Iain Jackson et. al., "Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Matthew Wells
Guests: Euan Harrison & Rick Booxtra (co-authors; Iain Jackson is also a co-author)
Episode Title: Iain Jackson et. al., "Architecture, Empire, and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Date: January 28, 2026

This episode dives into the new book "Architecture, Empire and The United Africa Company," which reconceives the architectural and urban history of West Africa through the lens of a colossal British trading conglomerate—the United Africa Company (UAC). The discussion focuses on how the UAC’s business imperatives, rather than the colonial state, fundamentally shaped the built environment in West Africa from the 1890s through the 1960s.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis of the Project & Authors' Motivations

• The project emerged from a large grant to Iain Jackson to research the UAC as a case study for understanding West African architecture through commerce, not just state intervention.

  • "We were interested in telling the story of West African architecture and urban development, not through what the British government had built...but rather how the colonial drive for raw materials like palm oil, timber, cocoa, minerals really shaped the West African built environment." — Rick Booxtra [03:33]

• The research team included Iain Jackson, Euan Harrison, Rick Booxtra, Michele Tenzon, and Claire Tunstall (head of archives at Unilever).

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2. The UAC as an Actor in Architectural History

• UAC was a business empire more powerful than the colonial state at times, building hundreds of trading posts, warehouses, and even company towns.

  • Architecture was often a byproduct, not a central objective—making the archival study challenging.
  • Few buildings have known architects; most were utilitarian and driven by logistical and commercial needs.

• Introduction of "gray architecture" (Alex Bremner’s concept):

  • Focus on humble warehouses, offices, and infrastructure rather than monumental colonial buildings.
    "Rather than thinking about these grand public buildings...the majority of the colonial built environment really is made up of warehouses, offices...not grand designs, but really formed a key part of this network of imperial trade." — Rick Booxtra [07:38]

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3. Navigating a Non-Architectural, Corporate Archive

• The UAC archive was vast, complex, and more business-oriented than architectural.

• The research team used "informed speculation" and collaborative sampling, forgoing established business history methods for a more creative, lateral dive across files.

  "Instead of this kind of solitary endeavor of being looking at a single archival file, you were experiencing this archive as a whole, as part of a team." — Euan Harrison [09:54]

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4. Book Structure and Unique Methodologies

• Tripartite Structure:

  1. The Archive (foundational context)
  2. Rivers & Waterways (early trading posts)
  3. Land & Extraction (resource exploitation, e.g., in Congo, Nigeria, Ghana)
  4. Cities (urban development, real estate, department stores, independence era)

• Image Collections: Each section includes previously unpublished visual material from the archive.

• Responder Essays: Short essays by visiting African architects/scholars, bringing alternate and critical perspectives.

  "We invited several architects and scholars, mainly from West and Central Africa, to...engage with the archive, and then come up with shorter essays...in which they provide a different idea...and critically respond to what we see and what we read in the archive." — Rick Booxtra [12:40]

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5. Key Places and Histories

• Port Sunlight: Model company town by Lever Brothers in the UK, under-explored link to West Africa.
  • "Port Sunlight is a famous company town...built by Lever Brothers...It's a place that has its own historiography as contributing to the Garden City movement. Lord Lever begins building Port Sunlight...at the same moment as he begins buying up these palm oil trading firms in West Africa. And this was the aspect of the Port Sunlight story that we felt had never really been told." — Euan Harrison [17:23]

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6. UAC’s West African Expansion

• Early Trading Stations: Rudimentary, fortified, often prefabricated, using imported materials; driven by security and expedience.

  • "They're often made of imported materials brought over from Britain. Often they have a fortified element to them." — Rick Booxtra [19:43]

• Transition to Company Towns and Harbors: As monopolies secured, infrastructure and scale grew notably (e.g. Barutu harbor).

