, Tarlow, Robb and Harris2013: 170). Paradoxically, the body retained importance, perceived either as a ‘temporary vehicle for the soul’ requiring discipline or as ‘an object of study’ (Reference Harris, Oliver, Tarlow, Robb and Harris2013: 169–70). The viewpoints of Metcalfe, Shore, Chambers and Gaster caught up in these transformations. Encyclopaedias and advice literature (Menagarishvili, Reference Menagarishvili2020; Pernau, Reference Pernau, Pernau, Jordheim and Bashkin2015a) served as influential sources of knowledge legitimation in this context. Under certain circumstances (Kivimäki, Malinen and Vuolanto, Reference Kivimäki, Malinen and Vuolanto2023), they could foster imagined ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein, Reference Rosenwein2007). The English Encyclopaedia (1802), which distinguished affection from passion and passion from emotion, is but one example. The ‘life stories’ of Metcalfe, Shore, Chambers and Gaster may have also informed their understandings of affection. For example, Metcalfe hailed from Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was born into a prominent ‘Anglo-oriental family’. He was the son of Major Thomas Metcalfe (1745–1813) and held the position of director at the East India Company during various periods between 1789 and 1812. In 1803, he became personal secretary to the Governor-General of Bengal Lord Wellesley (1798–1805), who was recognised for his assertive expansionist policies (Nichols, 2019). Born in London, Shore was the son of an East India Company employee Thomas Shore. He followed in his father’s footsteps and entered the Company’s service in 1769. One year later, in 1770, he was appointed assistant to the board of revenue at Murshidabad. This post allowed him to witness the 1770 famine first-hand, a calamity he recalled decades later as ‘still fresh in Memory’s eye’ (Chaudhary, Reference Chaudhary2012: 157–8). Missionaries were often born into missionary families, with some dedicating their entire careers to working closely with local people in the mission fields. Gaster was a son of Rev. Thomas Gaster (1832–1909), who was a missionary in British India between 1857 and 1863 (The Autumn Farewell, 1900: 861). While Metcalfe and Shore identified as colonisers, some missionaries preferred to distance themselves from such classifications when discussing their work and identities. It is only by taking these considerations into account that scholars can start to examine the situated meanings of affection.

If we consider Cogan’s study and The English Encyclopaedia, it becomes clear that their use of the term ‘affection’ indexes forms of social and physical attachment. To delve deeper into this understanding, it is useful to consider the term attachment, which requires thinking about apprehension through proximity and touch. Imperial actors sought to impose new sensory regimes on their subjects, whose senses they judged as uncivilised and backward (Rotter, Reference Rotter2019). While apprehension through touch had not yet lost currency in early nineteenth-century Western society in favour of sight (Howes and Classen, Reference Howes, Classen, Howes and Classen2014: 1), the rules governing who could touch what, and under what circumstances, were tightly regulated. Holding European sensorialities far above those of ‘primitive’ peoples (Classen, Reference Classen2012: xii), imperial actors condemned physical proximity with indigenous populations and subjected it to strict rules as early as the late eighteenth century. However, these rules were not applied uniformly to every local person. In this light, it is important to ask whom Metcalfe was referencing when arguing against the centrality of affection to British empire building. His mission to Lahore, spanning August 1808 to May 1809, illustrates his willingness to build personal connections with local rulers for the purpose of gaining ‘affective knowledge’ (Nichols, 2019) or ‘knowledge which derived from the creation of moral communities within the colonial society by means of conversion, acculturation or interbreeding’ (Bayly, Reference Bayly1996: 7).Footnote ¹⁴ In this regard, although Metcalfe, Shore, Chambers and Gaster shared certain perspectives, notable differences also existed. Shore singled out the Company’s sepoys, but he did not just favour attachment to certain elite groups or limit his interest to knowledge acquisition. In Notes on Indian Affairs, Shore referenced Metcalfe’s statement, interpreting it as ‘the attachment or dislike with which we are regarded by the natives’. He concurred with Metcalfe’s assertion that ‘we are detested by the people’ across much of the country (Shore, Reference Shore1837: 530–2). Like Grant, he perceived this ‘disaffection’ as a significant threat to the stability of British India. But Grant’s perspective on affection was geared towards ‘establishing in their [people of our territories] minds … an affectionate participation in our lot, [and] union with our interests’ (1797: 203), whereas Shore was concerned with the souls of the people.Footnote ¹⁵

The soul was also a focal point for both Chamber and Gaster. But, as missionaries, they favoured physical proximity. As a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century physician, Gaster’s views were shaped by changing ideas about death, suffering and pain. For him, as for many medical missionaries, healing bodies was inseparable from the salvation of souls. In this context, gaining affection was redefined to reflect relationships framed as those between ‘friends and benefactors and worthy of much esteem’, even likening missionary roles to that of spiritual parents (Native Esteem and Affection for Missionaries, Reference 58Marrast1887: 767). Moreover, showing and cultivating sympathy through the abandonment of ‘a spirit of religious superiority over the Pagan or the Mohammedan’ (Rev. Dr Bruce, Reference Bruce1895: 281) and through acts of ‘feeding’, ‘folding’, ‘watching’ and ‘watering’ (Herron, Reference Herron1863: 161) gained prominence as prerequisites for winning affection. By the late nineteenth century, the foremost goal of medical missionaries was to connect with a broader and more diverse array of local individuals. This proximity could foster sympathy. To complicate matters further, the ways in which winning affection was understood and practised varied between male and female missionaries and depended on the country in which they served. For example, despite travelling overseas and challenging prevailing views of women’s roles at the time (Gaitskell, Reference Gaitskell and Porter2003; Prevost, Reference Prevost2010, Reference Prevost2008), female missionaries were often linked to what were considered ‘lower’ senses – touch, taste and smell (Classen, Reference Classen2012: 75) – which defined the form and scope of their activities. While winning affection was relevant to both male and female missionaries, for women it took the form of ‘familial connection’ or ‘sisterhood’ with (potential) converts (Honarmand Ebrahimi, Reference Ebrahimi, Parker and Doble2023b). Moreover, medical missionaries operating in the so-called Muslim World referred to their hospitals as ‘affective agencies’. In places like Persia and north-western British India, missionaries faced restrictions on preaching – sometimes encountering hostility, including being stoned – and struggled to connect with diverse populations through Bible sales and educational initiatives. The introduction of medical work helped mitigate these challenges (Honarmand Ebrahimi, Reference Honarmand Ebrahimi2023a).

Christopher Bayly argues that the British state’s concern with ‘affective knowledge’ diminished over the course of the nineteenth century. Stoler, by contrast, contends that the opposite was true. According to her, ‘affective knowledge was at the core of political rationality in its late colonial form’ (Stoler, Reference Stoler2002: 102). Attending to the diverse and changing understandings of affection throughout the nineteenth century adds nuance to these differing viewpoints. What underwent transformation by the late nineteenth century was not a political reframing of affection per se, but a political reframing of the relationship between touch and affection. In other words, although the political exigency of affective knowledge persisted, it involved touch in different ways. The relationship between policy and practice was certainly ambiguous, and internal differences existed among imperial actors’ policies and aims. But there were also distinctions in how affection was framed. The work of medical missionaries demanded physical proximity. The reframing of affection as familial touch and of sympathy as a prerequisite for gaining affection, legitimated physical touch as both acceptable and necessary.

Our examination of affection demonstrates that sensitivity to the language entails more than simply employing historical terminology. Affection was a mixture of affective and cognitive categories, continually framed and reframed in relation to shifting concepts of race, gender and sovereignty. Understanding its situated meaning is not possible without engagement with the history of the senses. Treating emotions and the senses separately is one reason scholars have often failed to attend to the contextual meanings of emotions. Recent calls to consider the history of emotions and the senses in dialogue (Boddice, Reference Boddice2018; Boddice and Smith, Reference Boddice and Smith2020; Moscoso, Reference Moscoso2021) highlight that neglecting their interrelationship hampers our understanding of emotions, their management and the nature and knowledge of lived experience. This call for integration is rooted in the historiography of emotions and the senses. Neither Lucien Febvre of the Annales School (Boddice and Smith, Reference Boddice and Smith2020) nor David Howes and Alan Corbin in the 1980s and 1990s (Boddice, Reference Boddice2018: 132–33; Smith, Reference Smith2021: 30) treated emotions and the senses as distinct.Footnote ¹⁶ In the next section, the focus on non-Western or non-Anglophone concepts makes recognising their interconnection even more crucial.Footnote ¹⁷ Considering them in dialogue is essential for capturing ‘the lived, meaningful reality of historical actors’ (Boddice and Smith, Reference Boddice and Smith2020: 17). Any straightforward interpretation risks being misleading. The depth and breadth of historical understanding required to examine emotion words is vast. While the process is demanding, the insights gained are invaluable, offering a richer and more complete historical narrative.

