Enfilade

Another title now 50% off at the Princeton UP sale:

Itohan Osayimwese, Africa’s Buildings: Architecture and the Displacement of Cultural Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-0691251431, £30 / $35.

A groundbreaking history of Africa’s looted architectural heritage—and a bold proposal for the repatriation of the continent’s stolen cultural artifacts

Between the nineteenth century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States. Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures. Africa’s Buildings traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings and addressing the ethical questions surrounding the display of these objects.

Itohan Osayimwese ranges across the whole of Africa, from Egypt in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, and spanning the western, central, and eastern regions of the continent. She describes how collectors employed violent means to remove elements such as columns and door panels from buildings, and how these methods differentiated architectural collecting from conventional collecting. She shows how Western collectors mischaracterized building components as ornament, erasing their architectural character and concealing the evidence of their theft. Osayimwese discusses how the very act of displacing building parts like floor tiles and woven screen walls has resulted in a loss of knowledge about their original function and argues that because of these removals, scholars have yet to fully grasp the variety and character of African architecture.

Richly illustrated, Africa’s Buildings uncovers the vast scale of cultural displacement perpetrated by the West and proposes a new role for museums in this history, one in which they champion the repatriation of Africa’s architectural heritage and restitution for African communities.

Itohan I. Osayimwese is professor of the history of art and architecture and urban studies at Brown University, where she is an affiliate faculty in Africana studies and at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the editor of German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies.

Recently released in paperback from Princeton UP, where many books are now 50% off with code SPRING50 (until June 9) . . .

Tristan Brown, Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 356 pages, ISBN: 978-0691246734 (hardback), £38 / $45 / ISBN: 978-0691247175 (paperback), £25 / $30.

Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912).

Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines. Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.

Winner of the John K. Fairbank Prize, American Historical Association
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
Winner of the Biannual Book Prize, International Society of Chinese Law and History

Tristan G. Brown is S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Professor in History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From Haus Publishing, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Monika Czernin, with an introduction by Dominic Lieven, The Emperor Incognito: Joseph II’s Journey through Enlightenment Europe, translated by Jamie Bulloch (London: Haus Publishing, 2026), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1914979439, £22 / $30.

The first complete account of Emperor Joseph II’s undercover journey through his kingdom

Travelling incognito, and without the customary pomp and entourage, the young emperor Jospeh II travels through the Holy Roman Empire and his Hapsburg lands to see with his own eyes how his subjects live, suffer, and starve. As well as kings, queens, and the European political and social elite, Joseph engages with and observes ordinary people and their hospitals and factories, eagerly soaking up Enlightenment ideas of progress and liberty. Visiting his sister, Marie Antoinette, in Versailles in 1777, he senses the French Revolution looming and realises that reform is inevitable if he is to build a modern state. The Emperor Incognito tells the story of an extraordinary man, far ahead of his time and in an age of great upheaval, who spent a quarter of his twenty-five-year reign on the road. The result of his titanic efforts, despite his own admission (as inscribed on his tombstone) that he ‘failed everything he undertook’, was the foundation of a more modern Austrian monarchy, in a Europe in which progress was no longer determined solely by its rulers.

Monika Czernin is an internationally renowned author and filmmaker. Her research focuses on key figures and turning points of European History, and her book, Anna Sacher and Her Hotel, spent many weeks on the bestseller lists in Germany. Czernin was awarded the Friedrich Schiedel Literature Prize in 2023 and is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Dominic Lieven is a Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Jamie Bulloch is a historian and has worked as a professional translator from German.