• Books
  • Audiobooks
  • Events
  • Radio
  • Blog
  • Contact
Menu
  • Books
  • Audiobooks
  • Events
  • Radio
  • Blog
  • Contact
Search
0
  • No products in the basket.

Books

Pre-order
book

Artificial Islands: Adventures in the Dominions

by: Owen Hatherley

£12.99

Great Britain has just left one Union. But might the island’s future lie in another Union altogether, with its former colonial “kith and kin” in a trans-oceanic super-state with Canada, Australia and New Zealand?

Welcome to the strange world of the “CANZUK Union”, the name for a quixotic but apparently serious plan to reunify the white-majority “Dominions” of the British Empire under the flag of low taxes, strong borders and climate change denialism.

Artificial Islands tests this idea that Britain’s closest relations are in these three countries in North America and the South Pacific, through a thorough investigation of the townscapes and buildings of several cities within “CANZUK”. In this settler zone we can find some of the most purely modern landscapes in the world — British-designed cities that were built with extreme rapidity in forcibly seized territories on the other side of the world, created specifically to make the colonisers feel at home.

This book uncovers the secret histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British architecture in the Dominions — from Neo-Gothic cathedrals and parliaments, to rows of terraces and suburbs of semis, Edwardian baroque museums and classical war memorials, right up to post-war high-rise estates and Brutalist experiments.

by: Owen Hatherley

SKU N/A Categories Architecture, History, Politics
Clear

— OR —

Author
Book info
Reviews
Author

  • Owen Hatherley

    Owen Hatherley writes regularly on aesthetics and politics for, among others, the Architectural Review, the Calvert Journal, Dezeen, the Guardian, Jacobin, the London Review of Books and New Humanist. He is the author of several books, most recently Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015), The Ministry of Nostalgia (Verso, 2016) and The Chaplin Machine (Pluto, 2016), the last of which is based on a PhD thesis accepted by Birkbeck College in 2011. A book on European cities, Trans-Europe Express, will be published in 2018.

Book info

Paperback with free eBook9781914420863
Number of pages345
Publication date09/08/2022

Reviews

David Edgerton, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation

“Owen Hatherley follows Rudyard Kipling in asking “What do they know of England, who only England know?” in this masterly, sharp study of cities of the former white Dominions. He shows that there is something important to be gained from studying them together. But that lesson is not that an empire of white capitalism is waiting to be recreated, but rather that there were separate but common histories of making white nations, of labourism, neoliberalism, of growing multi-ethnicity, and of beginning to come to terms with the legacies of these pasts. Strikingly, Britain is not even former-Dominion-leading let alone world-leading in any one of these. A rich cliché-busting book, a model of how to think critically about empire and its contemporary relevance.”

Share:

Related Books

Related products

  • Pre-order
    Herbert Marcuse, Ray Brassier

    Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia: Five Lectures

    £10.99 Select options
  • Mark Fisher

    The Complete k-punk Collection

    £16.99 Add to basket
  • Pre-order
    David Renton

    Against the Law: Why Justice Requires Fewer Laws and a Smaller State

    £10.99 Select options
  • Pre-order
    James Wilt

    Drinking Up the Revolution: How to Smash Big Alcohol and Reclaim Working-Class Joy

    £12.99 Select options
Back to top
  • About
  • FAQ
  • Submissions
  • Jobs
  • Distribution
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
Menu
  • About
  • FAQ
  • Submissions
  • Jobs
  • Distribution
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service

  • Books
  • Audiobooks
  • Events
  • Radio
  • Blog
  • Contact
Menu
  • Books
  • Audiobooks
  • Events
  • Radio
  • Blog
  • Contact