  • "By the kind of 1910s, when the lever owned businesses are the largest in the region, they begin investing in quite substantial pieces of company owned infrastructure. Company towns, an entire harbor complex at a place called Barutu" — Euan Harrison [21:35]

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7. Resource Extraction, Trade, and Empire

• Main Commodities: Palm oil (for soap and margarine), cocoa, minerals, tropical timber (especially profitable).
  • "One of the most profitable things that they extracted was tropical timber...the African Timber Company, which is a UAC subsidiary, sort of eventually buys out all these other traders and really builds company towns and starts quite successfully extracting timber over enormous amounts of land concessions..." — Rick Booxtra [23:10]
• UAC’s operations were shaped by, and shaped, colonial legislative frameworks, even as they sometimes clashed with colonial authorities.

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8. Material Histories: From Africa to Britain

• Empire-produced timber from West Africa was promoted and utilized in British public architecture; policy changes rebranded these as "world woods" as independence neared.
  • "What we see is that the UAC's business there really aligns with British government policy...So when you check these things, we found, for example, that empire timber, including timber that we could trace back to the UAC's operation in West Africa, was used for post offices in London in the 1930s." — Rick Booxtra [26:45]

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9. African Cities, Independence, and Architectural Modernity

• UAC in Developmental Modernity: Presented itself as a partner in modernization, constructing office blocks and using them as symbols of national progress.
  • "The UAC becomes very adept at framing itself as an agent of a kind of broader kind of developmental modernity, particularly in African cities..." — Euan Harrison [29:28]
• Advertising & Representational Strategies: UAC framed its buildings as gifts to independent nations, deploying press campaigns and advertisements.
  • "They would run these very extensive press campaigns showing images of their own office blocks under headings like Find buildings in richer country or A gift to Ghana from the uac..." — Euan Harrison [31:16]

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10. Consumerism, Department Stores, and Elite Consumption

• Kingsway Stores: UAC's luxury department store chain pivoted from serving expatriates to a local African elite in the postcolonial era—conspicuous consumption as modern identity.
  • "Through things like fashion shows and ideal home shows, exhibitions, this kind of thing, an African elite customer base is introduced, quote unquote, to new forms of consumption." — Euan Harrison [32:15]
• Architecture as Symbol of Progress: New-store features like elevators and self-checkout reflected modern aspirations.

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11. Images and Visual Material as Historical Intervention

• Over 400 previously unpublished images feature in the book, often revealing shifts in corporate thinking and archiving.

  • "One of the images that I've always really found fascinating and revealing in the archive is a photograph of. A dwelling in West Africa, which is mud. And the descriptions next to it are quite revealing. So when the photograph was initially taken by one of the UAC's photographers, it says, this is a mud hut. But then at some point, this is crossed out and it is replaced by, I think it's an African dwelling. So you see that the way the uac, the company, thinks about West Africa as changing, and you see that reflected in the archive itself." — Rick Booxtra [34:49]

• Advertising images from late colonial Lagos reframed postcolonial aspirations, showing modernist interiors and affluent African life as an aspirational ideal.

  • "...there is one that advertises Kingsway stores in Lagos, which shows this very elegant cocktail party with modernist furniture and beautifully patterned fabrics...the kind of subtle message behind this advertising image seemed to be that if we want postcolonial Africa to work, we should work with the UAC and not against it." — Euan Harrison [37:13]

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12. Future Research Directions

• Rick Booxtra: Further research into "empire timber" and a project on concrete in post-independence Indonesia.
• Euan Harrison: Projects on British banks in colonial Africa and luxury hotels’ role during decolonization.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• "We were interested in telling the story of West African architecture...not through what the British government had built...but rather how the colonial drive for raw materials...shaped the West African built environment." — Rick Booxtra [03:33]

• "Rather than thinking about these grand public buildings...the majority of the colonial built environment really is made up of warehouses, offices...not grand designs, but really formed a key part of this network of imperial trade." — Rick Booxtra [07:38]

• "We sort of...picked files that looked interesting, and from those began to get a sense of what worked and what led us to interesting architectural narratives...this was such a collaborative way of working..." — Euan Harrison [09:54]

• "We invited several architects and scholars...to engage with the archive, and then come up with shorter essays...in which they provide a different idea...and critically respond to...the archive." — Rick Booxtra [12:40]

