Atlantic Unbound

Architecture in the World of the Haitian Revolution

Atlantic Unbound is a remarkable book with a number of singular achievements. Using Haiti as a hub around which Caribbean, North American, and European cultural and political developments can be arrayed and analyzed is logical, innovative, and entirely necessary. The specific figures who are brought into the spotlight, along with their architectural endeavors, powerfully illuminate these Atlantic World places and the connections between them. Every single chapter is enlivened with unique and powerful insights, at times pulled from archives and at times drawn from the visual analysis of buildings, their remains, and/or their representations.
Nathaniel Robert Walker, Catholic University of America

In Atlantic Unbound, Peter Minosh examines neoclassical architecture within the Atlantic World—a site of colonialism, resource extraction, commodity circulation, capital, and slavery spanning Europe, North America, and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Minosh focuses on France during the expansion of its colonial empire and the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue during and after the Haitian Revolution, and the United States in the decade following the ratification of the Constitution. By analyzing architecture’s relationship to revolutionary politics, colonial practices, and Enlightenment discourse, this book reveals buildings, cities, and landscapes as products of transnational exchange and cross-cultural interaction that shaped the modern world. By positioning neoclassical architecture within colonialism and slavery and rethinking its role in Atlantic revolutions, Atlantic Unbound reorients neoclassicism as a globalized modernity—a negotiation of global systems and hybrid sovereignties.

about the author

Peter Minosh

Peter Minosh is a historian of architecture, urbanism, and landscape with a focus on the relationship between politics and the built environment who teaches at Tufts University. He is a contributor to the volumes Race and Modern Architecture and Writing Architectural History.

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Peter Minosh