Administering Architecture, Administering Empire: The Fortification of English Tangier, 1662–84

Abstract This article examines the entangled practices of architectural and imperial administration in the early modern period through an investigation of efforts to fortify the short-lived English colony at Tangier. When England acquired Tangier in 1662, it inherited a crumbling system of urban fortifications, and improving the colony’s military architecture emerged as an immediate priority. Yet the English Crown established no administrative system to oversee the project from afar, leading to an impasse in design as well as project management. Using state papers, correspondence, and engineering drawings, this article traces how the English government gradually consolidated control over the fortification process through one department of state, the Ordnance Office. Too late to save the Tangier colony, the administrative building practices established in Tangier brought the colony under tighter imperial control and sketched a framework for the management of other colonial infrastructural projects.