Strategies of Containment: Iron, Fire, and Labor Management

Edward Holl. Port Royal Naval Hospital, 1817–1820.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Strategies of Containment: Iron, Fire, and Labor Management

JONAH ROWEN

It was the preconcerted signal for our part of the country that the struggle for freedom had begun; and the volumes of lurid smoke rose high. . . . When alone that evening, we sat ponder- ing, and saying one to another, “What will the negroes next do? What should we do?” . . . then the sky became a sheet of flame, as if the whole country had become a vast furnace. —Hope Masterton Waddell, reporting on the Christmas Uprising, Jamaica, December 18311

The insights of Robin Evans, Michel Foucault, and many others on the Panopticon as an “architectural figure”—and on “panopticism” as its theoretical corollary—make it easy to overlook the project’s constructional particularities.2 Yet its inventor, Samuel Bentham, planned the Panopticon in great material detail, notably in specifi- cations for the building’s resistance to fire. Samuel (brother of Jeremy Bentham, with whose utilitarianism the structure is usually associated) “designed [the Panopticon] to be fire-proof, as far as any structure could be made so.” Above all, this meant using iron instead of wood. “According to drawings which still remain . . . iron, cast and wrought, was introduced wherever wood was usually employed in a building.”3 These descriptions, from an 1862 biography by Samuel’s wife, date the Panopticon’s invention to the late 1780s or early 1790s, contemporary with or even predating the earliest fully fire-resistant buildings, which were mills.4 Thus Bentham’s specification gives the Panopticon a different set of architectural associations than Foucault’s “compact model of the disciplinary mechanism,” with its implications for modern imprisonment, spatial confinement, and scopic control.5 Instead, the Panopticon becomes one among a number of early projects conceived expressly for averting the threat of fire, according to a notion of containment that differs markedly from the confinement of bodies in space. Containment here meant a set of principles that allowed architects, engineers, and manufacturers to enact social-structural control by means of materiality. The form of the Panopticon exemplified every one of these principles, but so did many other architectural forms that

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 bore no resemblance to Bentham’s invention. The present article uncovers a connected lineage of experimental iron-structured buildings designed for the British navy in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Much as Foucault’s intellectual construct of panopticism diffused across society as a whole (and not only in the Panopticon’s shape), fire-resistant iron architecture also enacted a kind of control—over both human beings and nonhuman elements—unrelated to its form. In part, my examples echo Foucault’s list of building types inspired by the Panopticon prison: “factories, schools, barracks, hospitals.”6 Factories include the Rope House at the Plymouth Dockyard (England, 1812) and the Painters’ Shop and Lead Mill at the Chatham Dockyard (England, 1817). Naval hospitals include one at the Port Royal Dockyard (Jamaica, 1817), one at Antigua (1826–1827), one at Barbados (1827), and another in the middle of the Atlantic, about halfway between Recife and Luanda at Georgetown (Ascension Island, around 1829).7 Naval barracks include those at Fort Nassau (Bahamas, 1826–1827) and Morne Fortuné (St. Lucia, 1829–1833). But an elite military residence com- plicates this seemingly Foucauldian list: the Naval Commissioner’s House at the Ireland Island Dockyard (Jamaica, 1822–1831).8 Colonialism will provide another complication. Although mentioned only in passing in Discipline and Punish, colonialism is inseparable from the architectural genealogy of fire protection.9 And where Foucault’s story of “the birth of the prison” is concerned above all with an anthropocentric “history of the modern soul,” the human was but one target for containment in a global history of fire-resistant architecture.10 “Whatever we mean by modernity,” Lorraine Daston writes, “is in some way linked with new attitudes toward the control of the future and the possibility of a life relatively secure from the disrup- tions of chance.”11 Other historians of quantification, precision, and risk have expounded on this characterization of modernity in fields as diverse as abstract mathematics and the realms of fabrication and construction.12 But what would modern architecture, specifically, look like when viewed through this lens? Over the past decade, architectural historians have begun to explore this question, analyzing buildings in regard to hypothetical risks, benefits, and futurity in general. Scholarship by Daniel M. Abramson, Michael Osman, and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury—on obsolescence, regulation, and technological potentialities, respectively—reveals attempts to grapple with hypotheticals, by architects specifically and technocrats more generally, over the past two centuries.13 Abramson describes buildings being fundamentally impermanent, subject to supersession under pressures as varied as the vicissi- tudes of technologies, economics, and land-use patterns. Planners,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 and eventually architects, envisioned dismantling their projects as part of their designs. Osman, on the other hand, shows how control over environments governed technical, scientific, and aesthetic production and practices. Predicting and adjusting to circumstances as they changed required new, flexible systems or models that could adapt under inconstancy. Merwood-Salisbury writes against teleological narratives that place tall buildings along a develop- mental timeline that leads to a stylistically “modern” architecture. For Merwood-Salisbury, who writes of “the simultaneous uncertainty about and enthusiasm for material progress,” futurity played as much a role in restraining as in anticipating what was to come.14 In contrast to traditional modern architectural historiography, these authors suggest a nonlinear, nonprogressive image of architecture built to allay—and, in some cases, to elicit—anxiety. In doing so, they offer means of reconfiguring the values convention- ally associated with architecture. In place of durability or solidity, architects built to avert uncertainty. Pushing these ideas further back in time, the archives of the British colonial project during the first decades of the nineteenth century reveal how new technologies and materials served to pri- oritize security and control in ways that had not been possible before. Beyond simply providing shelter, designers, builders, and technocrats assigned architecture the function of containing, thus converting buildings into instruments for managing risk.15

Bentham and Holl, Fire and Paper In 1804 (the year Haitian revolutionaries finally triumphed over British and French counterinsurgencies), Edward Holl became assistant architect and engineer to the Navy Board. Notably, he was appointed by Samuel Bentham, then inspector general of naval works of the British navy. Holl served the navy from 1804 until his death in 1823, under changing titles, from assistant architect to surveyor of buildings to civil architect, and designed or inspired all of the buildings considered in this article.16 Under Bentham and Holl, the navy optimized the dockyards’ operations through surveillance measures and work reform initiatives.17 For example, in 1797 (early in his tenure as inspector general), Bentham proposed several dockyard reforms, including a project for a steam-driven system to store and pipe water across the Portsmouth facility for firefighting. Paradoxically, opponents argued that this firefighting system would itself be a fire hazard, both from the machines themselves and from arsonists critical of replacing human with nonhuman labor: “The cry had been, and still continued, that steam-engines would set fire to the dockyard; [and] artificers would rise, if an attempt were made to introduce the machinery.”18 Bentham’s push to substitute machines for people

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 speaks to his management strategy, an approach he bequeathed to his subordinate architect Holl and then to a subsequent generation of naval planners.19 Although many of the buildings Holl (and his followers) designed still exist today, equally important for my history of containment are surviving architectural drawings. As Antoine Picon argues, drawings paved the way for a correlation of conception and realisation, a correlation which would be one of the chief objectives of the nineteenth-century science of engineering. There is also good cause to link the appearance, in the practice of Enlightenment engineers, of the process of conception-realisation, to the much more general, technical imaginary, which sought to organise and to quantify flows and movements of every kind, from road traffic to the problems of water flow in rivers or canals . . . cartographic depiction served to guarantee that an indissoluble link remained between words, drawings and things.20 Through drawings, architects, builders, and engineers could forge conduits between respective realms, from immaterial to material, across transoceanic distances, and across social strata or professional groups and trades.21 Such properties are shared by most documents intended to relay information. But in addition to com- municating the facts of fire-resistant construction techniques, the drawings of Holl and his followers reveal attempts to control the very objects they portray and the people interpreting them. That is, the documents were tools not only for manufacturing components, organizing labor, and assembling buildings but for exerting control over uncertainties. At the same time, however, these paper surfaces also reveal limits to that control.

Naval Hospital, Port Royal Dockyard (Jamaica, 1817–1820) Holl designed the 1817 Naval Hospital in Port Royal, Jamaica, on the margins of a periphery. Enslaved African laborers assembled the cast-iron components drawn by Holl near the metropole, fabri- cated by founders in northern England, and then shipped by the navy across the Atlantic.22 This marginal building therefore belongs to any and all of these imperial locations. Although at first blush this production process might reinforce Britain’s primacy as the center of industrial manufacture whose wares were then disseminated to the colonies, it also presents Jamaica as a consum- mate destination, valuable as both a site for commercial exchange and for its geopolitical location. More significant, the pieces brought across the ocean constituted part of an as-yet experimental construction system built from iron and brick and meant to withstand inevitable atmospheric threats.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Edward Holl. “No. 3 Plans, In England, those threats came from new sources of combustibility Elevations and Sections of the from dangerous combinations of flammable oil, fuels, and particu- Cast Iron Columns, Girders, Joists &c. &c. for the Royal Naval late matter in close proximity to steam machinery and semi- Hospital Erecting at Jamaica . . . ,” controlled flames at mills, factories, and storehouses. By producing 1818. Jamaica Archives. and erecting such experimental prefabricated buildings in British- held territories in the Caribbean—the first places to which such technologies traveled—Holl, Bentham, and their Royal Navy col- leagues communicated their impulse to control fire across the British imperial domain.23 The iron-framed Naval Hospital at Port Royal was a second iteration, replacing a 1740 structure damaged by an earthquake in 1771, a hurricane in 1787, and finally destroyed by another hurricane and fires in 1812 and 1815.24 But the exportation of this fire-resistant, prefabricated technology to new environments also expanded imperial understandings of architectural control: in the tropics, iron structures were discovered to control dry rot, white ants, and even the effects of hurricanes.25 The two-story Naval Hospital (which still stands today) consists of enclosed brick blocks inside an iron cage. Under a single long roof, a row of six brick subbuildings is oriented enfilade to take advantage of lateral breezes for ventilation.26 Merchants trans- ported brick, a relatively uncommon building material in the Caribbean, as ballast in ships’ holds that would return to London’s West India Docks filled with sugar.27 The iron columns of the lower story are round with a slight taper, approximating entasis, and the upper level has H-section box beams (a hollow center with lateral lips), slotted to receive adjustable wood jalousies for shading.28 The lower columns support a perimetrical girder molded into the shape of a classical entablature tied to the brick walls by outer iron inverted-T beams, cast with projecting shelves for T-section joists spanning north-south.29 Outer and inner beams are bolted to one another and cast with shelves to hold I-section joists spanning the interior bays. The columns on the upper story also support a cornice around the gambrel-trussed slate roof.30 The bottom chord of the truss sits on top of the brick walls, also made up of inverted-T