• "Port Sunlight is a famous company town...built by Lever Brothers...at the same moment as he begins buying up these palm oil trading firms in West Africa. And this was the aspect of the Port Sunlight story that we felt had never really been told." — Euan Harrison [17:23]

• "By the kind of 1910s...they begin investing in quite substantial pieces of company owned infrastructure. Company towns, an entire harbor complex at a place called Barutu..." — Euan Harrison [21:35]

• "One of the most profitable things that they extracted was tropical timber. And here again, you see that initially there are other traders involved, local traders as well. And the African Timber Company, which is a UAC subsidiary, sort of eventually buys out all these other traders and really builds company towns..." — Rick Booxtra [23:10]

• "What is fascinating...empire timber, including timber...from the UAC's operation in West Africa, was used for post offices in London in the 1930s...So there really is a fascinating sort of material history that puts these buildings in Britain together with what we see in Africa." — Rick Booxtra [26:45]

• "The UAC becomes very adept at framing itself as an agent of a kind of broader kind of developmental modernity, particularly in African cities..." — Euan Harrison [29:28]

• "They would run these very extensive press campaigns showing images of their own office blocks under headings like 'Find buildings in richer country' or 'A gift to Ghana from the UAC...'" — Euan Harrison [31:16]

• "One of the images that I've always really found fascinating...is a photograph of a dwelling in West Africa, which is mud...the way the UAC, the company, thinks about West Africa as changing, and you see that reflected in the archive itself." — Rick Booxtra [34:49]

• "...an advertising image that seemed to say: if we want postcolonial Africa to work, we should work with the UAC and not against it. So I found this a very fraught and unstable and very, very rich image." — Euan Harrison [37:13]

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Conclusion

This episode offers a fascinating look at how the United Africa Company—driven by business imperatives and commercial strategies—left a profound architectural legacy in West Africa over a century. By shifting the focus from state-centric narratives to those of commercial enterprise, the book and the discussion reveal new understandings about the colonial and postcolonial built environment, material flows, and visual cultures. The use of rich images, collaborative methodologies, and interdisciplinary essays underscore the book's innovative approach.

The book "Architecture, Empire and Trade: The United Africa Company" (Bloomsbury, 2025) is available as open access.

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Transcript

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[Matthew Wells]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm Matthew Wells, one of your hosts and today I'm delighted to be speaking with Euan Harrison and Rick Booxtra, two of the authors of Architecture, Empire and The United Africa Company, published by Bloomsbury in 2025 the book pieces together a new architectural history of West Africa from the high colonial period through to independence. From the Imperial Royal Niger Company's charter in the 1890s through to commercial developments in the 1960s. The United Africa Company, British company firmly embedded in the economies of colonialism, became the largest firm in Africa. In West Africa. Sorry. Involved in almost every commercial enterprise and sector and responsible for procuring architecture, infrastructure, and all sorts of urban real estate across the vast region. Drawing on the UAC archive, the book reproduces an amazing array of visual material, from photographs of everyday life to city plans and architectural drawings, and presents these alongside critical discussions to reveal an alternative account of the architecture of the region. Ewan Rex, thank you so much for joining me.

[Euan Harrison]

Thank you for having us.

[Matthew Wells]

Rick, could you please start off by telling us how this group of authors came to write this book? And who is the group of authors?

[Rick Booxtra]

Yes, thank you, Matt, for that great introduction. The project started about four years ago when our colleague Ian Jackson, who's a professor of architecture at the Liverpool School of Architecture, received a large grant from the leverjume foundation to look into the United Africa Company, which, as you said, was from the late 19th century throughout most of the 20th century, one of the largest British trading companies in West Africa. And then the group sort of got started and Euan came on the project. I joined the project. Michele Tenzon, another co author, joined as well. And then Clare Tunstall, the head of Arxiv at Unilever, one of our co authors. And then we started a project because we were interested in telling the story of West African architecture and urban development, not through what the British government had built in these places. And thus thinking about architecture as a proxy for colonial power, which has been done to a certain extent, but rather how the colonial drive for raw materials like palm oil, timber, cocoa, minerals really shaped the West African built environment. And so for us, the UIC was really a fascinating case study to really think through the relationship between architecture and trade and do that over a prolonged period of time, but also across a vast region that extends beyond the colonial borders of what was British Africa and into French West Africa and into some of the German colonies, even into Central Africa with the Congo or the Belgian Congo. And when we started, we received questions about why, as architectural historians, we were interested in a business archive like this. And it is in some ways a strange place for architectural historians to do work. And we can talk more about that. But for us, this company, which at times was even more powerful than the colonial state, really provides a fascinating Gateway into the built environment of these places. It built, over the course of its life, built hundreds of trading posts, offices, warehouses, factories, even entire villages in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, et cetera.