2.2 Understanding Form

We have already mentioned that scholars have often used the words affection and sympathy when examining buildings constructed using local or traditional techniques and decorative forms. The prevailing argument suggests that imperial actors sought to exert control by fostering a sense of affection through the adaptation of local building traditions. This interpretation frames the incorporation of local architectural techniques as a strategic element of imperial governance. Scholars who have advanced this view by drawing on concepts of mimesis, mimicry and imitation have gone so far as to situate these adaptations within a broader ‘thematic complex’ tracing back to Greek antiquity (Ladwig and Roque, Reference Ladwig and Roque2018). Although they have examined imperial imprints on theories of mimesis, their emphasis on comparison and categorisation obscures differences. They tend to associate these buildings with unfounded affective charges. Far from stripping these structures of their political implications, we hope to show that attending to the situated meanings of affection can yield a more nuanced understanding of these buildings’ form and political agendas.

Under the leadership of Hubert Lyautey, Resident General of French Morocco from 1912 to 1925, a distinct approach to building design became popular, called ‘Arabizing style’. During this period, Marrast designed Casablanca’s Palais de Justice, built between 1921 and 1922 (Figure 1). The building faces onto a square and features a symmetrical layout characteristic of the Beaux-Arts style, while incorporating Moroccan decorative elements (Roberson, Reference Roberson2014: 63). Marrast’s use of traditional decorative motifs was not unique to the early twentieth-century French Empire in North Africa; this practice can be traced across various French imperial territories, as well as those of the Dutch, British and Portuguese Empires, from at least the mid nineteenth century and possibly earlier. Examples abound. We begin by describing a selection of these buildings, most of which have been extensively studied, before turning to how analysing affection in context can deepen our understanding of their design and intended purpose.

Figure 1 The Palais de Justice in 1936. The building overlooks the gardens, now known as Mohammed V Square. Local architectural elements were incorporated into its façade.

Source: Image Archive / Dia_247-09071, ETH Library Zurich. http://doi.org/10.3932/ethz-a-000081454

Far from Morocco, French imperial authorities embarked on a project of renovating Buddhist temples and ‘rebuilding’ Buddhism in Cambodia and Laos in the 1890s. In Laos, the ravaged city of Vientiane was selected as the capital of the Lao part of French Indochina.Footnote ¹⁸ Recognising the symbolic power of temples for Buddhist kings, staff of the French School of the Far East, École franҫaise d’Extrême-Orient, including architects, Indologists and archaeologists, assessed the architectural heritage linked to Lao Buddhist civilisation. They mapped these sites and undertook renovation efforts, notably on the revered That Luang temple, drawing on Louise Delaporte’s (1842–1925) paintings from the 1860s. This process involved systematically disassembling the temple, photographing and analysing its components and then carefully reconstructing and restoring the structure (Bayly, Reference Bayly2000; Ladwig, Reference Ladwig2018).

An early nineteenth-century example is the parish Church at Rangiātea, New Zealand. The Church stands out as one of the first instances of the Anglicans’ tactic of integrating local construction techniques (Figure 2). It was constructed near the Church Missionary Society (CMS) station at Otāki between 1848 and 1851.Footnote ¹⁹ Externally, the Church may not appear particularly unconventional, having been constructed without direct references to Māori art or architecture. However, it is within the interior that the influence of Māori construction and decorative techniques becomes evident (Bremner, Reference Bremner2013: 169–70; Turner, Reference Turner2015: 206–11). Local Māori, under the supervision of Samuel Williams (1822–1907) – a son of Henry Williams (1792–1867), the leader of the CMS mission in New Zealand – built the Church. The rafters of the Church were adorned with kowhaiwhai patterns in red and yellow. Moreover, Tukutuku (lattice wall panels) ‘were placed between the structural wall posts’, featuring the purapura whetu (stardust) pattern woven into them (Brown, Reference Brown2000: 256). A decade later, similar construction techniques were used by local builders to construct a church at Manutuke (Sundt, Reference Sundt2010). Other examples of Anglican churches incorporating local architectural elements include the St. Mark’s Church in Alexandria, Egypt, All Saints’ Memorial Church in Peshawar, Pakistan (Figures 3 and 4) and the Christ Church Cathedral in Stone Town, Zanzibar. These churches were built in the second half of the nineteenth century. Unlike the churches at Ōtaki and Manutuke, local traditions and techniques were integrated into both the exterior and the interior of these buildings. All Saints’ Memorial Church was constructed by the adaptation of ‘Saracenic architecture’. As Thomas Partrick Hughes (1838–1911) wrote in 1885, the Memorial Church ‘stands in an Oriental dress’ (Reference Hughes1884: 121). Built of brick covered with ‘Indian stucco’, the Memorial Church features a dome-covered cupola, inscriptions in Persian and Pushto and distinct entrances for men and women. The British architect James Wild (1814–1892) designed St. Mark’s Church by combining early Christian forms with ‘Islamic’ details (Crinson, Reference Crinson1995: 58–64). Likewise, the Christ Church Cathedral blends local, particularly ‘Islamic’, forms with Byzantine architectural elements (Bremner, Reference Bremner2009: 514–39).

Figure 2 Interior of Otāki Church, ca. 1851. Church rafters bore kowhaiwhai patterns, while tukutuku panels with purapura whetu designs filled the spaces between wall posts. The height of the building is much exaggerated.

Source: B-080-021: Barraud, Charles Decimus 1822–1897, National Library of New Zealand.

Figure 3 All Saints’ Memorial Church, Peshawar. The Memorial Church features a dome-covered cupola, inscriptions in Persian and Pushto and distinct entrances for men and women.

Source: Hughes, T. P. (1884). All Saints’ Memorial Church, Peshawar. The Church Missionary Gleaner XI (131), 122. Cadbury Research Library, Special Collection, University of Birmingham.

Figure 4 Interior of All Saints’ Memorial Church, Peshawar. It is designed using local materials and techniques.

Source: Hughes, T. P. (1884). All Saints’ Memorial Church, Peshawar. The Church Missionary Gleaner XI (131), 123. Cadbury Research Library, Special Collection, University of Birmingham.

In addition to churches, missionaries constructed schools and hospitals. Among these institutions, the CMS hospital in Peshawar is notable for its resemblance to All Saints’ Memorial Church. The hospital’s outpatient building was decorated with details and ornamentations associated with the Mughal era (Figure 5). Another example is the Isfahan mission hospital, which was built by replicating timber structures and decorative elements characteristic of the Isfahan region, dating back to the seventeenth century, including wooden columns and carved flat wooden ceilings (Honarmand Ebrahimi, Reference Honarmand Ebrahimi2023a: 87–8). Hospitals were also constructed across other European imperial territories. For example, in Portuguese-administered African regions such as Angola and Mozambique, ‘hut hospitals’ were built between the 1920s and the 1950s. These hospitals consisted of a fenced compound containing a main building and several small, hut-like structures (Bastos, Reference Bastos2018: 76–97).

Figure 5 Front elevation, mission hospital outpatient building, Peshawar. It illustrates the incorporation of local architectural elements into the building’s façade.

Source: CMS/M/FL1/I 7, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collection, University of Birmingham.

