Follies of Finance: Agrarian Landscapes and Corporate Capitalism in the Eighteenth Century

The talk looks at the financialization of the world in the eighteenth century, secured through the rising levels of debt issued by private institutions such as the Bank of England and the East India Company to support Britain’s ascendancy to imperial power. The primary front for this financialization, scholars have argued, comprised the significantly changed status of agriculture globally, whose quantitative expansion (and accrued revenues) were crucial to the circulation of debt. Using the large garden estates of eighteenth century America, Great Britain, Ireland and Bengal as examples, the talk analyzes their architecture as discursive elements for the socialization of vastly different populations across the world. The “follies” – symbolic garden structures – deployed within these estates reference multiple legal and doctrinal traditions, from the harking back to a Roman legal past by the Whig faction in Britain, to the renewed, and novel, emphases and inventions of religion in Bengal resorted to by the revenue-collecting class, the zamindars, established by the East India Company.

Bio: Arindam Dutta is Associate Professor of Architectural History. He is the Director of the History, Theory, Criticism Program in Art and Architecture at MIT. Dutta is the author of The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility, (New York: Routledge, 2007), as well as the editor of the editor of A Second Modernism: Architecture, MIT and the "Techno-Social" Moment, on the postwar conjuncture of architectural thought and linguistic/systems theories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).