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 sections in three parts and bolted together end-to-end. Wedged iron bands hold wrought-iron purlins to the cast iron between each truss.31 The hospital’s constructional configuration corroborates its functions as a device for re- inforcing hierarchical order- ing systems. The iron framing inside the blocks coincides with the structure only out- side of the blocks at the brick walls’ midpoints; otherwise, the sets Edward Holl. Port Royal Naval of members are structurally independent.32 Hospital, 1817–1820. The variety of fasteners, types of connections, and series of parts in the hospital also reflect the hierarchical order that characterized its designers. Like the unidirectional hierarchy that descended from the architect (who supervised the draftsmen, iron founder, on-site clerk of the works, and on down to the coerced manual laborers), the intricate assemblages of parts conveyed a strictly delineated order. The temporal sequence for building was as important as the parts fitting together and the fulfillment of professional roles and tasks. Only Holl and the other planners could approve inevitable design changes, through the chain of socio- professional delegation. On the site plan, for example, Holl pro- jected two phases. The first involved a line of three brick blocks, creating a central axis for the compound. The second phase would have extended this main north-south structure with another block to the north, two more to the south, and then, at northern and southern ends, two additional blocks perpendicular to the main six-block structure, which would have given the overall compound the shape of a square bracket, open to the west.33 At least those were the plans on paper. On the ground, the two bracketing end blocks were never built—a glimpse of how metropolitan designs might diverge from practice. Other architectural plans reveal top-down design changes. The shape of the roof was modified from a single pitch over the brick blocks with flat segments over the verandas to two gambrel slopes that extend out to the veranda columns.34 The first design shows up in documents from May 1818, but drawings from 1819 (produced even as the building was under construction) show the new design. Undated drawings also acknowledge these revisions with notes in red ink that say, “Memo., This is the last arrangement” and “Memo: Last Plans &c.—.”35 Although design changes or phased building processes were hardly unusual, the system of prefabrication placed pressure on the temporality of construction more starkly

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 than in other circumstances. That is, designers and manufacturers made the components specially to slot into an established architectural order that matched the hierarchical structure of command. Notes on some of the drawings give us a microhistorical glimpse of that hierarchical structure on the English side of the process. The hand of iron founder John Sturges, who presided over the Bowling Iron Works near Bradford, England, is evident on several documents.36 On a framing plan for the Jamaican hospital, he labeled each member with a unique number and also signed several marginal comments (one, for example, noting that a plan corresponded to “the request made in your L[ette]r,” presumably to Holl; another informing Holl about the iron Sturges was concurrently producing for the Woolwich Dockyard near London).37 Sturges’s tone is fittingly deferential for a businessman with several open contracts to his client.38 Other annotations, however, seem to be directed at Sturges. Two carefully drawn “Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Cast Iron Columns” and other components have these red- inked instructions: “NB. It is requested that this drawing be kept clean, and returned as soon as the Castings have been completed.”39 Implying both property and propriety, these notes highlight the hierarchical statuses of the participants in the building process. Through their communications and authorship, the exchange of these documents thus indexed the economic structures of who was paying whom. Finally, the drawings also help us imagine processes of construction on Jamaica and the building’s eventual use. All of these drawings are now in the Jamaica Archives, and so they—and their various layers of annotations—presumably crossed the Atlantic with the iron components they display, words and images working to ensure the proper combination of parts. Holl labeled the drawings for the building in Jamaica with the terms “Cornice,” “Entablature,” and “Collonade [sic],” implying that readers should interpret the buildings according to normative architectural criteria, but also that the building could shore up an image of solidity in the face of the uncertainty and risk inherent in economic exchange and other colonial practices.40 Sturges, who labeled each member of a framing plan with a number, also added a note: “The Beams Joists &c are all figured & marked according to this Plan”—presumably meaning the actual metal objects had also been given numbers, allowing enslaved builders in Jamaica to connect paper to iron. The on-site architect’s first assistant, or clerk of the works, William Miller, signed the overall site plan.41 Another drawing displays a specific, fixed moment in the distributed production process on both sides of the Atlantic: “Plan of the One pair floor and Roof of the three Buildings to be erected at the R.N. Hospital at Jamaica; shewing by a Red tinge the Cast Iron Work required to complete the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Veranda, in addition to that already prepared and forwarded to Jamaica.” A record of staggered production and shipping processes, this drawing pointed out to readers which members had already been cast and sent and which members were still needed. The document may have accompanied the still-missing beams to the Caribbean. Perhaps the most important information conveyed by these plans, with their dimensions, notations, coloring, and marginalia, had to do with the control of labor implied by prefabrication. The systematic assembly of prefabricated architectural elements eliminated the need for almost all skilled labor in favor of forms of forced labor. In designing these iron assemblies, Holl preempted any uncertainty or leeway in craftsmanship in the building process. His drawings, replete with dimensions usually in whole inches, indicate high material tolerances; nevertheless, he meticulously labeled and cross-referenced the cast components to fit together only in their stipulated arrangements.42 Some of the enslaved people who built the hospital had enough skill as masons to build the brick walls, but the designers and overseers evidently did not trust them to do more with iron than to lay parts into prespecified cast notches.43 More than simply a product of a reified social order, then, the Jamaican Naval Hospital itself embodied and was an active conduit in reproducing that order. In all of the entangled networks of manufacture necessary for its construction, the hospital materialized the anxieties and apprehensions that undergirded the actions and ideologies of industrialization. Constructional hierarchy produced and actively reinforced social hierarchy. This was true even after construction had been completed. Each of the site plan’s eight pink rectangles, representing the brick- walled wards, is labeled “Building to contain 32 Patients.”44 Two aspects of that phrase bear semiotic significance: the term contain and the reference to each of the blocks as a “Building” in its own right. These repeated details bluntly demonstrate the theme of containment, in which predetermined quantities of patients were held within self-contained “buildings” that were themselves all sheltered under a shared roof—each enclosed part delineated from the whole. The subsequent new hospital was both the apotheosis of a series of experimental buildings intended to withstand a volatile atmos- phere and a beginning of innovatory technologies of prefabrication and assembly.

Rope House, Plymouth Dockyard (England, 1812) Rope facilities, like textile mills, were prone to fires. Boiling tar and oils, hemp and its dust, manual or draft-powered equipment—all of these rope-making methods led to a high risk of combustion.45

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Beginning in the 1790s, specialists increasingly debated the benefits and “dangerous consequences” of introduc- ing steam machinery into rope making.46 Once steam was introduced at a large scale from the early nineteenth century, these fears were confirmed: spinning and laying houses, being long, undivided spaces—Plymouth was the longest— remained especially flammable building types.47 Therefore no one was likely sur- prised when the first Plymouth Rope House burned in 1812, spurring recon- struction in iron (and subsequent expansion with an added story).48 The new structure was regarded as a marvel: an 1840s Plymouth travel guide admired “the Rope-houses, two buildings each 1200 feet long. . . . One of the Rope-houses is fire-proof—it is worthy the visitor’s minute attention, particularly the fine perspective view, from either end, being excelled only in this respect, by the Louvre in Paris.”49 Equating the utilitarian Rope Edward Holl. “Plan, Elevation and House with the Louvre gestures toward the Anglo-French rivalry, Sections of a Part of the Eastern but, more important, it shows how architectural value could be Rope House in His Majestys derived from immensity and industrial-military aesthetics. Those Dock Yard at Plymouth . . . ,” 1812. Detail. National Archives. aesthetics were predicated on the iron from which the building had been reconstructed. Holl titled one of the project’s drawings “Plan, Elevation and Sections of a part of the Eastern Rope House in His Majestys Dock Yard at Plymouth, shewing the mode for restoring the same, so as to render the whole Incombustible, also an additional Square Story, by a red tinge.”50 His proposal shows heavy brick walls with a single row of cast-iron columns bifurcating the building’s width on the ground floor and the one above it, on a construction system similar to the one later used for the Naval Hospital in Jamaica. The drawing’s title conflates technologies of fire resistance with techniques of drafting by prioritizing the “red tinge” and “render[ing] the whole Incombustible” on the same level. With this jux- taposition, the drawings themselves become interpretable for their visual rhetoric.51 The Rope House plans are meticulous, highly finished mechanical drawings. They portray objects using color coding, watercolor rendering, and according to conventions of line weights and types. Supplemented with various hatches for section cuts and dashed