These buildings might be examined side by side as part of an overarching project to maintain and expand empires, whether through fostering coexistence, asserting control, promoting civilisation or encouraging conversion. While this general observation has merit, it requires a deeper exploration of the historical nuances involved. To be sure, some studies highlight that, depending on time and context, the perceived value of adopting local architectural techniques was regarded differently. French imperial policies ‘entered a relatively liberal stage at the end of nineteenth century’ when ‘assimilation goals became those of association’. During this period, imperial actors ‘sought sustained control through increased cooperation among indigenous and imperial authorities’ (Coslett, Reference Coslett and Gharipour2015: 356).Footnote ²⁰ Anglicans of various persuasions incorporated ‘aspects of indigenous belief for the purpose of facilitating conversion’ (Bremner, Reference Bremner2013: 169). There was a clear divide among them, particularly between High and Low church members, regarding the best ways to incorporate traditional motifs and decorations. For example, an unnamed correspondent describing the Church at Otāki noted that it was ‘entirely of native fabrication’. He acknowledged that it had gained ‘the commendation of the most fastidious ecclesiologist’ but also pointed out its significant ‘ritual deficiency’ due to the absence of a chancel (Colonial, Foreign, and Home News, 1855: 158). Drawing on the views of Henry Venn (1796–1873), the honorary secretary of the CMS from 1841 to 1873, who promoted ‘native agency’, some Evangelicals began to assign value to non-Western cultures (Turner, Reference Turner2015). Conversely, others cautioned against adopting indigenous motifs and decorations without appropriate modification to refine the ‘native taste’ (Bremner, Reference Bremner2013: 170). Likewise, opinions on constructing hut-like structures for indigenous communities varied, with reactions ranging from outright rejection to enthusiastic acceptance (Bastos, Reference Bastos2018: 85–6).

The absence of bungalows from this narrative is puzzling. Originating in India, the bungalow was ‘adopted and adapted for European living’ and became a staple across British India and other imperial territories. Many mission hospitals were designed like a bungalow, such as the Ranaghat and Islamabad mission hospitals (Honarmand Ebrahimi, Reference Honarmand Ebrahimi2023a; King, Reference King1995: plate 6).Footnote ²¹ The CMS hospital in Bannu was also a bungalow, resembling the pucka bungalow frame of the ‘standard plans’ developed by the Public Works Department of the Government of India (Scriver, Reference Scriver1994). Besides hospitals, many schools, houses and administrative buildings were constructed as bungalows (Crinson, Reference Crinson1996; King, Reference King1995). Following Anthony D. King’s work, the bungalow has often been regarded as a colonised ‘host’ for the expression of ‘inherent cultural values of a metropolitan society’ (Reference King1974: 30). It simultaneously gave material presence to a kind of ‘Indian-ness’ that became ‘a source of discomfort to their European occupants’ (Glover, Reference Glover2004: 63). Yet the question remains whether its continued popularity in British India reflected certain imperial actors’ preoccupation with winning affection. For example, the CMS missionary Arthur Neve (1859–1919), described the Islamabad mission hospital as ‘unpretentious’ (Neve, Reference Neve1904: 199). The hospital’s modest design, constructed from stone sourced from the surrounding mountains, allowed it to blend into its surrounding, perhaps as a strategy to attract patients (Honarmand Ebrahimi, Reference Honarmand Ebrahimi2023a: 176).

Moreover, studies have taken for granted the deeply historical character of perception. While protagonists of the British, French, Portuguese or Dutch Empires may have drawn on one another, a topic that certainly merits further exploration, the buildings described in the preceding paragraphs were constructed in different times and places. As understandings of affection and of the connection between touch and apprehension underwent transformation, so too did beliefs about the relationship between the body and the built environment. Following Monique Scheer, we may consider the adaptation of local architectural techniques as a form of ‘emotional practice’. This concept emphasises that emotions are not prior to bodily practices but are produced through them, involving language, material artefacts and the built environment (Scheer, Reference Scheer2012). This framing allows us to theorise imperial buildings as ‘emotional setups’ designed to shape people’s emotions through bodily practices.Footnote ²² But, as discussed in more detail in the next section, we should not assume that the relationship between bodies and buildings is universally understood or serves as a stable baseline. Rather, our focus should be on how this relationship was perceived in specific contexts and historical moments. Our contention centres on imperial actors’ distinct interpretations of affection and their diverse understandings of how bodies relate to their surroundings. We argue that these interpretations and understandings impacted architectural decisions in significant ways.

Let us consider how an analysis might delve into the situated understandings of emotions and their connection to environments. Although this discussion is not exhaustive and leans towards speculation, it offers valuable insights into the contextual nuances that warrant our consideration. It is not intended to be a thorough examination. However, we hope it generates dialogue on the design and planning of imperial buildings.

In her study of Evangelical Anglican perspectives on church building overseas, Emily Turner has shown that the integration of local architectural techniques depended on the availability of an established local architectural tradition (Turner, Reference Turner2015). Another crucial factor was the limited availability of professional architectural expertise (Bremner, Reference Bremner2013: 169–84). These factors certainly mattered, but their influence was tied to shifting and multifaceted interpretations of how environments, bodies and emotions interact. Attending to the history of this relationship in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adds important nuances to our appreciation of buildings such as the Church in Ōtaki and the Memorial Church in Peshawar. Traditional architectural techniques, ornaments and religious symbols were regarded for their emotive power (Hammond, 2022). Yet understanding their incorporation and revival in the mission fields during this period requires us to engage with philosophical and psychological shifts underway at that time, particularly those concerning perception, attention and human sensibility (Crary, Reference Crary2001). For example, an unknown ‘correspondent of the Guardian’ praised the Church in Ōtaki for its ‘aesthetical and ecclesiastical effect’ (Colonial, Foreign, and Home News, 1855: 157). If we take this appraisal as an evidence of the emotive power of the Church, we overlook these shifts and ascribe an ahistorical value to perception. We must consider whether this building was meant to move the soul through the beating heart or manipulate people through the gazing eye. Addressing this question and others like it demands further contextual scrutiny. What is certain, however, is that the Church in Ōtaki and the Memorial Church in Peshawar can only be compared if we account for the philosophical and psychological models that imperial actors followed in incorporating local architectural techniques into their design. While these buildings are similar in that they exhibit elements of local architectural techniques, they were likely designed with distinct understandings of the relationship between environments and emotions.

The interior of the Church in Ōtaki resembles a typical Māori meeting house. As noted by Adrienne L. Kaeppler, the ‘horizontally and vertically ordered space [of these meeting houses] conceptualized as a model of the cosmos and a metaphor of the history and embodiment of the ancestors of the group’ (Reference Kaeppler2008: 63). In Māori ideas of the self, ancestors are believed to be carried in ‘wairua’ form or that ‘part of the human being that transcends the physical dimensions’ (Stewart, 2021: 30). The physical body acts merely as a vessel for wairua, which enters the place; these buildings are meeting places for wairua (Stewart, 2021: 30). Given that the Church was designed and constructed with the help of Māori craftsmen, it is worth reflecting on whether it was ever intended to be experienced physically at all. We are, of course, not suggesting that the Church should be classified as a meeting house, especially since it was intended for both Māori and Pākehā (European). Rather, we argue that it was designed with a particular insight into the relationship between architecture and emotions. It is this insight that sets the Church in Ōtaki apart from the Memorial Church in Peshawar.

Missionary records indicate that by the mid nineteenth century, local chiefs in parts of New Zealand had already shown interest in the work of missionaries. Missionaries increasingly focused on strengthening their connections with local people. For example, according to The Missionary Guide-Book, ‘Mr. Marsden persuaded many of the New Zealand chiefs to visit him at Paramatta in New South Wales, for some years previous to any missionary exertions being commenced in the Islands themselves, and thus he gained the goodwill and affection of all the Bay of Island Natives, and laid the foundation for that attachment and regard to the English nation, which this notable race of savages has ever manifested’ (Reference Shore1846: 264). Consider this case alongside the situation in Peshawar, where missionaries encountered considerable challenges and opposition. A church decorated with Islamic motifs was intended to attract local interest. Another pertinent example is St. Luke’s Church in Isfahan, Iran (Figure 6), built by the missionaries of the CMS in the 1910s, much later than both the Church in Ōtaki and the Memorial Church in Peshawar. It was the first Church constructed in the city’s ‘Muslim quarter’. Missionaries documented their arduous efforts to establish a mission there in correspondence and public reports. They succeeded in building the Church only after establishing a hospital, which seemingly aroused local people’s interest. Therefore, constructing a church without incorporating local architectural techniques into its exterior was unwise. This approach was less about mitigating perceived ‘threats’ and more about sustaining a bond of affection between missionaries and the local people.

