Capital Structures: Victorian Architecture and Economic Imperialism

Across the long nineteenth century, the circulation of gold through the Royal Mint and Bank of England underpinned the gold standard, facilitating London’s emergence as the unrivalled centre of international finance. By following gold from extraction to refining, transporting and warehousing, this talk argues that money was not a neutral instrument but a governance project shaped by material processes in architectural settings. Gold, as both medium and material, reveals the infrastructures through which capitalist value and imperial power were sustained. Beginning with the political uproar provoked by the arrival of the First Opium War indemnity in London and its effects on the Royal Mint, the talk traces how this circuit reshaped imperial landscapes, from the leased territory of British Weihaiwei to the dockyards of Newcastle, revealing how global flows of bullion and people bound together Britain’s industrial landscapes with colonial outposts in a shared economy of empire.

Image caption: John Bluck, The Mint, from Microcosm of London, plate 55, 1809, hand-coloured etching and aquatint, 33.1 x 43.3 cm. Digital image courtesy of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art (59.533.1853)

Content advisory: This talk contains historical descriptions and depictions of violence, war, and racial stereotyping. This talk contains this content in order to show the complex entanglement of the built environment with political economy and racial ideology.

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