[Matthew Wells]

And that's great. And it's a great introduction to both the book and also the kind of context and I think you've already alluded to a bit, Rick. So I'll ask you in the next question, but who are the main actors in this story then, if it's not the state? Are they famous architects really?

[Euan Harrison]

No. Often one of the challenges with working in this archive, this very large business archive, is that it is often not a very architectural archive. The UAC is a huge procurer of architecture and urbanism as a kind of byproduct to its main objective, which is resource extraction and profit. And so it often isn't at all clear who the architects are, are behind a lot of the buildings that it produces. Except for in a few cases which we can talk about later, really, the main actors here are corporate. The UAC is formed as a result of Lord Lever, the British soap magnate's desire to create monopolies in the palm oil trade. And that's the main driver.

[Rick Booxtra]

And that was also one of the struggles we had with dealing with this archive, is that it often, as a business archive, it didn't often provide us, as architectural historians what we needed. So architecture very much is a byproduct and not the main subject. So we sometimes found architectural drawings, but we often see architecture discussed as a necessary vehicle to do business rather than the main subject. So we often couldn't find out who these buildings were built by. So we often couldn't find the necessary material. And we often couldn't even distinguish in records between what the company itself built or whether this was a property that they'd hired. And gradually, I think one of the main things that we came to realize is that we had to think about architecture in a slightly different way. And one of the concepts that was very useful to us was the idea of gray architecture, which is something Alex Bremner coined a while ago to think about architecture in a colonial built environment. So he basically said that rather than thinking about these grand public buildings with classicizing references, the majority of the colonial built environment really is made up of warehouses, offices that are not built by well known architects that are not grand designs, but really formed a key part of this network of imperial trade. And that is also where the significance of these buildings is absolutely.

[Matthew Wells]

And it seems like it's kind of a very. The project and the book itself took a, you know, a very thoughtful approach to this, to this methodological issue as well as the archive itself. How did Nigel ask you? And again, how then did this go into structuring the kind of the output? How did this go into structuring the book? Like, how did you organize this vast material and this huge geographical area that you're exploring as well?

[Euan Harrison]

Yeah. So, I mean, not only does the company cover this huge geographical area and this huge temporal depth, but because the company was so organizationally complex, because it consisted of a huge array of different subsidiaries with their own kind of corporate identity, in life, the archive was equally complex. The archive was arranged both sort of vertically through the business structure, from the chairman, board of directors, down through individual departments, but also horizontally across these different businesses. And navigating this hugely complex archive would really have been impossible for us had we not been so embedded in the archival team at Unilever. And this was really where our collaboration with Claire Tunstall and her team really paid off. We did initially look to business histories as a way of making sense of the archive. And although we were quite clear we didn't want to write a corporate history of the uac, we did think that the kind of methods of business historians could be perhaps applied. And the convention there is that you begin at the highest level of the archive, you begin with the chairman and you work your way down. And we sort of tried this at the beginning, but it kind of didn't really help us to get a sense of the variety of different things that were going on or to really lead us to the architectural in this archive. So instead we sort of. I think I would refer it to sampling somewhat at random. Ian called it Informed Speculation, which is perhaps a little bit more polished. We picked files that looked interesting, and from those began to get a sense of what worked and what led us to interesting architectural narratives. And the really rich thing, I think, was working together in this process, that this was such a collaborative way of working, that instead of this kind of solitary endeavor of being looking at a single archival file, you were experiencing this archive as a whole, as part of a team.