Figure 6 Isfahan hospital, Iran. St. Luke’s Church is visible in the centre. Both the hospital and the church were designed by incorporating local architectural elements.

Source: GBR/0115/RCS/CMS 33/6. Cambridge University Library. https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/repositories/2/digital_objects/57226 Accessed February 04, 2026.

The Peshawar hospital and the Memorial Church in Peshawar resemble one another, but it is essential to consider these buildings’ different functions. Churches were attended during specific times and occasions; people did not live or reside in a church. By contrast, patients stayed in a hospital for an extended period. Indeed, they were constructed to increase the number of people missionaries encountered. Therefore, it is essential to examine the arrangement of rooms within mission hospital buildings. Missionaries distanced themselves from prevailing approaches to hospital design in Britain and invented new types of hospital planning. One such plan was family wards, which originated most likely in north-western British India. Works by historians such as Esme Cleall show that missionaries often intervened in local family structures (2012). They made a distinction between what they labelled the ‘European’ family, seen as ideal and virtuous, and the ‘indigenous’ family, viewed as degenerate or even non-existent, thus in need of intervention or reconstruction. Conversely, patients, including children, were allowed to remain with their family members and friends in family wards. They could also bring their belongings, including cooking utensils and bedding, effectively allowing them to inhabit the hospital like their homes or even turn the ward into a ‘cozy living room’.Footnote ²³ Family wards disrupted the discursive split between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’, or ‘ideal’ and ‘decadent’, family portrayed in missionary writings. While missionaries expressed concern about indigenous families, they hoped to bring family members under the locus of their project of intervention in this way.

In his examination of James Wild’s use of Islamic ornamentation on the exterior of St Mark’s Church in Alexandria, Mark Crinson states that ‘appealing to the Muslim population’ was one rationale for this design (Crinson, Reference Crinson1996: 63). Without considering the history of the relationship between the built environment and emotions, Crinson’s observation remains abstract. Contextualising it requires attention to missionaries’ engagement with contemporary ideas about the emotional appeal of architecture. Specifically, we might ask whether St Mark’s Church was designed with such ideas in mind. This line of inquiry helps identify which churches and buildings reflect a shared concern with local people’s experiences. From there, we can explore the kinds of experiences these structures were intended to foster and discern the reasoning behind their specific designs.

As part of their mission or project, imperial actors reflected on how people would, and should, experience buildings. Yet there was no singular framework for conceptualising the relationship between the built environment and emotions. As understandings of emotions, the senses, perception and the body underwent transformations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so too did imperial actors’ visions. Accordingly, the affective valences of given designs shifted. Recognising these dynamics opens new avenues for debate among historians studying modern European imperial architecture.

3.1 Historicising Buildings and Feelings

Examining the relationship between the built environment and emotions is not a recent topic; it has long been the focus of extensive scholarly work across multiple disciplines. As noted in the introduction, significant contributions can be found in the writings of architectural and art historians, as well as feminist geographers, who delve into themes such as the aesthetics of ruins, the concept of the sublime in architecture, the architecture of sites of massacres and commemoration and architecture and affect. This literature is largely inspired by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and the foundational works of phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre and affect theorists. Engaging with these thinkers’ emphasis on embodiment, studies advocate for the ‘lived space’ of architecture vis-à-vis the physical form. Far from treating buildings, landscapes or environments as mere products that influence individuals or communities, they base their analyses on the notion of space–emotion and body–building–environment mingling or co-constitution and co-production. Architecture and the environment are thus viewed as part of the ‘social production of space’ (Stanek, Reference Stanek2012: 51). While these scholars argue against conceiving the environment as a mere producer of affect, they nonetheless tend to attribute an inherent emotional value to buildings and environments or treat them as intrinsically emotive formations. Within this literature, emotions are often assumed to be largely knowable and at times even measurable. Feminist geographers have sought to challenge this position by foregrounding a variety of fears (England and Simon, Reference England and Simon2010; Shirlow and Pain, Reference Shirlow and Pain2003),Footnote ²⁴ a line of inquiry that historians of emotions have reinforced. However, they have yet to interrogate the underlying assumption that buildings and emotions are mutually constitutive, a conception encapsulated in the claim that the ‘flesh kicks back and gives definition’ (Barclay, Reference Barclay and Broomhall2017; Krishnan, Reference Krishnan, Barclay and Stearns2023). Introducing a variety of propositions by arguing that one might have feelings for and in an environment, be affected by it and develop certain feelings because of it (Smith, Reference Smith2010) does not resolve the issue. While these propositions gesture towards the situatedness of the notion of the ‘social production’, they fall short of engaging with histories of and divergent interpretations of the self, agency and subjectivity. For example, scholars have yet to address what it was (and is) like to navigate the world as a body without a self (Liu, Reference Liu1993). Consider, for example, the seventeenth-century Sufi leader Bazayid Ansari’s poem that ‘There is no god but God. There is no I but You’ (Sherman, Reference Sherman2023: 62); or how the experiences of those who inhabited a ‘self-as-heart’ differed from those who inhabited a ‘self-as-brain’; or what it was like to experience the world as a body–soul reality, in which no separation existed between materiality and selfhood.Footnote ²⁵ What changed in the relationship between environments and emotions as philosophy and theology became disentangled (Harris, Robb and Tarlow, Reference Harris, Oliver, Tarlow, Robb and Harris2013: 171), and the concept of the cognitive subject began to take shape in the late eighteenth-century Western societies? Consequently, the assumption of a direct and straightforward link between environments and emotions persists largely unchallenged. This idea is so deeply embedded in academic discourse that to claim emotions are embodied often amounts to asserting that they are spatial. Historians of emotions tend to perpetuate this perspective rather than critically unpacking it. To understand the relationship between environments and emotions, we must go beyond a narrow focus on embodiment and consider other ways of being bodies, whatever forms they may take, including ‘embrained’ and ‘ensouled’ bodies.

Compared to art and architectural historians and geographers, historians of emotions were late to the study of buildings and feelings. When they eventually, and out of necessity, began to consider buildings alongside objects and things, they criticised phenomenology and affect theory for downplaying ‘the historical and the social variability of the feelings provoked’ (Pernau, Reference Pernau2015b: 636). However, they overlooked the contributions of architectural historians who had already challenged the ahistorical assertions of ‘architectural phenomenology’ (Otero-Pailos, Reference Otero-Pailos2010).Footnote ²⁶ They also disregarded crucial scholarship that has examined how the rise of phenomenology transformed the relationship between the body, emotions and matter (Morgan, Reference Morgan2017). Nor did they acknowledge art historians’ investigation into the deeply historical character of perception (Crary, Reference Crary2001).Footnote ²⁷ Moreover, while they engaged with Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of space (Barclay and Riddle, Reference Barclay and Riddle2021; Broomhall, Reference Broomhall2015), they overlooked his emphasis on the ‘historicality’ of the experience of time and space. As Stuart Elden has noted, ‘Lefebvre’s analysis of [space] is both conceptual and historical’ (Reference Elden2004: ix). In Lefebvre’s account, ‘no longer conditions of experience, time and space could be experienced as such’ and ‘their experience was directly related to the historical conditions they were experienced within’ (Elden, Reference Elden2007: 108–9). Lefebvre’s book on rhythmanalysis further reveals his preoccupation with body and rhythm under capitalism. Architectural historian Łukasz Stanek has recognised this historical dimension, nothing that ‘the spatial turn does pose a fundamental challenge and affordance to contemporary architectural research if it is addressed according to its historical conditions’ (Stanek, Reference Stanek2012: 49). Yet he too has ultimately adopted a research perspective on architecture within the processes of the production of space, treating architecture as a ‘multifaced and multivalent product of apprehension, experience and reification’ (Stanek, Reference Stanek2012: 51). Historians of emotions have also largely neglected this historical dimension, an omission which, as Elden notes, ‘is seriously to misread him’ (Reference Elden2004: ix). It matters that the meaning of space, as Katie Barclay has emphasised in her examination of space and place in early modern emotions, can differ from ‘location’ and ‘place’ (2017: 20–1). A place (such as a physical location, landscape, city, building) can be a type of space, but the notions of place as space and space as a ‘social production’ are historically situated and mediated. As such, they are only analytically useful and generative when considered within the dynamic interplay of body, brain and world.