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 lines for hidden sides, the documents convey a high degree of certainty about the capabilities of architectural drawings to conform to their material corollaries, and vice versa.52 When multiple views of an object appear, they are accurately, orthographically coordinated. Labels, annotations, dimensions, and other cross-referential marks conduct readers through the drawings. Illustrative of a certain type of precision, the drawings are a set; no one sheet or image presents the project in full. As a composite, the set presumes readers’ familiar- ity with the components, materials, and means of assembly that, collectively, it shows. Simultaneously, it provides redundant information, constantly refer- ring to other drawings to locate a particular beam or including dimensions inferable from adjacent views.53 With blue washes consistently representing iron in elevation or a dense blue hatch in section, or brick in red and thick grey hatching in section—to take two examples—color coding assumed readers’ ability to comprehend without written labels. How this technique affected the drawings’ amenability to low-skilled labor is open to interpretation. On one side, such conventions presupposed builders’ or other readers’ abilities to decipher the signification system. On the other, the signs pictorially resemble their objects, iconograph- ically. No on-site measurement should have been necessary, since parts were made and surveying done in advance. The profuse dimensions attest to that certainty, seemingly included to convince readers of the construction system’s forethought, efficiency, and economy.54 But in between the carefully drawn lines with which they depict their objects, more provisional annotations allude to adjustments necessary under the constraints of the physical world. This cou- pling of precision and variation corresponded to later impulses toward standardization as an architectural technique for managing risk.55 The hard-line inked drawings are covered in light pencil notes and numbers, undermining their otherwise steadfast expres- sion of precision. Apparently haphazardly scrawled directly over the more decorous mechanical drawings, these emendations often show what the drawings omit. Some are simply arithmetic, suggesting that the architects, builders, and manufacturers used

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Opposite top: Edward Holl. whatever paper was at hand; others seem to be revisions, more “No. 4 Plans, Elevations and directly relevant to the underlying drawings.56 Sections of the Cast Iron Columns, Cornice, Principal Overall, the pencil marks imply more provisionality than the Rafters &c. &c. for the Royal Naval drawings suggest at first glance. The notes offer insight into design Hospital Erecting at Jamaica . . . ,” and construction, otherwise elusive processes in prefabricated 1818. Detail. Jamaica Archives. buildings for which few preliminary documents exist.57 Instead of Opposite bottom: Edward Holl. “Plans, Elevations and Sections a linear progression from sketches to crisply drafted drawings to of the Girders, Joist [sic], completed buildings, these drawings complicate that timeline. Columns &c for the Eastern The pencil marks, some likely added during actual building, also Rope House at His Majestys Dock Yard at Plymouth,” 1812. convey a flexibility otherwise absent from the drawings’ and pre- Detail. National Archives. fabrication system’s rigidity. If the documents’ visual rhetoric Above: Edward Holl. “Plans of the of precision was, in fact, correlated with a wider constructional- Basement and Ground Floors of architectural project to anticipate and control for uncertainty, then the Painters Shop, Lead Mill &c. the rougher, penciled parts of the drawings suggest a recognition to Be Erected at His Majesty’s Dock Yard at Chatham,” ca. 1818. that only so much control was possible. National Archives. Painters’ Shop and Lead Mill at the Chatham Dockyard (England, 1817) Five years later, in 1817—at the same time he was drafting plans for the Jamaican Naval Hospital—Holl was working on the Painters’ Shop and Lead Mill at the Chatham Dockyard, a project whose drawings exhibit many of the same traits as those for the Plymouth Rope House. Machinery, however, appears as an added element increasingly as the planners developed the project.58 Like cotton and rope, paint production required tar, pitch, and boiling oil in addition to molten lead, alcohols, resins, and varnishes, all sub- stances liable to cause fires.59 As “a Mill for remanufactoring [sic] and rolling Old lead,” another kind of industrial fire hazard arose from machines for recycling metal. Holl and his assistants therefore conceived of the Chatham building expressly to diminish the threat of fire in view of the combustibility of the materials and activities that it housed. Largely built into the building, paint-making equipment and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 architecture were undifferentiated. More appropriate than describ- Above: Edward Holl. “Plans, ing these features as “added,” perhaps, would be to consider Elevation and Sections of a Painters Shop Designed for machinery and architecture synthetically, as a total production His Majestys Dock Yard at facility. In this regard, the boiler, steam engine, grinding mills, lead Chatham . . . ,” 1817. National rolling mill, sunken heated oil tanks, and canvas-stretching racks Archives. all constituted parts of the architecture as much as walls, columns, Opposite top: Edward Holl. “Plan, Elevation and Section of stairs, and windows did. More significant than the building becom- the Painters Shop Ordered to ing a machine or vice versa, the designers integrated fire risks with Be Erected at His Majestys Dock passive means of fire suppression: brick and prefabricated iron Yard at Chatham . . . ,” 1817. construction. National Archives. Sources of fire risk and techniques of averting fires therefore com- Opposite bottom: “Plans, Elevation and Sections of a prised a single assemblage, effectively setting up a continuum rang- Painters Shop Designed for ing from the building’s structure on one end to its contents on the His Majestys Dock Yard at other. The brick walls, iron columns, beams, roof, and suspended Chatham . . . ,” 1817. National Archives. iron canvas-stretching devices were the least combustible, most inert elements. Though not combustible in themselves, the oil tanks, grinding and rolling mills, boiler, and steam engine contained and processed volatile materials. The wood frames, furni- ture, and oars to be painted were liable to catch fire, and the pigments, oils, and fuel were flammable—but were also the reason for the building’s existence. The designers therefore envisioned the building as an apparatus of containment: to limit hypothetical damage if its contents were to ignite. The architecture became more complex as it integrated more- complex machinery, as illustrated in the changes from an initial design to a subsequent version of the project. The first design was of the Painters’ Shop alone. To the second design, planners added a beam engine for driving the lead mill.60 This almost doubled the building’s length, from eleven evenly spaced bays to a much more irregular elongated organization, and the portion of the building that principally accommodated the steam engine and rolling mill corresponded with more variegated dimensions.61 Patterns became more intricate, and local symmetries replaced repetition. Taken together, for example, the parts of the plan labeled “Boiler Room,” “Engine House,” and “Furnace” make up a symmetrical unit.62

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Boiler and engine rooms opened only to the exterior, although steam and exhaust pipes, a rotary drive from the flywheel to the paint grinding mills, and an overhead arm driving the lead rolling mill all communicated through enclosing walls. In this facility for making paint, recycling lead, and prevent- ing fires, Holl created conditions for controlling all interior activities. He and his assistants accomplished this by enclosing all potential hazards in brick walls four inches thicker than the exterior walls; by delimiting access across spatial compartments; and, again, by exhaustively drawing, dimensioning, and labeling the building’s parts. Despite its staid, minimal decoration, this architecture expressed its contents by assuming qualities of what it contained. Using the same conventions for describing architectural features as found in the Rope House designs, the drawings for the Painters’ Shop and Lead Mill depict machines’ materiality, shade, and shadow in watercolor washes. The boiler and engine base are pale yellow, likely for copper, which, because it is spark-proof, was used for fittings and doors of powder magazines and containers for potentially explosive materials.63 Another coincidence of architecture and machinery appears in the upper level of the Painters’ Shop, with its wooden stretching frames. Suspended from the bottom chords of the roof trusses, cast-iron “Hanging Bars” with plat- forms or “Stages” for painters to stand or sit on to reach high-up parts of stretched canvas are integrated into the building’s structure.64 One of the more pictorial drawings of the Painters’ Shop, a short section for the early project (before the steam machinery was added), shows painters at work, a somewhat jarring addition to drawings otherwise devoid of human presence.65 In the same out- lined washes as the building’s structure, integrated stretchers, and other machines, the draftsperson (possibly Holl himself) impres- sionistically rendered three people, working in white painter’s smocks. A facile conclusion would posit the people as cogs in a mechanistic-disciplinary system, churning out workers as effi- ciently as pigments, rolled lead, and painted cloths. In the context of architecture as a means of containment, however, the workers can be interpreted more relevantly as objects that needed to be contained.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 That is, they were sources of damage no less volatile than several Edward Holl. Bermuda other of the building’s contents. If the visual rhetoric for the archi- Commissioner’s House, 1822–1831. tecture expresses certainty through precision and realistic rendering that had the capacity to contain variations in its verisimilitude to the objects depicted, the drawings portray labor using physical and spatial containment of the behaviors that appear on the page as another variable or risk for architecture to mitigate. Seen in this light, the workers’ presence in the drawing reflects back on the tasks of the architect and the architecture. The stretching frames made the building’s interior operable. But the hanging bars’ stages were fixed, and the frames were adjustable only along tracks. This points to a theme of limited ranges of movement or strictly controlled freedom. From the mid-1790s, Samuel Bentham, in an effort to optimize the navy’s logistical operations, had imposed the sorts of control over labor intended to end older practices of skimming waste products or other small items, as such unregulated activities contradicted his broader supervisory and management program.66 In all of these mechanisms, prescription and proscrip- tion were equally important.

