'Imperceptible Transitions:' The Anglo-Indianization of British Architecture, 1769-1822

This dissertation examines certain "imperceptible" changes that British architecture underwent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through cultural encounters with Indian architecture. By studying such diverse media and genres as antiquarian studies, architectural drawings, caricatures, and architecture, and their movement along the cultural, geographical, and political axes between Britain and India, I recover the instances that informed the creation an "Anglo-Indian" order within British architectural practice. In so doing, I challenge previous scholars' assessment of Anglo-Indian architecture in Britain as either instances of a triumphant imperialism or an unproblematic eclecticism - that is, as peripheral to the canon of neoclassicism itself.;Chapter one examines architect Thomas Sandby's Royal Academy lectures for their formulation of an architectural aesthetic that facilitated, rather than hindered, Britain's self-fashioning into an imperial power. Chapter two studies antiquarian methodological debates, especially those regarding etymology and orthography, between colonial philologist Sir William Jones and mythographer Jacob Bryant (1715-1804). The Jones-Bryant debates provide a useful lens for assessing the changing perceptions and methods of study of the Elephanta Cave, and allow us to trace the pathways for the transmission of Indian architecture to Britain.;Chapter three situates architect George Dance the Younger's 'Indianized' Guildhall facade amongst his largely-neglected artistic forays as a caricaturist, and identifies the building as a key example of how eighteenth-century British public architecture struggled to embrace Britain's new imperial identity. Chapter four excavates artist Thomas Daniell's (1749-1840) efforts to compile a visual library of Indian architectural ornaments. This chapter bridges Daniell's attempts to create a modular language of Indian architectural parts with the design and construction of the following buildings: Dance's Coleorton House (b. 1802-1807) and Ashburnham Palace (b. 1813-1814), Cockerell's Daylesford House (1788-1793) and Sezincote (b. 1805-1812), and Humphrey Repton and John Nash's (1752-1835) designs for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (1808-1822). It examines Daniell's drawings, the four country houses, and the palace, as critical nodes at which the ornaments of Indian architecture were contested and those of an imperceptible "Anglo-Indian" architectural order finally formulated.