Margrit Pernau’s ‘Building to Feel’ has made a significant impact on the study of architecture and emotions. In her exploration, Pernau acknowledges developments in gender and body studies, noting that the body is ‘no longer the universal body of life sciences’ because these studies show how the body is marked and produced by historically contingent, socially and culturally mediated experiences. According to her, the turn to the body as a site where culture is enacted has necessitated a renewed emphasis on space and spaces. This emphasis seeks to understand not only how bodies bear the imprint of spaces they move through, but also how this relationship is intentional rather than universal and constant. To contribute to these studies, she suggests ‘temporization’ as the central category for linking materiality with knowledge and practice. Her framing critiques affect theory’s disregard of linguistic representation in favour of the body, arguing that this substitution merely replaces the nature/nurture dichotomy with equally unproductive body/language and materiality/representation binaries. While Merleau-Ponty’s view of perception as ‘intentional’ underpins Pernau’s conceptualisation, she resists separating language, experience and embodiment. Instead, she explores the process of translation and mediation among them to account for cultural differences. Yet she does not subject the term space, the notion of the social production and the act of moving through space to the same process of translation and mediation, thus removing them from their historical conditions. To elaborate: although she acknowledges that the relationship between architecture and emotions ‘is neither random, nor is it given once and for all’ (Pernau, Reference Pernau2014: 541), this is framed solely through the idea that ‘[bodies] bear the imprint of spaces they are moving through and have moved through’, as if the category of space and the act of moving through it (and hence the self, subjectivity and agency) are historical constants. It is this ahistorical and universal reading that renders Pernau’s overall argument largely indistinguishable from studies that compare the experience of a building to ‘the technique of montage in photography’ (Franke, Reference Franke2022). Like these studies, Pernau emphasises the role of memory and the culturally and historically specific preconceptions, arguing that ‘spaces can be endowed with an emotional valence through practices and experiences repeated over a long time’ (Pernau, Reference Pernau2014: 542), while also contending that there remains potential for unexpected reactions, including unanticipated sensations, perceptions, judgments and forms of common sense (Gammerl, Nielsen and Pernau, Reference Gammerl, Nielsen and Pernau2019).

Pernau’s focus on Delhi as a case study, where conceptualisations of place, the self and perception took on distinctive forms, offers further points for reflection.Footnote ²⁸ For example, she questions the assumption that the concept of ‘the discursive gaze’ is unequivocally modern and colonial, yet represents ‘gaze’ as pertaining universally to vision and visuality, a point to which we will return shortly. Moreover, her analysis challenges the prioritisation of intellect over the senses, or vice versa, in assessing the built environment. However, it leaves room to critique the tendency to treat buildings as ‘emotional prescriptions’ or to overstate the mutual shaping of buildings and people, both of which risk reducing architecture to a ‘social technology’ (Cupers, Reference Cupers2013: 4). The influence of Pernau’s work has constrained scholars – including us – from engaging with worldviews that escape narrow definitions of space, place, the self, subjectivity, agency and perception (Akkach, Reference Akkach2015; Zinnenburg Carrol and Kinner, 2018). In their recent reappraisal, Hultam and Cooper address this shortcoming only partially. By focusing on ‘alternative experiences’, they rightly draw attention to how the built environment shapes ‘the emotional communion of its [marginalised] inhabitants’ (Hultman and Cooper, 2023: 6), but without calling for an investigation into how marginalised people, across times and cultures, have conceptualised their place in the world and the ways they inhabit it. Like earlier scholarship, their exploration overlooks the deeply historical character of the architecture-experience relationship. To attend to the situated history of the relationship between environments and emotions, we must consider not only the varied spatial imaginaries that have underpinned this relationship but also the diverse ways bodies and surroundings have been perceived and lived.

Pernau draws inspiration from two other pivotal studies: those by Andrew Reckwitz and Monique Scheer. In ‘Affective spaces’ (Reference Reckwitz2012), Reckwitz begins by mapping how early or classical social theory relegated material-technological and aesthetic-artefacts to the ‘surface of culture’. He argues that this ‘anti-technological and anti-aesthetic’ stance has contributed to the marginalisation of emotional-affective dimensions and spatiality in social and cultural theory since the 1960s. His discussion not only disregards the contributions of feminist geographers but also advances a normative and universalising claim by asserting that ‘every social practice involves an artefact-space structuration worth of analysis’ (Reckwitz, 2012: 249). While it is certainly true that social practices involve such structuration, whether this structuration is distinct from body–emotion dynamics and whether it constitutes the primary source of self-definition are the questions. A more nuanced approach might have preserved room for classical theory’s anti-technological and anti-aesthetic stance, exploring how that very stance conditioned experiences. Such an approach would allow these positions to be incorporated into a history of the relationship between the built environment and emotions.

In her influential article on emotions as a kind of practice, Scheer emphasises that thinking is achieved through a process of cause and effect between concepts and ‘bodily sensorimotor’. She refuses to confine cognition to the brain alone, arguing that ‘the socially and environmentally contextualised body thinks along with the brain’ (Scheer, Reference Scheer2012: 197), thereby restoring the dynamic interplay of brain, body and world. However, in her effort to collapse the body–mind, inner–outer and conscious–unconscious dualities, she effectively sidelines the distinct realities of ‘ensouled’ and ‘embrained’ beings, among others. For an ensouled being, perception could transcend the limits of the senses (Akkach, Reference Akkach and Akkach2021), a possibility Scheer’s account overlooks. Moreover, her assumption that situated cognition also encompasses ‘automated and habitual processes of everyday assessing, deciding and motivating’ risks reducing individuals to mere ‘users’ or ‘consumers’ of the built environment. While ‘practiced, skilful interactions with people and the environment that do not presuppose an acute awareness of beliefs and desires’ (Scheer, Reference Scheer2012: 197) should be considered in our assessment of the relationship between buildings and feelings, these interactions should not be assumed to be habitual. Otherwise, we risk disregarding how the emergence of the category of user in the twentieth century reshaped people’s interactions with buildings. One might ask how people as non-users of the built environment experienced their surroundings. In essence, if people did not perceive themselves as inhabitants, users and consumers of buildings, can their interactions with buildings still be considered habitual? By extension, if buildings were not designed as ‘spaces’ to be used and consumed, is it accurate to describe them unequivocally as ‘emotional prescriptions’? These inquiries are especially urgent in the context of imperialism and imperial architecture, where we must attend to diverse conceptualisations of buildings, bodies and emotions. Far from separating the built environment and emotions, our argument adds further layers of complexity to how buildings are encountered and evaluated. Put simply, ‘contact’ among people and between buildings and people is as historically situated as emotions, buildings and the circumstances that shape them.

If we view the relationship between the built environment and emotions as fundamentally biocultural, then merely extending Merleau-Ponty’s framework falls short. We must problematise his emphasis on normativity and intentionality and remain cautious about treating space, social production, moving through and the category of user as timeless or ahistorical. Lefebvre’s work remains valuable, insofar as his emphasis on the interrelationship between space and time is not overlooked. Historicising the relationship between the built environment and emotions does not require abandoning phenomenology, rhythmanalysis, affect theory or practice theory. It instead entails tracing their contributions to the formation of the category of user and the notion of space. Rather than drawing on these theories to contemplate the relationship between the built environment and emotions across times and cultures, we must analyse them to discern how people in specific historical and cultural contexts understood the interplay between buildings and feelings, as well as how these theories were adapted across cultures.Footnote ²⁹ Far from insisting that terms such as ‘use’, ‘user’ or ‘space’ must appear in our historical sources to discern the relationship between buildings and feelings, we contend that their emergence should be recognised as part of the history of that relationship.Footnote ³⁰

3.2 Feeling Differently

Returning to Lloyd’s letter discussed at the beginning of this section, we begin by drawing on Pernau’s argument to analyse it, before broadening the discussion through alternative conceptualisations of the self, space and perception. Lloyd found the ‘cordiality and affection’ of the local people both surprising and reassuring. It was surprising because previous reports had left a different impression on his ‘mind’; it was reassuring because gaining favour was central to missionary work. While understanding why Lloyd perceived the local people’s feelings as both unconventional and fitting may seem straightforward, the same cannot be said when the lens is turned towards the local people. Assuming Lloyd was right – that the local people did indeed gather along the road and that their gathering signified happiness – were their feelings conforming? Why did they not avoid or even repel Lloyd? One possible answer lies in the notion of colonising minds and bodies: missionaries in New Zealand imposed new norms and ways of sensing and feeling that transformed and colonised local modes of perception. Another stems from Françoise Vergès’ insights that ‘human relations could not be reduced to a battle of interests’ (Reference Vergès1999: 3). Yet another emerges from Pernau’s examination of Delhi, which prompts us to consider that gathering along the road may, in fact, have aligned with local people’s customary norms.