Commissioner’s House, Ireland Island Dockyard (Bermuda, 1822–1831) In 1822, Holl began work on the Commissioner’s House at the Ireland Island Dockyard in Bermuda.67 After Holl died in December 1823, before the project was completed, George Ledwell Taylor assumed Holl’s post and finished the Commissioner’s House. The design had basically been completed, but the building was not fully built until 1831.68 Using the same cast-iron construction system as Holl’s factories and hospital, the Commissioner’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 House did not pose risks of fire as great as manufacturing facilities of the time built according to similar methods.69 Yet the fact that architects specified iron for these buildings’ construction demonstrates just how essential, common, and customary fire prevention had become.70 Above a brick basement, the load- bearing walls of the Commissioner’s House were built of a hard local stone quarried on-site by convict laborers.71 The columns surround- ing the exterior veranda, and all horizontal structural members, are cast iron.72 Thus, the metal encases and pervades the building. Fire control appears explicitly in the designs: water tanks were included in case of fire.73 In addition, the use George Ledwell Taylor (?). of an overall iron structure reveals that by the time of the house’s “Plans of the Ground Floors of construction in the mid-1820s the benefits of building in iron had the Commissioners House . . . ,” been accepted as a matter of consensus. The building system’s ca. 1826. Bermuda Archives. advantages outweighed the costs of shipping cast components from England, as well as the challenges of designing in one place and building remotely in another, in a distributed process further com- plicated by the use of forced labor: not enslaved people, as in the Jamaica Naval Hospital, but deported convicted laborers. The building plans, for example, include cross-references between labeled parts and their positions in the building and instructions to on-site masons for assembling the building’s main staircase.74 These annotations suggest that impulses to reduce uncertainty inherent in remote assembly motivated both prefabrication and fire prevention. Yet, the Bermuda building’s design also represents the spectrum of what these planners could and could not control. A peculiar feature of the house is its irregular intercolumniation, noticeable in the built building and delineated in the architectural drawings. While the front façade is mostly regular, the spacing on the sides varies from a foot wider than the standard bays to just over half of the standard width.75 Meanwhile, a structural framing plan shows the trussed roof members spaced much more evenly.76 We can only speculate on the reasons for these discrepancies, but the house’s joints between components and materials offer some clues. In all, the building has seventy-eight mass-produced cast-iron columns.77

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 On each story, thirty-nine columns support a cast-iron quasi-classical lintel that runs around the perime- ter of the building.78 The columns’ capitals are outfitted with flanges for bolting to a channel cast into the cornice above. On the lower story these are in line with the cornice, and on the upper one they project out over the cornice, like impost blocks. The columns’ place- ment was therefore autonomous from the continuous lintel above, as if free to slide along the cornice laterally.79 In this way, the spacing of the columns and beams ties in to the horizontal structure that sits on the stone walls. Some of the external beams were bolted to the internal ones through the stone, likely for increased structural rigidity. In this case, the designers’ and manufacturers’ attempts to control unforeseen circumstances on the building site created a limited range of freedom in the building’s construction, ensuring an even more rigid final structural assembly—on the pattern of the limited mobility of the stages at the Chatham Painters’ Shop.

From Antigua to Ascension, or, A System of Barracks for the West Indies (1824–1833) The same year Holl died, 1823, Colonel Charles Felix Smith was appointed Commanding Royal Engineer of the West Indies. Headquartered in Barbados, Smith would spend the next fourteen years in the Caribbean. One year after his arrival, and facing the problem of how to oversee eleven island colonies Top: Edward Holl. Bermuda Commissioner’s House, with the help of only five Royal Engineers, Smith proposed to the 1822–1831. Board of Ordnance “a new system of barracks.” Like Holl’s projects, Bottom: Edward Holl. these would be prefabricated buildings that used iron framing to Bermuda Commissioner’s hold together a core structure of masonry bearing walls.80 House, 1822–1831. Smith’s proposal was approved, but another three years were needed to work out the details. Eight-year West Indies veteran Captain Henry Rowland Brandreth was dispatched to Birmingham to oversee the design work and material tests.81 The first test project was a barrack at Fort Nassau, Bahamas. Surviving correspondence reveals (again) the difficulties of design at a distance. First, there was an iron founders strike, an ironic—or historically appropriate—

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 glitch for a project aimed at deskilling the labor of construction. Then the separation of design work in London and foundry work in Birmingham caused further delays. And then, when the first shipment of parts arrived in the Caribbean in January 1826, the builders discovered that the parts had been incorrectly machined, with the wrong size bolt holes. (The bolts sent were also too short.) As shipped, the parts could not be assembled, resulting in further delays.82 Subsequent problems involved Yorkshire paving stones cut to the wrong size and unreported redesigns of ironwork by Brandreth (which led to a formal investigation).83 After these difficulties, subsequent projects seem to have gone smoothly. Hospitals in Antigua and Barbados went up without a hitch in 1826 and 1827.84 John Smyth and H.R. Brandreth. The “iron barracks” on St. Lucia were built between 1829 and 1833 West India Barracks Pl. 1, ca. and were described a decade later as “the chief ornament of Morne 1826. From Papers on Subjects 85 Connected with the Duties of the Fortuné.” These Caribbean installations were, in turn, the con- Corps of the Royal Engineers ceptual launching point for a Brandreth-designed naval hospital at (1838). Georgetown on Ascension Island, built in the middle of the mid- Atlantic in 1829.86 Although the travails of the Fort Nassau project are known to us through archival documents, the other installations—the Antigua and Barbados hospitals, the barracks at Morne Fortuné and Georgetown—were all discussed and disseminated to a broader audience in the second and fourth volumes (1838 and 1840) of the Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers.87 The 1838 volume included Brandreth’s “Memorandum Relative to a System of Barracks for the West Indies, Recommended by Colonel Sir C.F. Smith, C.B., R.E., and Approved by the Master- General and Board of Ordnance,” as well as an article by fellow Royal Engineer Captain John Smyth “On the Construction of Barracks for Tropical Climates,” which praised “the advantage of Sir C. Smith’s iron frames.”88 Both Brandreth and Smyth reported on the hurricane-resistance of these structures. Smyth mentioned the barracks at St. Lucia and the hospital at Antigua; Brandreth mentioned the hospitals at Antigua and Barbados. (The same issue also features “On Hurricanes,” an article by Royal Engineer Lieutenant- Colonel William Reid.)89 Two issues later, Brandreth published his “Notes on the Island of Ascension,” which describes his 1829 inspection and includes engravings that “represent the fort and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 hospital that have been erected, and which are modifications of my original proposition.”90 Bentham, Holl, and other technocrats like them worked from the metropole and sent objects across oceans, in apparent conformance to a pattern of top-down colonial diffusion. Yet because they were experimenting with building techniques, their buildings can be understood as artifacts of multidirectional knowledge transfer. That is, the first cast-iron buildings in Jamaica and Bermuda were culminations of experimental systems initially tested in England. Smith’s “System of Barracks” involved further back-and-forth between the West Indies and Britain (quite literally, in the travels of Brandreth) and then on to Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. Volume two (1838) of Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers is filled with references to experimental architectural knowledge produced in and circulated among the colonies before being exported back to Fleet Street, London, where the Papers were printed for further dissemination across the globe. Brandreth’s “Memorandum Relative to a System of Barracks for the West Indies” reports that “The junction of wrought and cast iron is . . . avoided, a circumstance of importance in a climate where the union of the two conditions of iron occa- sions greater liability to the decay of each.”91 An extended footnote in Smyth’s “On the Construction of Barracks for Tropical Climates” explains various methods of installing antimiasma screens in windows, which he developed in consultation with Brandreth. The broad survey begins with a hospital project by Brandreth in Demerara, to which Smyth compares his own experience in Canada as well as hearsay from “several hospitals in Italy” and from barracks in Africa via an “officer who passed two years in Sierra Leone.”92 Thus, British military personnel used architecture as a tool for gathering knowledge about materials through its performance across geographic locales, knowledge that was then disseminated across the British globe.93 Historians have accounted for British technological superiority during this period, using materiality as a key instrument in constructing mythologies of modernism and of British building, with cast iron occupying a formidable position in those narratives. Iron is supposed to have been an autochthonous English invention related to England’s abundant coal seams.94 Sigfried Giedion waxed poetic on the 1779 Coalbrookdale Iron Bridge, a project that Nikolaus Pevsner nominated as the inflection point where cast iron became an acceptable architectural material.95 Carl Condit lamented that U.S. builders would not erect a similar bridge until the 1830s.96 Yet the travel of iron construction across imperial networks as a result of these fireproofing experiments deepens these narratives, showing that designers and builders had indiscrimi-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 nately sowed British materials and construction practices across the globe several decades before. Around 1800, the Coalbrookdale company shipped across the Atlantic the components for a cast-iron bridge in Spanish Town, Jamaica, that still stands.97 Similar remote projects followed, including the naval hospital. Furthermore, in many canonical histories, early iron architecture is treated as announcing a dematerialization and structural expres- sionism that others would not pursue until the twentieth century. The Crystal Palace of 1851 encapsulates these triumphalist ideologies of the effects of the Industrial Revolution onto architectural design. Before that, in Pevsner’s words, cast iron “was chosen . . . for purely practical” reasons and thus had not been “regarded as an aesthetic asset.”98 Yet the history of fireproofing proposed here shows that iron’s performance was evaluated and optimized not by criteria of structural performance dependent on dematerialization but through a redefinition of materiality itself as an imperial cate- gory, with coincident significations and consequences—including aesthetic ones. In place of associations with structural integrity and solidity, Holl, Bentham, and others used iron to convey those aesthetic effects while implicitly acknowledging their inability to contain uncertainties. That is, despite Pevsner’s insistence on distinguishing between “practical” and “aesthetic” properties, the material both connoted and concretely contributed to regimes of management from afar.