[Matthew Wells]

And with the team and with this collaborative rixt. Would you mind talking a bit about structure of the book and this tripartite structure, but also the responder essays and how they fitted into the collaboration.

[Rick Booxtra]

Yeah. So the book, the archive, really shaped the book. I mean, some books start with a particular question or thinking about the work of an architect or a particular building, but here it was really the archive itself that shaped the book. And also began shaping the structure of the book. So the book is, as you said, it's structured in three parts. They're chronological, but also thematically organized. So we started out with a chapter on the archive. Because we felt that was such an important part of the book. And really needed a chapter by itself. And then the first part of the book is about rivers and waterways. And sort of tries to tell the story about how the United Africa Company and its predecessors, the Royal Niger Company, sort of set up in West Africa through these trading stations, through warehouses and offices in Lagos. And then sort of evolves from there. And then the second part of the book moves on in time chronologically, to land. And is about extraction and the extraction of raw resources. And here we have a chapter on the Congo, which was one of Lever's main endeavors. He had massive palm oil plantations. Built Leverville after himself in the Belgian Congo. And another part is about the timber plantations that the UAC had in Nigeria and Ghana. Quite fascinating, really profitable. Extracted tropical timber from the early 20th century, really, until the 1960s, 70s, so until after independence. And then in the last part, we really look at the built environment in cities. And there sort of that. That also narrates the transition to independence. So at the same time, we see how the subsidiary businesses Africanized, so hired more African employees. They become more involved in real estate speculation. But there's also a wonderful chapter on Kingsway, which is a chain of department stores, quite successful, that they owned. And here we also see architecture functioning in a different way. As conveying. Representing the uac outwardly, sort of conveying a message. And really trying to collaborate with the new post independence regimes. And then in between all of that, we wanted to have image collections. Because we had so much amazing visual material. And because we worked with the archive itself, we could use all of these images for free, which is incredible. So we decided to have image collections for each part. And these were also images that have never been published before. So we thought that was important. And at the same time, we wanted to bring in different voices into the project. And that's where the responder essays, or what we call the responder essays, came in. So we wanted to. We were already a team of five researchers. But we also thought it would be fascinating to have different perspectives on this material. So what we did is we invited several architects and scholars, Mainly from West and Central Africa, to come to Liverpool to see the archive, to engage with the archive, and then come up with shorter essays, which we call responder essays, in which they provide a different idea sometimes quite. And critically respond to what we see and what we read in the archive. And we think it's. Yeah, we thought it was an interesting structure to have these counterparts within the book itself.

[Matthew Wells]

Yeah. And it comes across very clearly in the introduction about why you need these and how these respond to conditions of the archive and some of the, you know, asymmetric. Asymmetric power relations from the archive. And we've talked a little bit about Liverpool. We talked a little bit already about this one individual. I wonder if we should start before we dive into each of these very clear sections, whether we should talk a little bit about Port Sunlight and Ewan, I wonder, could you tell us, what is it? Where is it? What does it have to do with soap and West Africa?

[Euan Harrison]

So Port Sunlight is a famous company town built by Lever Brothers, the soap manufacturers in Merseyside on the opposite bank of the River Mersey from Liverpool. And it's a place which was lauded in its time for developing a new mode of benevolent capitalism, a kind of a form of giving back to workers by providing them with decent housing and healthy surroundings. And it's a place that has its own historiography as contributing to the Garden City movement. Lord Lever begins building Port sunlight in the 1890s at the same moment as he begins buying up these palm oil trading firms in West Africa. And this was the aspect of the Port Sunlight story that we felt had never really been told. So we begin the book by this sort of visit to Port Sunlight which whilst thinking about at the same time what is happening in the Lever business empire in Africa, the story that is less, less told.

[Matthew Wells]

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[Rick Booxtra]

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[Rick Booxtra]

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[Euan Harrison]

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[Matthew Wells]

And and then from, from, from, you know, the banks of the Mersey, we moved to these coastal trading stations in West Africa, modern day Ghana and Nigeria. And these river trading posts, I mean, what's the Rex? What's the built environment of these places? How are the settlements formed? Like what Sorts of construction and buildings are there.