Although Pernau does not explicitly address the question of unconventionality and conformity, her exploration of Delhi during its critical transition from a late Mughal to a colonial city disrupts straightforward narratives linking colonisation, modernisation, the ‘intrusive gaze’ and the formation of new forms of selfhood. By reading maps and paintings not merely for their representational value but as mediating devices of the gaze and spatial sensibilities, she demonstrates that spatial surveillance may have already been embedded in the city’s fabric, shaping the experiences of those who moved through its urban space long before the British arrived. This perspective shows how the intrusive gaze, as a form of colonial ‘emotional performance’, could fail – not as a violation, but as a failure to feel according to expectations or prescriptions. According to Benno Gammerl, Jan Simon Hutta and Monique Scheer, our focus on norms and social conventions should not eclipse the exploration of ‘unfit’ feelings or ‘feeling otherwise’. Their conceptualisation of ‘feeling differently’ or ‘failing to feel correctly’ invites us to consider broken habits and norms, or the processes of becoming ‘in contradistinction to what actually is’ (Reference Gammerl, Hutta and Scheer2017: 3). Far from autonomous, these ruptures emerge from mismatches between norms and desires, which themselves produce ‘norms and subjectification’ (Reference Gammerl, Hutta and Scheer2017: 3).Footnote ³¹ This perspective challenges the notion that emotions unfold against ‘stable backgrounds’ of experiential feelings that exist ‘out there’ (Boddice, Reference Boddice2018: 162).Footnote ³² People appropriate or arrange, rearrange and categorise buildings, environments and their feelings to construct experiences. Only some may be able to appropriate a given building practically, but even then, we may have another story in a different time (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2014: 5–8).

These conceptualisations open important avenues for exploring how imperial buildings were experienced. In relation to Lloyd’s statement, two possibilities emerge that resist straightforward rejection of his presentation of the local people’s actions or a blanket condemnation of missionary activity as colonial imposition. First, gathering along the road may have conformed to locals’ norms but, rather than expressing affection, may have signalled aversion. Second, it may have been a newly developed practice intended to express dislike. Both interpretations call into question Lloyd’s capacity to read indigenous feelings and reflect the long history of cross-cultural misunderstandings that characterised Christian missions and imperial expansion more broadly, even into the late twentieth century, when missionaries were more determined than ever to bridge cultural divides. A striking example is Daniel Everett’s encounter with Pirahãs. After recounting how his stepmother’s suicide led him to Jesus, Everett found himself unable to interpret their laughter. As Stephen Cummins and Joel Lee note, this experience ‘eventually led him to reject his faith’ (Reference Cummins, Lee, Gammerl, Nielsen and Pernau2019: 38). Indeed, Cummins and Lee argue that ‘unexpected emotional reactions’ could influence missionaries and their activities. They could also drive architectural changes, leading to new forms. This is particularly evident in buildings with explicit representative agendas, such as museums. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta observes, the Indian Museum, founded in 1814 in Kolkata (then Calcutta), embodies imperial desires to see India ‘as a single unified site where … her diverse people and, no less, her arts and antiquities could all feature within the same collective constellation, even as each had their own classificatory labels’ (Reference Guha-Thakurta, Mathur and Singh2004: 46). However, such classification soon collided with competing local and international sensibilities. Fervent devotion to key objects like the relics of the Buddha in India, for example, became grounds for contesting colonial authority over religious remnants and sites. This led to a split in the management of recovered archaeological findings: reliquaries were housed in European museums and catalogued as historical antiquities, while the relics were entrusted to the Maha Bodhi Society and classified as religious rather than historical objects. Over time, this division prompted the construction of new building types, such as the Dharmarajika Chetiya Vihara on College Square in Kolkata. Functioning as both a temple and a museum, it embodies a nationalist impulse to envision India as a sacred geography or ‘divine geo-body’ (Ramaswamy, Reference Ramaswamy2002).

These are key points that we now reconsider within the framework of our call to historicise the relationship between the built environment and emotions. Our plea for reconsideration does not necessarily alter the core of the argument. Instead, it yields more nuanced explanations for the failures of emotional practices. If the focus is on 1830s Delhi, where the Persian language continued to define adab, or the proper form of perceiving, speaking and acting (Kia, Reference Kia2020), any emphasis on the power of buildings as emotional prescriptions must be approached with caution. As Mana Kia has shown, adab, which ‘transcended whatever land constituted as a kingdom or nation-state at any given time’, involved a ‘different form of meaning-making’. Central to this form was the figure of the ‘beloved friend’, through whom the self was defined. This mode of self-definition, which was ‘dependent on social relationships for actualization’ (Kia, Reference Kia2016: 401), undermines the determinative power of the built environment. In this setting, the colonial gaze could not unilaterally shape urban experience – not for lack of novelty, but because it failed to align with the prevailing relational mode of self-definition. By foregrounding these layered cultural dynamics, we can better understand why buildings did not dictate feelings or behaviours in predictable ways.

Moreover, if the senses are historically constructed, then we must consider forms of seeing that go beyond mere vision, sight and visionally, such as naẓar, a pre- and early modern Islamic understanding of visual perception. While it is beyond the scope of our discussion to fully engage with the conceptual complexity of naẓar, it is worth noting that it encompassed not only sight and gazing but also reasoning, reflection and imagination. In other words, it encompassed ‘sensory aspects of visual perception as well as imaginative, cognitive and reflective as aspect of comprehension’ (Akkach, Reference Akkach and Akkach2021: 12–13). Naẓar signified ‘an act of seeking to see’. Thus, it extended beyond seeing to imply a reaching or arriving, made possible through the intertwining of baṣar (vision) and fikr (thinking), Naẓar bi-l- baṣar (sight) and naẓar bi-l-qalb (insight). Naẓar did not simply mean ruʾya (seeing) and baṣar but worked in conjunction with them to define the nature of visual perception. Besides challenging the disassociation between sensing and reasoning, Naẓar downplays the ‘objective autonomy of the process of visual perception’ (Akkach, Reference Akkach and Akkach2021: 20), allowing for the possibility that an object is not perceived differently but seen differently by different viewers or seekers. In this way, intentionality becomes a form of visualisation, which Samer Akkach has termed ‘the eye of reflection’ (Reference Akkach2015). If seeing is a form of seeking, then the notion of ‘feeling differently’ becomes conceptually unstable. We need not determine here how naẓar applies to Delhi, Rather, what matters is the way it alerts us to the existence of alternative modes of seeing and perceiving. At the heart of Pernau’s suggestion lies the assumption that the post-Cartesian scientific understanding of vision and of the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible had already eradicated other forms of perception.Footnote ³³ This, in a way, runs counter to her central argument. The imposition of the intrusive gaze may not have led to feelings of surveillance and control, precisely because gazing and seeing, while interconnected, were not synonymous.

Imperial actors’ intentions were sometimes misplaced, as there was no simple and universal understanding of how experiences and architectural interventions related to one another. In other words, whether architecture could create emotions, reinforce individual experiences or be augmented by them depended on the time and context. Historicising the relationship between the built environment and emotions is therefore crucial for understanding how imperial buildings were experienced. This perspective has important implications for rethinking the notion of the ‘contact zone’ and for grappling with questions of scale and heritage. In the remainder of this section, we bring this core argument into conversation with these three major historiographical themes, each the focus of extensive debate over the past thirty years to generate alternative, expanded and counter-hegemonic readings of imperial buildings. A focus on emotions, or the ‘affective lives’ (Rajagopalan, Reference Rajagopalan2016) of imperial buildings, contributes to this endeavour.

