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Podcast: New Books in South Asian Studies
Episode: Swati Chattopadhyay, "Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Description: Swati Chattopadhyay's book Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023) recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. It takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people-the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities-who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale. Taking the British emp...