[Rick Booxtra]

These early trading stations are quite rudimentary. They're often made of imported materials brought over from Britain. Often they have a fortified element to them. They needed to be defendable. This is still very much sort of the beginning of the colonization of Nigeria. And we see these early training stations mainly of the Royal Niger Company, which is a predecessor to the uac, see along the Niger river in Nigeria. And we have drawings of some of them, sometimes very rudimentary, hand drawn maps which are quite great, we thought, and then photographs. But this is sort of the early onset of how one of these subsidiary companies which then amalgamated to the UAC sort of starts to expand. And then we also see around this time that they start operating in Lagos or in the vicinity of Lagos. So they open up, they lease a plot of land in Apapa, which is near Lagos, where they open up a timber mill, palm oil mills. They start a shipping business. So they can start to sort of ship from here as well. But at this time, it is also important to emphasize that they're still one of quite a few European traders, British and also some German traders in Lagos.

[Matthew Wells]

And Ewan, I wonder. Oh, yes, please, Ewan, you have some add to that.

[Euan Harrison]

We see as time goes on and the monopoly becomes more and more secure, the scale and complexity of these places expands until really by the kind of 1910s, when the lever owned businesses are the largest in the region, they begin investing in quite substantial pieces of company owned infrastructure. Company towns, an entire harbor complex at a place called Barutu, where the scale of the storage containers for palm oil, I mean, it really is a large piece of infrastructure. Yeah. So the scale increases as time goes on.

[Matthew Wells]

And with this scale, I think, you know, are there other European nations involved, Other companies involved? You said it's not, you know, monopolies are not established for a certain. To a certain point. This is not presumably a purely British story.

[Euan Harrison]

Well, at the beginning it isn't right. There are very large German and Dutch Belgian interests. By the early 20th century, those have been really bought out, contained, managed out. And it kind of is an entirely British and also an entirely lever monopoly, Especially in the Niger basin.

[Matthew Wells]

And Ricks, could you explain a little bit about why they're there? What are the resources that are being extracted and traded? Why, why are these companies? You know, in the second part, you move to this question of land as the broken structure. Could you tell us a bit about this?

[Rick Booxtra]

So initially, as we already talked about a little bit, it's palm oil. Palm oil main Ingredient for making soap. You have big palm kernels which then need to be crushed and milled, et cetera. And also margarine, which is also one of the main products produced by Lever. But what we also see is that they're interested in other raw resources and they try out different things. So one of Lever's strategies to avoid risk, because this is a very risky environment, is to sort of spread out his investments and try different things. So we came across records of.

[Matthew Wells]

Him.

[Rick Booxtra]

Being involved in cocoa plantations, minerals in Sierra Leone, and then what turns out to be quite profitable are the palm oil plantations in Congo then under Leopold ii. Lever chosen because he exudes a sort of benevolent form of capitalism with the Congo being in crisis at that time and bad press coming out of of what Leopold II is doing in Congo. But one of the most profitable things that they extracted was tropical timber. And here again, you see that initially there are other traders involved, local traders as well. And the African Timber Company, which is a UAC subsidiary, sort of eventually buys out all these other traders and really builds company towns and starts quite successfully extracting timber over enormous amounts of land concessions, which they've been granted at quite a profitable. Through a profitable arrangement. So here you also see sort of the coalition between the colonial government and the uac, which is an interesting relationship.

[Matthew Wells]

Absolutely. And you and other kind of institutional structures in the 20th century, you know, and, you know, legislative frameworks that are encouraging this sort of extraction of timber and other materials around the British Empire.

[Euan Harrison]

Well, certainly. I mean, it's interesting that the company has quite a fractious relationship with colonial regimes who are often quite suspicious of its monopoly. And yet the company absolutely exists within a legislative environment that allows it to grow in the way that it does. And Lever and his other sort of the team around him, I guess, are very adept at managing this business empire in such a way that the ownership and profit is always held in Unilever, regardless of where the operations are.