Conclusions: Ontological Scandal If, as Bill Brown argues, slavery represents the “ontological scandal” of human beings treated as things, then the use of prefabricated iron architecture in Great Britain’s colonial territories in the Caribbean reveals another facet of architecture’s potential to serve as a preemptive strategy for controlling humans and nonhumans alike.99 The fear of acts of rebellion by the enslaved was a major motiva- tion for all of these military buildings, a fear that James Walvin identifies as “collective plantocratic psychosis.”100 Barracks built on Holl’s and Smith’s principles quartered soldiers who would suppress the 1831–1832 Christmas Uprisings in which insurgents strategically used arson in Jamaica’s Montego Bay. That this history of fire-resistant architecture runs parallel to a history of enslaved people’s insurgent actions in the Caribbean—and to the history of British anti-slavery politics that those actions prompted—is no accident. On the one hand, the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, Bussa’s Rebellion in Barbados in 1816, and another organized uprising in British Guiana (Demerara) in 1823 displayed enslaved people’s ability to exert agency to demand freedom.101 On the other hand, the British public began to call for change, eventually lead-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 ing to legislation abolishing the British slave trade in 1807 and, Adolphe Duperly. The Destruction finally, emancipation from 1833 to 1838. Although those legislative of Roehamton Estate in the Parish of St. James’s in January 1832, moves followed liberal economic ideologies as much as humani- 1833. National Library of Jamaica. tarian impulses, they likewise were responses to apprehensiveness over the power that enslaved people had demonstrated across four decades of armed insurrection.102 Buildings therefore played several roles in the British Caribbean timeline and policies: they were both substrates for protest and repression mechanisms. The barracks’ fire-resistance, their precise architectural communication enabling prefabrication, and their deterritorialization all coalesced toward an imperial project focused on anticipating and protecting against risks. While grow- ing identification on the part of the working class in England and Scotland with enslaved people of African descent helped to shift political attitudes, abolition nonetheless left the institution of chattel slavery in place, and non-British and illegal slavers continued the trade.103 Piecemeal emancipation acts subjected many enslaved people to an initial period of so-called apprenticeship in which (monetarily compensated) slave owners were to paternalistically guide formerly enslaved people into life as capitalistic, wage-earning, ostensibly free economic agents while they continued to work under the conditions of slavery. As that system’s viability unrav- eled, full emancipation took effect, though the consequences and the buildings used to enforce authoritarian control remain as visible artifacts. Drawings of these buildings reveal the structures by which the technocratic-professional class of architects, engineers, and manufacturers collaborated to produce and maintain hierarchical control, which they effected by means of those same documents. The workers portrayed on the stages and stretching frames in the drawing

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 for the Chatham Painters’ Shop hint at labor’s position as a compo- nent of that apparatus. But the painters’ presence in that image contrasts with the invisibility of the laborers in the buildings across the Atlantic, apart from the signed name of the supervisory clerk of the works—an exception that proves the rule. In that regard, hierarchies of labor corresponded to modes of representation on drawings: a signature denoted higher status than bodily depiction, and, at the risk of stating the obvious, the lowest status received no representation at all. Therefore, we cannot neglect the concurrence of prefabrication with movements from enslavement-aligned mercantilism, to abolition in 1807, to emancipation and apprenticeship in the 1830s, to a more widespread wage-labor economy. The liberal economic argument that paid labor would be more efficient than coercion deliberately sustained the social order that had been in place prior to the reform initiatives that eventually resulted in emancipation. Labor practices, ranging in scale from the transatlantic hierarchical organization of networks of production to the minute scale of architectural details in the form of cast-iron notches dictating how builders would perform assembly, manifested that social order. Holl’s prefabricated buildings, by controlling for unforeseen events such as fire or atmospheric phenomena, as well as imposing limitations on freedom, gave material form to those techniques of managing laborers. Though their designers couched them in the rhetoric of security and minimizing risk, these buildings were just as much mechanisms for coercion and capitalist exchange. A comparison between technology and labor, as they appear in these instances of prefabrication, encapsulates an imperial impulse toward control. Despite changes in technology, labor practices remained mostly stagnant. The designers, planners, and builders who invented and implemented these cast-iron construction systems gleaned experimental knowledge from them, which they then leveraged to minimize all other risks, even threats of violence. Such techniques of conducting behavior, control, and containment were manifest in these instances of compulsory labor in prefabrication and construction. Theorists of the disciplinary regime have legitimately regarded the Panopticon as a representative emblem of that apparatus: a “principle” or diagram. In supplementing the Panopticon’s repre- sentational aspects with the tangible components and documents that Samuel Bentham, Holl, and others used to channel orders, a deeper understanding of precisely how they subjugated people at a distance becomes available. As an architectural device, the Panopticon placed people in cells and under surveillance, depriv- ing them of knowledge about when or whether administrators actually were watching them. Extrapolated to the societal level, people