3.3 Beyond Contact Zone

Imperial actors’ intention to teach people certain behaviours through the spatial arrangement of buildings were sometimes misplaced. This argument may evoke concepts such as Mary Louise Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ (Reference Pratt2003), Anthony King’s ‘third culture’ (Reference King1976) or Samir Boulos’s ‘culturally entangled space’ (Reference Boulos2016). By focusing on the architectural plans and sections of structures rather than visual features, these concepts challenge the largely ‘nonspatial’ orientation of some discussions on imperial architecture (Chattopadhyay, Reference Chattopadhyay2000). They uncover and reclaim the zones where cultures collided and boundaries blurred, illustrating how imperial domination could manifest ideologically rather than through lived realities. As Tony Ballantyne has noted in relation to mission stations, imperial buildings ‘were never simply symbolic; they were real places, too’ (Reference Ballantyne2015: 68).

These concepts should be expanded because people experience and interpret emotions in diverse ways, which significantly influences how they relate to their surroundings and interact with others. It is crucial to examine how people encountered and evaluated imperial buildings, especially if a building’s potential to evoke emotions largely depends on the ‘specific cultural sensitivity and attentiveness’ of the people (Reckwitz, Reference Reckwitz2012: 255), and if ‘affects’ (with their distinct cultural baggage across time and space) only arise when people can ‘practically appropriate’ a building. Thus, while every imperial building might have functioned as a space of contact and cultural entanglement, this was restricted to particular groups at specific times. Moreover, such analysis may uncover a range of competing, overlapping and flexible contact zones or entangled spaces within a single building. This prompts us to consider numerous cultures – not just a third culture – depending on the context. We must account for both ‘internal variations’ related to class, gender, age, ethnicity and occupation and historically and culturally specific forms of ‘contact’ between people and buildings in order to assess whether an imperial building served as a contact zone. Although challenging, this task prevents us from making generalised claims.

The notion of the contact zone centres on the question of how scholars examine imperial buildings to better understand the lived experiences of imperialism. As noted, it is concerned with the tendency to overemphasise the appearance of buildings. While we share this concern, our argument goes beyond simply shifting the focus to architectural plans and elevations. Nor is it confined to debates around ‘smallness’ or ‘bigness’ and the political implications of materials and labour. It endorses studies that question historians’ techniques of analysing buildings and their ‘mode of seeing and knowing’ without redirecting attention from appearance and plans to ‘verandas, courtyards, terraces, fire escapes’ (Chattopadhyay, Reference Chattopadhyay2022, Reference Chattopadhyay2023; also see Sengupta, Reference Sengupta2020). Instead, it derives the diverse meanings of environment depending on context. Put differently, if ways of being and meaning-making are situated, then it is essential to ask what a term such as ‘environment’ meant in a given context. This methodological renovation helps not only rethink techniques of analysing architectural plans but also extend our investigation beyond a building’s appearance or arrangement to its surroundings, equipment and objects brought inside. It contributes to further ‘unlearning’ (Chattopadhyay, Reference Chattopadhyay2012) of our habits of thinking about imperial materiality. Rather than beginning with an urge to move past studies of form and layout, we propose starting from the conditions that shaped people’s experiences before and after they entered these spaces. In doing so, we suggest alternative methodologies that enable architectural historians to more meaningfully frame and define the lived experiences of those who entered, stayed in and laboured within imperial buildings.

As an example, we start with a children’s game that incorporates the fictional story of thirteen-year-old Mariam, a patient at the Kerman hospital (Figure 8). Held in the archive of the CMS in Birmingham, the game was produced by missionaries sometime after 1935 (Kerman hospital). The story opens with a description of Mariam’s home and her condition, before outlining her journey and admission to the hospital. There is no doubt about the story’s underlying imperial discourse. In comparing Mariam’s home to the hospital, the story emphasises that ill health was attributed to the ‘dark’ and ‘damp’ living conditions of the home, whereas the hospital is portrayed as a site of healing. Yet reading between the lines, one finds a reference to ‘the dog-tooth hills showed clear-cut against the brilliant blue sky’. The mountains are also visible when zooming into the background of the accompanied image. The city of Kerman is surrounded by mountains; to the east lies the Kūh Payeh mountain, and to the north, the Darmānū mountain. The Kūh Payeh mountain is also noticeable in the background of a photograph of the hospital taken before its completion (Figure 9). These mountains occupy no place in conventional examinations of the hospital building’s exterior and appearance. Even if we zoom in and focus on the formal arrangement of rooms, the mountains remain immaterial, excluded even as a background. In addition to asking where to zoom in, we must also ask how to zoom in. Otherwise, we risk missing details like the mountains.

Figure 8 Kerman Hospital Game. It features a painting of the hospital, along with instructions on how to cut and fold it to create a small model.

Source: CMS/H/H5/E2, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collection, University of Birmingham.

Figure 9 Kerman mission hospital before Completion. Only buildings of the outpatient department had been completed. Kūh Payeh mountain is visible in the background of the photograph.

Source: CMS/M/FL 2/ PE 2 [photo 3], Cadbury Research Library, Special Collection, University of Birmingham.

The debate over smallness and bigness might suggest they occupy opposite poles, but as Ann McGrath has observed in ‘How Size Matters’, ‘the micro and macro are not only companions, but can also be one and the same creature. A move to the macro scale does not require a move away from the moment’ (Aslanian et al., Reference Aslanian, Chaplin, McGrath and Mann2013: 1436). In this respect, our argument should not be equated with microhistory’s ‘reduction of scale’ to the analysis of ‘an individual or a small group, a place or locality and, usually, a brief time period’ (Vries, Reference de Vries2019: 23). The mountains can be either micro or macro, depending on the research focus. Nor do we advocate a shift of the lens onto the mountains. Rather, we call for a thorough, integrated study of the hospital’s landscape – its terrain, infrastructure, equipment and materials – so that scale and context remain dynamically intertwined.

Although not visible from within the Kerman hospital’s walls, the Kerman Friday Mosque lay only a short walk away, just as the Yazd Friday Mosque stands close enough for its twin minarets to peek into a 1930s photograph of the mission hospital (Figure 10). In both cases, azān (the call to prayer) most likely drifted audibly through the corridors. In Isfahan, some patients gazed upon the dome of the Soltāni Theological School from their beds. More unexpectedly, the Kerman hospital compound houses a mechanism called gavgārd (Figure 11). Gav means cow in Farsi and gārd means rotating. A gavgārd consists of a cow harnessed to a mechanism that turns a wooden wheel, drawing water from a well. Gavgārds were built across central and southern Iran (specifically in Isfahan, Shiraz, Yazd and Kerman). They were either constructed as free-standing structures or were connected to buildings, mainly houses. Unlike other gavgārds, which were typically constructed to the rear of a complex, the Kerman hospital’s gavgārd was situated somewhere near the centre of the site. No reference to this mechanism appears in missionaries’ letters, reports and published articles about the hospital, and its operators remain anonymous. In addition to separate doors for male and female patients, the hospital’s main entrance had a third door leading directly to the gavgārd (Figure 12). Those who operated the gavgārd most likely accessed it through this door, ensuring their segregation. Once inside the gavgārd building, they could not see or been seen by either the patients or hospital staff, while the cow’s lowing echoed throughout many parts of the hospital. Beyond mountains and the gavgārd, patients and their families furnished the wards with personal plates, bedding and cooking utensils, enjoyed tea and smoked water pipe (Honarmand Ebrahimi, Reference Honarmand Ebrahimi2023a). For example, a 1910 photograph from the Yazd hospital (Figure 13) shows a young shāhzāde reclining beneath a termeh-cloth duvet on a veranda (Figure 14), flanked by family and friends.

Figure 10 Yazd mission hospital for men. The picture was taken from the rooftop, with the twin minarets of Yazd Friday Mosque peeking into the frame.

Source: CMS/M/EL 2/37, p. 318, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collection, University of Birmingham.

Figure 11 The gavgārd in the Kerman mission hospital. It is a round structure. Just outside the building, a pool was used to collect water.