[Matthew Wells]

Yeah, absolutely. And how about as well. I mean, I also wonder as well how these materials are used. I mean, I don't know if this is something, Ricks, you want to talk about, but how are these materials used and conceived by designers? You know, does it change? Is it a material used in European.

[Rick Booxtra]

Modernism, for instance, when we talk about the timber. Absolutely. This is one of the aspects I found most fascinating in the archive. And we try to look into then, how tropical timber from West Africa was also used in England itself. And what we see is that the UAC's business there really aligns with British government policy, because in the 1930s, we see the Empire Marketing board pushing for the use of empire, what they call empire timber. So timber from within the empire. This also involved timbers from India, the Dominion, say, Canada, etc. Everything that didn't come from. From outside of the empire and the Dominions was used. And what is fascinating is that public authorities in the UK during that time, say, the LCC in London really stated that they had a preference in contracts for housing developments, etc. To use materials, including timber from the empire. So when you check these things, we found, for example, that empire timber, including timber that we could trace back to the UAC's operation in West Africa, was used for post offices in London in the 1930s. You see it for in the sense of doors, interior paneling, these sorts of things. So there really is a fascinating sort of material history that puts these buildings in Britain together with what we see in Africa. And it continues after the war into the welfare state, where these materials are no longer referred to as empire timbers, but become world woods. So taking out the imperial context at a time that these list places are in the process of gaining independence, I.

[Matthew Wells]

Mean, if we turn from London and British cities back to West Africa, how, Ewan, how did cities in West Africa change during this period? Were there new building typologies that emerged? How were they constructed? How were they financed?

[Euan Harrison]

Absolutely. So turning to the middle decades of the 20th century, the UAC becomes very adept at framing itself as an agent of a kind of broader kind of developmental modernity, particularly in African cities and the buildings that it builds for its own use, things like office blocks. It becomes very adept at narrativizing these as elements of developmental modernity, as a contribution to the modernization of African cities, particularly Accra, Lagos, Kumasi. And this really steps up as independence nears. And the UAC increasingly seeks to position itself as a partner to African politicians, particularly in Ghana, where Kwame Nkrumah is very vocal in his desire to disengage the Ghanaian economy from British capital. And there, the UAC really works hard to get Nkrumah onside by using architecture, by gifting buildings, and by framing the buildings that it uses for its own business purposes as these kind of gifts to the nation.

[Rick Booxtra]

And if I may add to that, one of the fascinating things that we saw was that you also see this through the advertisements of the company in local magazines of the UAC and its subsidiaries, sort of really broadcasting its support for these new independent nations and often using architecture to do that.

[Euan Harrison]

Absolutely. They would Run these very extensive press campaigns showing images of their own office blocks under headings like Find buildings in richer country or A gift to Ghana from the uac or an investment in Nigeria from the uac. This kind of thing. And these are attempts to build a kind of popular ownership for what were often private buildings, office blocks, things like this.

[Rick Booxtra]

And at the same time, really trying to speak to what is now a different customer base as well for some of these products, like the department stores, but also the timber. Trying to market timber products to a local West African middle class audience.

[Matthew Wells]

And does it come across in kind of conspicuous consumption as well, whether this is particular building types or design products?

[Euan Harrison]

Certainly in the case of the department stores. So the uac, as we've previously mentioned, had run this chain of luxury high end department stores called Kingsway Stores. And this had grown throughout the interwar period, really to service the needs of colonists in the region, Particularly at time when the gender balance of British colonial communities in West Africa was changing and more white women were living in colonial communities. And what they have to do in independence is pivot and market what had been this set of goods sold to colonists instead to an African elite customer base. And they definitely do this by marketing a kind of conspicuous consumption, as you say. So through things like fashion shows and ideal home shows, exhibitions, this kind of thing, an African elite customer base is introduced, quote unquote, to new forms of consumption.

[Rick Booxtra]

And this is sort of paired with increasingly modern stores with lavish features like an elevator and self checkout counters.

[Euan Harrison]

Yeah, these are new environments that speak to a kind of a demand for an internationalism as well amongst African consumers. These are confident emerging onto the world stage and they want the stuff that previously had only been the preserve of colonial communities.