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 internalized that surveillance and behaved according to the notion that surveillance was, indeed, constant. If architecture thus helped to constitute the disciplinary society through techniques of spatial and organizational configuration, however, those were not the field’s only contributions. By means of iron, and the drawings for assembling it into buildings, materiality was another architectural instrument for producing and ensuring adherence to the forms of conduct that discipline connotes. Where the Panopticon functioned to segment “space, in[to] which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place,” the drawings for Holl’s iron projects performed the same task but replaced dis- cretized, locatable human beings with iron members.104 The act of displacing people in favor of a material implies a particular scheme of valuation, one in which the iron parts’ standardization itself makes them valuable, as opposed to human beings’ uncontrol- lability—despite efforts to the contrary.105 As a technological object, with its corollary spatial practices and societal effects, the Panopticon contained people and their behaviors by constraining ranges of movement, freedom, and, ultimately, thought. The exchanges of construction documents for assembling Holl’s iron building designs had the same purpose. Limiting uncertainty by removing agency, the designs operated in a fictional world in which—with enough annotations and precise dimensioning—inert, eminently controllable materials mechanistically erected themselves. The laboring bodies who actually put the pieces together had no place in that fiction, except as objects to be contained.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Notes 1. Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1863), 53–55. 2. Robin Evans, “Bentham’s Panopticon: An Incident in the Social History of Architecture,” Architectural Association Quarterly 3 (April 1971): 21–37; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975; New York: Vintage Books, 1977), esp. 200; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7; and Anthony Vidler, “The Theatre of Production: Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and the Architecture of Social Reform,” AA Files 1 (Autumn 1981): 54–63, to cite a few. 3. Maria Sophia Bentham, The Life of Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Bentham, K.S.G. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 99–100; empha- sis in original. See also Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838–1843); William J. Ashworth, “‘System of Terror’: Samuel Bentham, Accountability and Dockyard Reform during the Napoleonic Wars,” Social History 23 (January 1998): 63–79; and Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 371–401. 4. See H.R. Johnson and A.W. Skempton, “William Strutt’s Cotton Mills, 1793– 1812,” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 30 (1955–1956, 1956–1957): 179– 205; and Sara E. Wermiel, “The Development of Fireproof Construction in Great Britain and the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” Construction History 9 (1993): 3–26. 5. “This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without divi- sion, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead—all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 197. 6. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 228. 7. The architect of the naval hospital in Bermuda may have been Edward Holl, whose work I discuss in this article. The Bermuda Naval Hospital, formerly on Ireland Island’s southern tip, was built in 1818 and deliberately burned down in 1972. No drawings of it remain, although other depictions do. Jonathan Coad, Support for the Fleet: Architecture and Engineering of the Royal Navy’s Bases 1700–1914 (Swindon, UK: English Heritage, 2013), 352, 425 n. 56. See also Ian Stranack, The Andrew and the Onions: The Story of the Royal Navy in Bermuda 1795–1975 (Bermuda: Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, 1990), 69–71; and W.E. Brockman, Bermuda: Growth of a Naval Base 1795–1932, ed. William R. Cooke (Bermuda: Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, 2009). 8. These buildings are absent from most accounts of the history of prefabrication, including Alfred Bruce and Harold Sandbank, A History of Prefabrication (Raritan, NJ: John B. Pierce Foundation, 1945); R.B. White, Prefabrication: A History of Its Development in Great Britain (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1965); and Gilbert Herbert, Pioneers of Prefabrication: The British Contribution in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). More recent scholarship has corrected this omission, including Pedro Paulo d’Alpoirn Guedes, “Iron in Building, 1750–1855: Innovation and Cultural Resistance” (Ph.D. diss., University of Queensland, 2010), 64–66, 116–18; Pedro Paulo d’Alpoirn Guedes, “The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks,” in Additions to Architectural History, XIXth SAHANZ Conference, ed. John Macarthur and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Anthony Moulis (Brisbane: Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2002), 72–94; John Weiler, “Colonial Connections: Royal Engineers and Building Technology Transfer in the Nineteenth Century,” Construction History 12 (1996): 3–18; and John Weiler, “The Making of Collaborative Genius: Royal Engineers and Structural Iron 1820–1870,” in The Iron Revolution: Architects, Engineers and Structural Innovation 1780–1880, ed. Robert Thorne (London: RIBA, 1990), 41–47. 9. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 29, 141 n. 1, 279; see also his metaphorical uses of bourgeois “colonization” on 171, 231, 282, 292, and 294. 10. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 23. 11. Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 164. 12. See Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and M. Norton Wise, ed., The Values of Precision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). See also Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 13. Daniel M. Abramson, Obsolescence: An Architectural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Michael Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); and Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Rosenthal writes, “Standardized plantation account books became like blueprints for factory production—designs for machines made out of humans.” Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery, 79. Compare Osman, Modernism’s Visible Hand, 127–63, on factory paperwork and regulation. 14. Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890, 11. 15. Economy, a contemporary watchword, also compelled the navy’s architectural uses of iron by conserving available timber for shipbuilding. This was a problem analogous to a Malthusian food shortage. See Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy 1652–1862 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926). 16. Coad, Support for the Fleet, 77. 17. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 371–401. 18. Bentham, The Life of Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Bentham, 127. See also Maria Sophia Bentham, “On the Combination of Fire-Extinguishing Works, with Those for the Supply of Water for Domestic and Other Purposes,” Journal of the Society of Arts, 23 June 1854, 533–39; “Fire Proof Buildings,” Journal of the Society of Arts, 11 November 1853, 758–59; and Jonathan Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1989), 233. On arsonists, see the 1776 “Jack the Painter” episode. Joseph Gurney, The Trial (at Large) of James Hill . . . for . . . Setting Fire to the Rope-House in His Majesty’s Dock-Yard at Portsmouth (London: G. Kearsley, 1777), available online at https://archive.org/details/b20443821. 19. In spite of general alignment of motives and intentions, Samuel Bentham was evidently not entirely satisfied with Holl’s work. See Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850, 35 and 39 n. 67, quoting an 1811 letter from Bentham requesting permission to replace Holl with another architect, Edward Aiken; and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Samuel Bentham to the Navy Board, 6 December 1811, in the National Maritime Museum (Greenwich, London), Admiralty Collection, Board of Admiralty, In- Letters, BP/316. Lady Bentham omitted mention of Holl by name in her Life but did hold a palpable grudge against the Navy Board for not having “properly sup- ported” Samuel, particularly on account of Holl’s predecessor, the architect Samuel Bunce (who, Lady Bentham writes, assisted with the architectural drawings for the Panopticon), and especially Aiken, the architect Bentham preferred over Holl. Bentham, The Life of Brigadier-General Sir Samuel Bentham, 293–96. 20. Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (1988; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 155, 214. 21. Scholarship in the history of science and technology has been devoted to analyses of visual rhetoric in terms of mass media and the display or formation of trust in experimental or proposed technologies. My use of the term is related, but I am more concerned here with the particularities of how meaning is conveyed than the effects that meaning might carry. See, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. 60–65; Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith, Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 7; Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” in Knowledge and Society Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 6, ed. H. Kuklick (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1986), 1–40; Wise, The Values of Precision; and William J. Rankin, “The ‘Person Skilled in the Art’ Is Really Quite Conventional: U.S. Patent Drawings and the Persona of the Inventor, 1870–2005,” in Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property: Creative Production in Legal and Cultural Perspective, ed. Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 55–75. 22. On enslaved laborers’ employment on dockyards, see Coad, Support for the Fleet, 213. On the hospital itself, little of the historical record of the building’s construction exists beyond the formal documents, but this is not unusual. A plaque on the site in Port Royal, erected by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, reads in part, “It was designed by a team headed by naval architect Edward Holl and constructed using the labour of enslaved Africans.” 23. Sir John Rennie quoted his father, also John Rennie, from 1807: “I should advise every means be adopted to prevent the danger of accidents by fire;—for this purpose, all the storehouses and other buildings should be rendered fire-proof, by constructing them in the first instance of incombustible materials, upon the plan of some of the cotton and flax mills lately erected . . . ; and the rigging-house, sail- lofts, or such other of the buildings as are required to be heated in cold weather, might be done so with perfect security by means of iron pipes filled with steam, as is now very generally practised in the manufactories of those towns: this security should be augmented by the erection of one or more steam engines.” Sir John Rennie, The Theory, Formation, and Construction of British and Foreign Harbours (London: John Weale, 1854), 51–59. See also Jonathan Coad, “The Building of Commissioner’s House, Bermuda Dockyard,” Post-medieval Archaeology 17 (1983): 168–69; Jonathan Coad, “Two Early Attempts at Fire-Proofing in Royal Dockyards,” Post-medieval Archaeology 7 (1973): 88; and Jonathan Coad, “Historic Architecture of H.M. Naval Base Devonport 1689–1850,” Mariner’s Mirror 69 (1983): 354. 24. See John Jarrett Wood, Jamaica: Its History, Constitution, and Topographical Description: With Geological and Meteorological Notes (Kingston, Jamaica: McCartney and Wood, 1884), 23, 122; Estimates of Ordinary of the Navy (London: House of Commons, 1821), 35; and Jean Cox and Oliver Cox, Naval Hospitals of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Port Royal Jamaica (Kingston: Caribbean School of Architecture at the University of Technology, Jamaica, 1999), 13. 25. Henry H. Breen, St. Lucia: Historical, Statistical, and Descriptive (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844), 28; John Smyth, “On the Construction of Barracks for Tropical Climates,” in Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of the Royal Engineers, vol. 2 (London: J. Barker, 1838), 238; H.R. Brandreth, “Memorandum Relative to a System of Barracks for the West Indies,” in Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of the Royal Engineers, vol. 2 (1838), 244; and Guedes, “The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks,” 3, 8. 26. Plans, sections, and detail drawings of the Naval Hospital, in Jamaica Archives (Spanish Town, Jamaica), 7/124/1–6, 7/124/8–10; and in National Archives (London), Admiralty Department (hereinafter Adm.) 105/89; and Cox and Cox, Naval Hospitals of Port Royal Jamaica, 25. 27. “The ships which are outward bound are not permitted to take in any of their outward cargo in the import dock?—No; except that some have been permitted to take in ballast, and some bricks, which have been considered as ballast.” George Hibbert, 3 June 1822 testimony, in Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Consider of the Means of Improving and Maintaining the Foreign Trade of the Country, 1823: West India Docks (London: House of Commons, 1823), 145. See also A.W. Acworth, Treasure in the Caribbean: A First Study of Georgian Buildings in the West Indies (London: Pleiades Books Limited, 1949), 27. On brick, see Acworth, Treasure in the Caribbean, 4; and Geoffrey de Sola Pinto, Jamaican Houses: A Vanishing Legacy (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2008), 51. 28. “No. 3 Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Cast Iron Columns, Girders, Joists &c &c for the Royal Naval Hospital Erecting at Jamaica; With Letters of Reference to the Plan of the Floors &c upon the Drawing No. 5 Where Their Lengths and Numbers Are Shewn,” 1818, in Jamaica Archives, 7/124/8. The architect’s drawings for similar contemporaneous projects show the same taper. See, for example, the columns for the Rope House at Plymouth (later renamed Devonport), “Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Girders, Joist [sic], Columns &c for the Eastern Rope House at His Majestys Dock Yard at Plymouth,” 1812, in National Archives, Adm. 140/257. These columns are dimensioned seven inches at their base and six inches at the spring point of the flanges at their “heads.” 29. Compare “Ground Plan of the Commissioners House Erecting at His Majestys Naval Establishment at Ireland Island Bermuda,” n.d. (ca. 1826), in Bermuda Archives (Hamilton, Bermuda), drawer 19, folio 10, folder MP2.1/295- 304, drawing OCW C7 M.11. Individual drawings in the Bermuda Archives are not numbered consistently except according to an older system, stamped on drawings and preceded by the letters “OCW,” so I provide the drawer, folio, and catalogue numbers for each folder and, where applicable, the “OCW” reference. 30. See David Yeomans, The Trussed Roof: Its History and Development (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1992), 168–94. 31. Cox and Cox, Naval Hospitals of Port Royal Jamaica, 23; and Clay S. Palazzo, “A Technical History of the Commissioner’s House, Ireland Island, Bermuda” (MS thesis, Columbia University, 1984), 110. 32. “No. 2 Plans of the One Pair Floor and Roof with an Elevation and a Section of the R.N. Hospital Erecting at Jamaica, with Letters and Figures of Reference to the Drawings No. 3 & 4—,” n.d. (ca. 1819), in Jamaica Archives, 7/124/4. 33. “General Plan of the Naval Hospital Designed to Be Erected at Port Royal, Jamaica,” 1818, in Jamaica Archives, 7/124/1. 34. The change in the roof’s shape was likely to allow for better drainage. See “No. 4 Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Cast Iron Columns, Cornice, Principal Rafters &c &c for the R N Hospital Erecting at Jamaica. With Letters of Reference

