It is no accident that “the very first hot-house architect,” William Atkinson (c. 1773–1839), was commissioned to design the mansion that would imprison Napoleon Bonaparte on Saint Helena in 1815. Nor is it merely coincidence that Atkinson, official architect to the Board of Ordnance, designed the carceral palace in England, where its parts were manufactured before they were packed and sent shipboard for erection on the South Atlantic island. British officials, ever in pursuit of security, wished to create distance between the metropole and the greatest perceived threat to their national sovereignty since the Anglo-Spanish Wars. 

The so-called New Longwood House is less significant for its planned detainee resident (Bonaparte refused to inhabit it) than for its simultaneous pomposity and ordinariness. Its unexpected combination of extravagance and confinement belies the surprisingly commonplace phenomenon of architecture made in one place and assembled in another, beginning in the late 18th century. Instead of a building for growing tropical plants in the North Atlantic, Atkinson’s task here was equally delicate: Transplant a volatile exile to a balmy, South Atlantic colony. Sensitive to the perception that they were mistreating their charge, British officials effortfully ensured Bonaparte’s comfort, translating one environment to another geography.

As built, the house bore little resemblance to Atkinson’s design. This was unusual for prefabricated buildings, which were typically diligently prepared and erected according to exacting specifications. Construction on New Longwood did not begin until 1818 and was completed in 1821, with major alterations in the meantime. The architectural changes were a combined testament to Bonaparte’s capacity to exert his will alongside the island’s supervisory administrator’s disposition to appease him. Among Bonaparte’s objections to the new house were “the iron rails, which formed a perfect iron cage,” in the words of 19th-century historian William Forsyth, causing him to feel like a prisoner (which he was). Accounts of over 200 builders include Chinese stonecutters, recruited from “Canton” (Guangzhou) to make up for an anticipated shortfall of skilled, enslaved laborers following the 1807 abolition of the slave trade. But considering the number of enslaved masons and carpenters still present, it is unlikely that that prodigious labor force would not have included coerced Black construction workers. The care not to insult Bonaparte’s self-perception as a free subject forms a sharp contrast to Saint Helena’s decidedly unfree coeval population.

During my fellowship at the Center, I developed the outline for my book, “Architecture of Security: Building Across the British Black Atlantic,” for which New Longwood will serve as an introductory framing device. Issues of labor, skill, and construction run in parallel with architectural aesthetics, spatial planning, and integration of material and technical systems. The book will be a study of the spatial ramifications of the supply chains for four commodities—sugar, iron, insurance, and land—that were essential to the Atlantic economy between the ruptures of the 1770s and emancipation in the 1830s. Taking a synchronic, trans-geographic approach, my research tracks building projects and materials across sites in the Caribbean, North Atlantic, and West Africa. 

More broadly, the book analyzes architecture’s capacity to convey structures of power: Those who get to decide what to build are, perhaps tautologically, capable of dictating others’ actions. In the increasingly globally connected world of the late 18th century and the early 19th, buildings destined for one place were frequently designed—and even manufactured—in another. Architecture, a discipline so traditionally rooted in place, was now commonly a product of design far from construction sites, assembled by workers (sometimes coerced) likewise foreign to those sites, to conduct activity at ungraspable scales. As singular artifacts that can consolidate ideation, theories, and skills from one place, physical materials from another, financing from yet another, and labor from any number of others, buildings offer case studies for researching the incomprehensibly diffused, dematerialized, deterritorialized world that was emerging around the turn of the 19th century.

Vassar College
Berger Collection Educational Trust Postdoctoral Fellow in British Art, June–August 2025

Following his fellowship over summer 2025, Jonah Rowen began as assistant professor of architectural and urban history at Vassar College. He is currently completing his book manuscript, “Architecture of Security: Building Across the British Black Atlantic,” under contract with the Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press.