Source: Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi

Figure 12 The door to the women’s hospital was on the right and the men’s hospital door was on the left. A third door was in the centre, leading to the gavgārd.

Source: Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi

Figure 13 A Shāhzāde in the Yazd mission hospital. He reclines beneath a termeh-cloth duvet on a veranda, flanked by family and friends.

Source: CMS/M/EL 2/14, p. 267, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collection, University of Birmingham.

Figure 14 A termeh cloth, ca. 1875–1900. It is designed with the paisley motif, known in Farsi as boteh, a tear-shaped element.

Source: S2017.14, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Nader Ahari in memory of Nahid Ahari.

We are certainly not the first to recognise the value of broadening our ‘gaze’. Consider, for instance, the work of Johan Lagae, Sofie Boonan and Sam Lanckriet, who have urged us to ‘decode’ the ‘urban landscape of walls and roofs’ in Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their examination stresses the importance of ‘liminal spaces that often remain invisible to the outsider’ (Reference Lagae and Holst2023: 86). However, it is one thing to identify these features, structures and objects (sometimes a challenging task)Footnote ³⁴; it is quite another to understand how they conditioned experiences. Mapping them and discussing how they integrated or segregated people tells us little about experiences. The mountains, the minarets, the gavgārd and the termeh cloth certainly invite reflection beyond hygiene, ventilation, light and order, elements typically encapsulated in the often generic typology of imperial hospital architecture. However, to claim that the distinctive sights, sounds and tactile qualities produced by this blend of mechanical and animal elements, and their familiarity to the hospital’s patients, were as potent in determining interactions and experiences as the spatial dimensions more commonly emphasised by architectural historians would be reductive. As should be clear by now, such assertions assume a universal and timeless understanding of body–environment interactions, often centring the body within the (post-)Enlightenment discursive traditions of the West.Footnote ³⁵ The importance of the mountains, the minarets, the gavgārd or the termeh cloth should not be dismissed but rather understood within their specific cultural, social and historical contexts. These contexts help scholars better understand how these features may have shaped patients’ experiences. However, uncovering and interpreting these contexts presents its own challenges: not least the need to engage with varied sources and methodologies (Sivasundaram, Reference Sivasundaram2010) and to resist the inclination to recast them into ‘familiar forms and stories’ (McGrath, Rademaker and Silverstein, Reference McGrath, Rademaker and Silverstein2021: 309). We need what William Sherman calls ‘an ethic of hermeneutic hesitation’ before ‘we rush to fill the gaps and cracks in our account’ (Sherman, Reference Sherman2023: 3).

Mariam’s story only tells us the basics: they were thirteen years old, lived in a village and made their journey to the hospital on a donkey. We know nothing about how Mariam – even as a fictional character – understood the world and the way they inhabited it.Footnote ³⁶ While it may be tempting to force Mariam’s experience to ‘conform to our semiotic imaginations’, such attempts would inevitably ‘stumble’ (Sherman, Reference Sherman2023: 9). Possibilities are all we can and should recount. Contrary to the assumptions of missionaries, the mountains may have held significance for Mariam beyond their practical role as a source of fresh water. They may have symbolised a connection between the past and present, evoking unanticipated feelings. The Kūh Payeh and Darmānū mountains may also have served as guides, helping Mariam navigate their way to the hospital. It is also possible that the names of the hospital and the mountains were used interchangeably. That is, the hospital was called the Kūh Payeh hospital or the Darmānū hospital instead of the Christian hospital, in which case the affective charges of the institution were altered. These possibilities suggest that the mountains warrant a central place in architectural histories of imperialism, revealing lived encounters that are otherwise obscured. Omitting these experiences not only fixes these buildings in time but also clouds their role in local and transregional histories by ascribing fixed and unchanging meanings to them. In contrast, recovering and engaging with these layered narratives offers richer, more nuanced understandings of imperial buildings’ lives and afterlives.

3.4 Whose Heritage?

In November 1996, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism of Iran listed the CMS hospital in Kerman as a national heritage site. This decision has led to the partial preservation and renovation of the hospital buildings. In stark contrast, the Anglican Church in Kerman, also a listed national heritage, was destroyed in 2011. These instances reflect a broader trend: in 2015, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) was removed from the University of Cape Town, and, in 2017, Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. While the listing of the Kerman hospital has sparked no significant debate, the declaration of Asmara as a World Heritage site has raised troubling questions about the continued celebration of colonial-fascist ideologies. As a response, architectural historians Emilio Distretti and Alessandro Petti have proposed a critical manifesto, advocating for ‘repair as reparation’ and highlighting ‘practices of reuse by the native population’ (Reference Distretti and Petti2019: 56). Their approach seems to only consider the fascist regime’s negative portrayal of the local community, overlooking what Sofie Boonen and Johan Lagae have referred to as ‘actively lived-in architecture’ (Reference Boonen, Lagae, Barker-Ciganikova, Rüther, Waldburger and 61Bodenstein2020). Reassessing the heritage status of the Kerman hospital through their manifesto risks overlooking significant events: when Dr George Everard Dodson (1872–1937) died of typhoid fever in Kerman in 1937, the local community mourned him by closing the bazaar, a gesture reserved for notable individuals in Iran. Furthermore, the missionaries’ decision to sell the hospital met with strong resistance. Abolghāsim Rāsikh, a former assistant director of the hospital, wrote to the Ministry of Health defending the community’s right to the facility. He emphasised that the people of Kerman donated the land, funded the construction and paid for the installation of electricity and the purchase of an X-ray machine (Rāsikh, Reference Rāsikh1952). Despite this opposition, the missionaries ultimately sold the hospital to the leader of the Honarmand Ebrahimi household, who retained ownership until its designation as national heritage in 1996.

These episodes in the life of the Kerman hospital prompt reflection on the ‘consecutive re-uses’ of imperial buildings and the significant shifts in meaning these structures have undergone (Lagae, Reference Lagae2008: 24). In mapping how the inhabitants of the Ruashi neighbourhood, built by the Office des Cites Africaines in the mining city of Lubumbashi, ‘responded to a physical environment shaped according to western dwelling patterns’, Boonen and Lagae have advanced the concept of ‘actively lived-in architecture’ as a means of reimagining the city’s future as an ‘African, rather than a mere colonial built, legacy’ (Reference Boonen, Lagae, Barker-Ciganikova, Rüther, Waldburger and 61Bodenstein2020: 67). Mrinalini Rajagopalan has similarly introduced the notion of affective lives to account for the ‘parallel world of meanings’ associated with ‘monuments’ in India (Reference Rajagopalan2016). In fact, there has been considerable debate around the question of whose heritage imperial built legacies represent, which we do not aim to summarise here. These studies are valuable in their insistence on moving beyond a focus on officials to examine the roles of inhabitants and local communities. Yet they often lean toward a linear, chronological understanding of buildings’ lives and afterlives, suggesting clear beginnings and, at times, definitive endings. Past, present and future may have been braided together through the mountains, the gavgārd and the termeh cloth; an observation that invites a more intricate view of lives and afterlives than most (architectural) historians of imperialism have been willing to consider. The issue, as we have shown, stems from the tendency to examine buildings through a universal and timeless lens on the relationship between bodies and environments. Lives and afterlives do not have fixed beginnings and ends; they do not mark a period between two events, nor are they anchored in time. Nor are they wholly about futures or pasts. What we perceive as lives and afterlives becomes decidedly more ambiguous.

The mountains, the gavgārd and the termeh cloth take away the focus on hospital buildings as the focal point of attention. If the hospital buildings were not the primary definer of people’s lived-in experiences, then to discuss their very experiences through the buildings would be erroneous. Of course, buildings echoed, inflected and were integral to the project of empire building (Crinson, Reference Crinson1996), but the process of colonising ways of sensing and feeling (or ways of perception and being) was messy and laden with misunderstandings. This recognition frees us from the question of ‘whose heritage’ and allows us to theorise about the buildings ‘within’ local (and not necessarily national) histories and practices of perception. The Kerman mission hospital is an imperial legacy but whether it has been experienced as such requires a thorough understanding of the history of perception in the Persianate world. We would be able to understand how and to what extent this institution and others like it were transformed by people’s understandings of the relationship between buildings, environments, bodies and emotions.