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 to the Plan of the Roof upon the Drawing No. 5, Where Their Lengths and Numbers are Shown, No. 5 Plan of the Ground and One Pair Floors of with Part of an Elevation and also a Section of the R N Hospital Erecting at Jamaica, with Letters & Figures of Reference to the Drawings No. 3 & 4.” n.d. (ca. 1819), in Jamaica Archives, 7/124/10; and Cox and Cox, Naval Hospitals of Port Royal Jamaica, 19–20. 35. “No. 2 Plans of the One Pair Floor and Roof,” n.d. (ca. 1819), in Jamaica Archives, 7/124/4; “No. 4 Plan and Section &c of One Half of the Cast Iron Principal Rafters for the Hospital Erecting at Jamaica with the Dimensions Figured and Letters of Reference to the Draws No. 2—,” n.d. (ca. 1819), in Jamaica Archives, 7/124/5. 36. “The Castings for This Floor Are Nearly 1 1/2 Inch Wider in the Whole Width of the Building Than the Given Dimensions and the Castings for the Roof Are Made to Sute [sic],” 1819, in Jamaica Archives, 7/124/2. 37. On Sturges, see Hilary Long, “The Bowling Ironworks,” Industrial Archeology 5 (1968): 171–77; and Charles Dodsworth, “Further Observations on the Bowling Ironworks,” Industrial Archeology 6 (1969): 114–23. 38. “The Castings for This Floor.” Sturges also had contracts for iron gates at the Sheerness and Chatham dockyards. See Coad, Support for the Fleet, 15, 408 n. 14; and Rennie, The Theory, Formation, and Construction of British and Foreign Harbours, 35. 39. “No. 3 Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Cast Iron Columns, Girders, Joists &c &c for the Royal Naval Hospital Erecting at Jamaica”; and “No. 4 Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Cast Iron Columns, Cornice, Principal Rafters &c &c for the R N Hospital Erecting at Jamaica.” 40. “The Castings for This Floor”; and “No. 3 Plans, Elevations and Sections of the Cast Iron Columns, Girders, Joists &c &c for the Royal Naval Hospital Erecting at Jamaica.” 41. Miller evidently had ambitions to take over Holl’s position when Holl died but was unsuccessful. “The office of SURVEYOR OF BUILDINGS TO THE ADMIRALTY becoming vacant by the death of Mr. Holl, I determined to try for it. There were many competitors. . . . Mr. Miller, first assistant to Mr. Holl, was disappointed in his hope of succeeding to the office, but was soon reconciled.” George Ledwell Taylor, The Auto-biography of an Octogenarian Architect (London: Longmans, 1870), 163. See also Coad, Support for the Fleet, 23, 77, 145. 42. “General Plan of the Naval Hospital Designed to Be Erected at Port Royal, Jamaica.” 43. In his guide to plantation management, Thomas Roughley writes (distrust- fully) about enslaved “Millwrights, and carpenters, mason[s], negro tradesmen.” Thomas Roughley, The Jamaica Planter’s Guide (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 62–63. On enslaved people employed in construction practices, see also Gregory S. Peniston, “The Slave Builder-Artisan,” Western Journal of Black Studies 2, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 284–95; and B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica: Press of the University of the West Indies, 1995), esp. 39. On the equation of enslaved and convict labor, see, for example, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Select Committee of the House of Lords Appointed to Inquire into the Laws and Usages of the Several West India Colonies (London: House of Lords, 1832). 44. “General Plan of the Naval Hospital Designed to Be Erected at Port Royal, Jamaica.” 45. See Coad, Support for the Fleet, 132. On the processes of rope making, see Abraham Rees, The Cyclopædia, vol. 31 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1802–1819), s.v. “Rope,” “Rope-Making,” available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101078163811; and Coad, “Chatham Ropeyard,” Post-medieval Archaeology 3 (1969): 143–65.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 46. “To the Admiralty,” 1790–91, in National Archives, Adm. 106/2216, quoted in Coad, “Chatham Ropeyard,” 157. See Rees, The Cyclopædia, s.v. “Rope,” “Rope-Making.” Steam power only entered Royal Navy rope making at scale from 1836, although it had earlier been used by private firms and in smaller applications. See Coad, Support for the Fleet, 133–35. Glimpses of this debate appear in Chatham Dockyard, 1815–1865, ed. Philip MacDougall (Surrey, UK: Navy Records Society, 2009), 114. See also “Architect to the Victualling Board: Employment of Saw Mill Engine,” 1827, p. 131, in National Archives, Adm. 114/40; “Admiralty to Commissioner Barlow: Rope Making,” 1817, pp. 121, 123, in National Maritime Museum (London), CHA/F/30; “Chatham Yard Officers to Admiralty: New Painters’ Shop,” 1817, p. 123, in National Archives, Adm. 106/2272; “Leading Man of Plumbers to Yard Officers: Milling of Lead,” p. 124, in National Archives, Adm. 106/1815; “Navy Board to Admiralty: Milling of Lead,” 1817, pp. 125–26, in National Archives, Adm. 106/2273; “Navy Board Committee of Visitation: Rope Manufacture,” 1823, pp. 127–29, in National Archives, Adm. 106/3237; “Admiralty to Superintendent Gordon: Tarring Machine,” 1833, p. 134, in National Maritime Museum, CHA/H/6; “Superintendent Gordon to Admiralty: Manufacture of Cordage,” 1833, p. 135, in National Archives, Adm. 1/3395; “Architect to the Superintendent of Chatham Dockyard: Engine House for Ropery,” 1837–40, pp. 139–40, in National Archives, Adm. 1/3502; National Archives, Adm. 1/3404; and National Maritime Museum, CHA/H/35. 47. Coad, Support for the Fleet, 130–31. 48. Coad, The Royal Dockyards, 199–203; Coad, Support for the Fleet, 78, 136; and Coad, “Historic Architecture of H.M. Naval Base Devonport 1689–1850,” 364–65. 49. H.E. Carrington, The Plymouth and Devonport Guide (Devonport, UK: Byers and Son, [ca. 1840]), 36. 50. “Plan, Elevation and Sections of a Part of the Eastern Rope House in His Majesty’s Dock Yard at Plymouth, Shewing the Mode for Restoring the Same, So as to Render the Whole Incombustible, Also an Additional Square Story, by a Red Tinge,” 1812, in National Archives, Adm. 140/257. 51. Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment, 155, 214. See also Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, esp. 60–65; Ken Alder, “Making Things the Same: Representation, Tolerance and the End of the Ancien Régime in France,” Social Studies of Science 28 (August 1998): 499– 545; Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith, Engineering Empires (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 7; Latour, “Visualization and Cognition,” 1–40; and Wise, The Values of Precision. 52. See, for example, the documents for the Plymouth Rope House, “Window Frames, etc.,” ca. 1814, in National Archives, Adm. 140/259; and Coad, “The Building of Commissioner’s House, Bermuda Dockyard,” 168. 53. For instance, see comparative historical plans from the 1750s, 1813, 1829, and 1891 of the Sheerness dockyard, 1891, in National Archives, Adm. 140/2. 54. The value of economy was paramount during this period and would only increase over the course of the nineteenth century. In large part spurred by the work of the political economists Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and, later, David Ricardo, economy would become a buzzword across domains of technology and engineering, reaching indelibly into architecture as well. See, for example, the intertwined works of architects Thomas Rickman and Edward Lacy Garbett, with polymath-engineer-scientists William Whewell, Robert Willis, and Charles Babbage. See also Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980); M. Norton Wise with Crosbie Smith, “Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain” (parts 1–3), History of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 Science (1989–1990): vol. 27, 263–301 (part 1), 391–449 (part 2), and vol. 28, 221– 61 (part 3); Simon Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 203–27; Margaret Schabas, The Natural Origins of Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Alexandrina Buchanan, Robert Willis and the Foundation of Architectural History (Cambridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013). Efficiency, too, was a closely related but distinct value espoused by several of the same writers. See Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 371–401; and Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 55. For example, an episode occurred in the 1820s that involved incorrectly sized bolt holes. See Guedes, “The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks.” 56. Other notable penciled annotations appear in the drawings for the Chatham Painters’ Shop and Lead Mill. For instance, a window on a plan drawing was crossed out in pencil with “Door” written above. Vague symbols, with rows of numbers and squiggly lines, accompany that correction directly over the carefully drawn black pen lines. Another plan for the Chatham project moved two stair- cases and a wall and included arithmetic in pencil. See “Plans of the Basement and Ground Floors of the Painters Shop, Lead Mill, &c., to Be Erected at His Majesty’s Dock Yard at Chatham,” 1817, National Archives, Adm. 140/107. 57. On construction as a process, see Tom F. Peters, Building the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 354. 58. “Plan, Elevation, and Section of the Painters Shop Ordered to Be Erected at His Majestys Dock Yard at Chatham, with a Proposal for a Mill for Remanufactoring and Rolling Old Lead and for Grinding Paint,” 19 June 1817, in National Archives, Adm. 140/107. 59. See P.F. Tingry, The Painter and Varnisher’s Guide (London: G. Kearsley, 1804), 282n; Coad, Support for the Fleet, 130; and Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850, 240–41. Hammock cloths were painted to make them watertight. See Robert Kipping, Elementary Treatise on Sails and Sail-Making, 7th ed. (1847; London: Virtue Brothers, 1865), 78. 60. Holl’s suggestion was to combine these functions and to make use of a steam engine that had been intended for another building. See “Navy Board to Admiralty: Milling of Lead,” quoted in Chatham Dockyard, 1815–1865, 126. Compare “Plans, Elevation and Sections of a Painters Shop . . . ,” from early 1817, in National Archives, Adm. 140/107, to “Plan, Elevation and Section of the Painters Shop . . . ,” 19 June 1817. 61. Initially, twelve five-foot, five-and-a-half-inch walls were interspersed with eleven three-foot, six-inch windows (eight feet, eleven-and-one-half inches on center). Holl modified the principal façade of the elongated part, with the beam engine, boiler, and lead rolling mill in the following ways: the twelfth bay (from left to right) of the first design was bumped out four-and-one-half inches to five feet, nine inches, and from there openings were either three-foot, six-inch windows or five-foot doors, and wall lengths were five feet or five feet, nine inches until the end of the long façade, which was five feet, eleven-and-one-half inches. As drawn in “Plan of the Ground Floor and Elevation of the Painters Shop and Lead Mill . . . ,” n.d., in National Archives, Adm. 140/107, the bays were as fol- lows, from left to right: eleven walls at five feet, five-and-one-half inches interspersed with eleven windows at three feet, six inches; one five-foot, nine-inch wall (this is the extent of the initial project, before adding the lead mill, steam engine, etc.); one three-foot, six-inch window; two five-foot walls interspersed with a five-foot door; three three-foot, six-inch windows interspersed with two