[Matthew Wells]

And my kind of penultimate question would be about to kind of return to something Rick started talking about the beginning, about the amount of images in the book. Say largely these were free, which is, you know, the main. You know, one of the main problems when writing a book is how to get hold of the images, how to pay for them. And There must be 400 images in this book, if I had to guess. Yeah, you know, I wonder if you could talk a bit about the images. Do you have a particular. Is there an image that is you've always held with you through the project? Is there a particular kind of series of image essays that you know that's held with you? Perhaps each of you could answer this.

[Rick Booxtra]

I think the images were one of the best things about working on this project, aside from doing it collaboratively. Which was really fun and, I think, really an enriching experience. The image collections were great, and I remember the first time we found architectural drawings of some of these new department stores, which was fantastic. And then quite early on, we encountered the image collection that the UAC had created for itself. And this in itself was a fascinating sort of mini archive within the archive. So you see at some point that the UAC has archival impulses, and they really tried to shape their own history and legacy in West Africa. And one of the things they start to do is to create an image collection of photographs, which is then also used by outsiders. And here you also see the UAC being such a big player in West Africa because it holds an incredibly vast collection that in these instances, really can sort of mirror what the National Archives have on West Africa. But what is fascinating and one of the images that I've always really found fascinating and revealing in the archive is a photograph of. A dwelling in West Africa, which is mud. And the descriptions next to it are quite revealing. So when the photograph was initially taken by One of the UAC's photographers, it says, this is a mud hut. But then at some point, this is crossed out and it is replaced by, I think it's an African dwelling. So you see that the way the uac, the company, thinks about West Africa as changing, and you see that reflected in the archive itself.

[Matthew Wells]

And, Euan, do you have an image you wanted to speak to?

[Euan Harrison]

I was very drawn to the advertising images from the late 1950s, early 1960s, and particularly there is one that advertises Kingsway stores in Lagos, which shows this very elegant cocktail party with modernist furniture and beautifully patterned fabrics that I think speaks in several registers. It suggests the kind of things that you could buy in a Kingsway store, but it also speaks to the kind of affluent post colonial society that African politicians wanted to create and the ways in which the UAC was framing itself as the route to the creation of this affluent post colonial society. And the kind of subtle message behind this advertising image seemed to be that if we want postcolonial Africa to work, we should work with the UAC and not against it. So I found this a very fraught and unstable and very, very rich image.

[Matthew Wells]

Amazing. Amazing. And it seems a little cruel to ask authors this when they've just finished a book, but I wonder if you could each just give us a kind of quick preview of what you're working on at the moment or what you want to work on over the next few years. Rick's.

[Rick Booxtra]

Just start with you something I'd like to work on which is still related to this project is, and this is something Yuan and I and Ian are working on together, which is to really to develop and look further into the idea of empire timber in West Africa and potentially other colonies. We find it so fascinating that.

[Euan Harrison]

An.

[Rick Booxtra]

Architectural material is sort of extracted part of colonial enterprise, but also then how it is used by architects in Britain. So to think about to really dive further into this part of the archive. And I've started a completely other project on concrete in Indonesia around independence, looking at the first cement factory in Dutch Indonesia.

[Euan Harrison]

Yeah. So Ian and I plan to do a kind of follow on project that looks at British banks active in West Africa, looking at some of the similar dynamics across Barclays and a bank called the British bank of West Africa, which is now part of Standard Chartered. So that's one project. And I'm also keen to develop something about luxury hotels and decolonization, the end of empire tax havens. But this is very much in its early stages.

[Matthew Wells]

Brilliant. Okay, well, we will look out for those and you know, relish in the future. So thank you so much for joining us and talking about your book. So I'll just say it again, Architecture, Empire and trade. The United Africa Company is published by Bloomsbury in 2025 and it is open access so anyone can go and read it. Thank you so much, Bricks and Ewan for joining us.

[Rick Booxtra]

Thank you for having us.

[Euan Harrison]

Thank you.

[Rick Booxtra]

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