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 five-foot, nine-inch walls; two five-foot walls interspersed with a five-foot door; four three-foot, six-inch windows interspersed with three five-foot, nine-inch walls; and a five-foot, eleven-and-one-half-inch end wall. The pattern is thus: a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-c-B-d-D-d-B-c-B-c-B-d-D-d-B-c-B-c- B-c-B-e (with lowercase letters signifying walls, uppercase for openings, and italic for a blind window, behind which is the furnace; a = five feet, five-and-one-half inches; B = three feet, six inches; c = five feet, nine inches; d/D = five feet; and e = five feet, eleven-and-one-half inches). The “Plan of the Ground Floor . . . ,” 6 August 1817, in National Archives, Adm. 140/107, has yet different spacing: a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-c-B-f-D-f-B-c-B-c-B-f-D-f-B-c-B-c-B-c- B-e (f = four feet, six inches). This façade adds up to only 195 feet, two feet short of the other version. In both versions, the inboard length of the Boiler House was notated at twenty-six feet, six inches, but in the latter this is implausible: two three-foot, six-inch windows; two four-foot, six-inch lengths of wall; a five-foot door; and approximately four inches and four feet of walls to each corner of the room adds up to only just over twenty-five feet, generously a foot short of the marked dimension. Changing the dimensions of “f” (four feet, six inches) to “d” (five feet), as in the former plan, would make up for this discrepancy. 62. In the notational language of the previous note: a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a- B-a-B-a-B-a-B-a-B-c-B-d-D-d-B-c-B-c-B-d-D-d-B-c-B-c-B-c-B-e. The underlined portion as a whole was dimensionally symmetrical around the bolded B window, with the leftmost underlined parts representing the parts of the elevation corre- sponding to the Boiler Room (the next to the right), the Engine Room, and the Furnace (rightmost). Also—arguably significantly—the engine’s cylinder and con- necting rod were centered on B. 63. Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850, 203, 255; and Coad, Support for the Fleet, 318. 64. “Transverse Section and a Part of the Longitudinal Section of the Painters Shop and Lead Mill to Be Erected at His Majestys Dock Yard at Chatham,” 1817, in National Archives, Adm. 140/107. 65. “Plans, Elevation and Sections of a Painters Shop Designed for His Majestys Dock Yard at Chatham,” 17 January 1817, in National Archives, Adm. 140/107. 66. Linebaugh, The London Hanged, esp. 377–82. 67. For records pertaining to the Plymouth/Devonport Rope House, ca. 1812, see National Archives, Adm. 140/257–58. For the Chatham Painters’ Shop and Lead Mills, ca. 1817, see National Archives, Adm. 140/107. For the Port Royal Naval Hospital, ca. 1817, see Jamaica Archives, 7/124/1–10, 2/6/430; and drawings of the Port Royal Naval Hospital, ca. 1817, in National Archives, Adm. 105/89. For the Bermuda Commissioner’s House, ca. 1822–1831, see Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 9, folder MP2.1/285–294, and drawer 19, folio 10, folder MP2.1/295–304, MP2.1/285–94, MP2.1/295–304; and National Archives, WO 78/743. Holl designed many more buildings, including others relevant to the history of fire-resistant construction technology. See also Rennie, The Theory, Formation, and Construction of British and Foreign Harbours, 84. 68. Coad, “The Building of Commissioner’s House, Bermuda Dockyard.” Other Holl designs from the early 1820s include a smithy and storehouse at the Sheerness Dockyard on a similar system. See documents for the Sheerness Dockyard, 1807–1820s, in National Archives, Adm. 140/913–47, and 140/978– 1019. These would have also been completed under Taylor. 69. See Palazzo, “A Technical History of the Commissioner’s House,” 100. 70. See drawings for the Bermuda Commissioner’s House, 1826–1830s, in Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 9, folder MP2.1/285–94, and drawer 19, folio 10, folder MP2.1/295–304.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 71. On the convict labor used to construct the Commissioner’s House specifically, see Richard A. Gould, Archaeology and the Social History of Ships (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 326; and David L. White, ed., Sandys: Bermuda’s Architectural Heritage Series (Bermuda: Bermuda National Trust, 1999), 118. See also Henry C. Wilkinson, Bermuda from Sail to Steam, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 378. Regarding the makeup of the work- force, Wilkinson writes of roadbuilding around 1813 that a large number of workers were enslaved women (384–85). See also Alyson Brown and Clarence Maxwell, “A ‘Receptacle of Our Worst Convicts’: Bermuda, the Chatham Prison Riots and the Transportation of Violence,” Journal of Caribbean History 37 (2003): 233–55; and Jarett Henderson, “Banishment to Bermuda: Gender, Race, Empire, Independence and the Struggle to Abolish Irresponsible Government in Lower Canada,” Histoire sociale/Social History 46 (November 2013): 321–48; and Susette Harriet Lloyd, Sketches of Bermuda (London: James Cochrane, 1835), 181. 72. The commissioner who had the building built, John Lewis, evidently wanted an even grander building, with verandas encircling the house and without the wing for stables, but was turned down. See Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690– 1850, 369–73; and Coad, “The Building of Commissioner’s House, Bermuda Dockyard.” On translation of environments, see Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces” (1967), in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (1984; New York: The New Press, 1994), 175–85; and Dane Kennedy, “The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics,” in Imperialism and the Natural World, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990), 118–40. 73. Coad, “The Building of Commissioner’s House, Bermuda Dockyard,” 171. 74. The quotation is from a ground-floor plan (unsigned but likely drawn by George Ledwell Taylor), “Plans of the Ground Floors of the Commissioners House,” n.d., in Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 9, folder MP2.1/285-94, OCW C7 M.11. 75. “Plans of the Ground Floors of the Commissioners House . . . ,” 1826, in Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 9, folder MP2.1/285–94, OCW C7 M.9; and “Plans of the House Designed to Be Erected for the Residence of the Commissioner at Ireland Island Bermuda,” n.d., in Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 10, folder MP2.1/295–304, OCW C3. 76. “Plan of the Roof for the Commissioners House Erecting at His Majestys Naval Establishments at Ireland Island, Bermuda Shewing the Situations of the Cast Iron Tie Beams Principal Rafters &c.,” 1826, in Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 10, folder MP2.1/295–304, OCW C10. 77. The girders and columns that support them are numbered in “Plan of the One Pair Floors of the Commissioners House . . . ,” 1826, in Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 9, folder MP2.1/285–94, OCW C8. Compare “Plans of the Ground Floors of the Commissioners House . . . ,” OCW C7 M.9; and “Plans of the Ground Floors of the Commissioners House,” OCW C7 M.11. “Plan of the Roof for the Commissioners House . . . ,” OCW C10, states, “The Columns marked X with white paint are intended for the four corners and this end [the front, or east-facing façade] of the Building.” 78. “The Cast and Wrought Iron Work for the Stables & Offices,” n.d., in Bermuda Archives, drawer 19, folio 9, folder MP2.1/285–94, OCW C12. 79. A conjectural explanation for this would be allowance for thermal expansion, particularly in warm, humid climates, which might also account for the relative inexactitude of the measurements. For a contemporary technical discus- sion of the subject, see David Mushet, “Facts Illustrative of the Shrinkage and Expansion of Cast Iron, &c., &c.,” Philosophical Magazine 18 (1 January 1804): 3– 12. Unusually, half-inch increments are notated in “Plans, Elevation and Sections

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 of a Painters Shop . . . ,” 1817, in National Archives, Adm. 140/107. Some of the drawings in the Jamaica Archives have quarter-inch dimensions. 80. John M. Weiler speculates, “Royal Engineers would have been familiar with these buildings [Holl’s projects in Jamaica and Bermuda] since they were stationed at the naval dockyards. The hospital at Jamaica shares many similarities in form with the plan adopted by the Corps for the system of cast iron building frameworks for the West Indies. Moreover, the method of making floors by slotting joists into the cast iron beams adopted by Holl from an early date was used in Corps’ cast iron building frameworks. No doubt the Board of Ordnance and the Corps had access to information from the Civil Architect’s Department of the Admiralty [i.e., Holl’s projects], although no evidence has been found to prove this connection.” John M. Weiler, “Army Architects: The Royal Engineers and the Development of Building Technology in the Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., University of York Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, 1987), 414. 81. Weiler, “Colonial Connections,” 12–13; and Guedes, “The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks,” 3–6. 82. See Guedes, “The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks,” 8. 83. Guedes, “The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks,” 8–10. 84. Guedes, “The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks,” 10. 85. Breen, St. Lucia, 28. 86. Weiler, “Army Architects,” 418–23; and Coad, Support for the Fleet, 285–86. 87. On nineteenth-century officials’ propensities to formulate “analogues” across British territories, see David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), xix, 41. 88. John Smyth, “On the Construction of Barracks for Tropical Climates”; and H.R. Brandreth, “Memorandum Relative to a System of Barracks for the West Indies, Recommended by Colonel Sir C.F. Smith, C.B., R.E., and Approved by the Master-General and Board of Ordnance,” Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of the Royal Engineers, vol. 2 (1838), 233–38, 239–46. 89. “On Hurricanes” describes “An hospital [in St. Vincent], with much iron in its construction, and having iron ties reaching quite across it, so as to have the supports of one gallery bolted to the main building and to the opposite gallery, withstood the hurricane.” An asterisked note reads, “Chalk, oil, and red-lead was used in pointing the joints of bomb-proof buildings at St. Vincent’s, apparently with success. Compounds of oil and lead, as in paint, however, are decomposed by the climate: the oil evaporates, leaving the lead in a state of white carbonate, which is the white-lead of painters.” H.R. Brandreth, “On Hurricanes,” in Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. 2 (1838), 150–51. 90. H.R. Brandreth, “Notes on the Island of Ascension,” Papers on Subjects Connected with the Duties of the Corps of Royal Engineers, vol. 4 (1840): 116–30. 91. Brandreth, “Memorandum,” 243. The Port Royal Naval Hospital did include this type of “union”; however, it preceded Brandreth’s essay by twenty years. 92. Smyth, “On the Construction of Barracks for Tropical Climates,” 235–37n. 93. The history of British imperial botany offers an apt comparison. Botanists derived knowledge from colonial territories not simply through importation to the metropole but through reexportation—for example, to the Caribbean botanical outpost St. Vincent—or through circulation among peripheries without return to the center. See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 479; and Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 171.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00274 by guest on 26 September 2021 94. See Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (1959; London and New York: Longman, 1979), 22–24. 95. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (1941; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 170; and Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design (1936; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 106–7. See also Barrie Trinder, “The First Iron Bridges,” in Structural Iron, 1750–1850, ed. R.J.M. Sutherland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate), 247–56. 96. Carl W. Condit, American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 103–4. 97. Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, “Utility and Beauty: Iron Architecture in Jamaica, 1800–1908,” in Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Paul Dobraszczyk and Peter Sealy (New York: Routledge, 2016), 165–67; Trinder, “The First Iron Bridges,” 254; and Herbert, Pioneers of Prefabrication, 30–31. See also “Old Iron Bridge,” World Monuments Fund, https://www.wmf.org/project/old-iron-bridge. 98. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 103, 106. 99. Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 179. 100. James Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom, 1776–1838 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986), 162. See also Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 101. Craton, Testing the Chains, 280; and Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 57–83. Notably, citing Craton and David Barry Gaspar, Lightfoot writes that the 1831 uprising in Antigua “and other rebellions in the British Caribbean after 1830 were not attempts to overthrow the plantation system; rather, they were efforts to gain greater advantages within it” (81). 102. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kathleen Mary Butler, The Economics of Emancipation: Jamaica and Barbados, 1823–1843 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997); and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), esp. 21–41. 103. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. 307– 37; Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); and Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 41. See also Seymour Drescher, “Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade,” Parliamentary History 26 (2007): 42–65; Seymour Drescher, “Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,” Past and Present 143 (May 1994): 136–66; and Walvin, England, Slaves, and Freedom. 104. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 197. 105. See Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery.

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