European colonialism stretched across almost all parts of the planet and had profound ramifications for the peoples it affected. Queen’s Professor and Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art Gauvin Alexander Bailey has been spending roughly the past decade tracing a particular part of this history: the architecture of the French Empire.

Across three books published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Dr. Bailey has examined the wide variety of structures France built across its far-flung colonies from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. These include civil, religious, residential, and military buildings erected in places as widespread as Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and islands in the Indian Ocean. This imperial architecture, Dr. Bailey shows, represents far more than the bricks and mortar that went into it. It tells the story of the people who worked on these buildings – often against their will – and the cultural traditions they brought to the projects.

The third book of Dr. Bailey’s unofficial trilogy, Architecture and Slavery in the French Indian Ocean: Madagascar and the Mascarenes, 1643-1848, was published just earlier this month. The Queen’s Gazette recently spoke with Dr. Bailey, who teaches in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, to learn more about this new book and what his research reveals about the complex history and legacy of European colonialism. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did the idea for your latest book come about and what originally fascinated you about the topic?

One of the main inspirations for writing this book has been just how little has been written about Madagascar and the Mascarenes (Mauritius and La Réunion) during the timeframe I’m studying. I focused on the Atlantic world – West Africa, the Caribbean, French Guiana, and Canada as well – in my first book on French colonial architecture. Then I worked on the Asian colonies of France in the second book. But this area in the Indian Ocean is right in the middle. It’s where all the ships went on their way to Asia and became a sort of launching pad for Asian trade and conquest. So this region combines the two worlds in a way. It combines many cultures as well. The people in Madagascar and the Mascarenes come from all over – many different regions of Africa and Asia in addition to the European colonizers and the Indigenous Malagasy people.

More money, effort, and builders were put into the architecture of these islands than in any other French colony. And the largest colonial building the French ever built was in Port Louis, on the island we now call Mauritius. This surprised me at first because, from the perspective of European empire, these islands seem to be in the middle of nowhere. But the scale of the architecture makes it clear how important the Indian Ocean was for the French strategically and also ideologically. They were proud of their history in the region. France first colonized Madagascar in 1643 and to them it represented the beginning of their Asian trade, even though it’s officially in Africa.

A major theme of the book is the lives of the people who constructed the buildings in the French Indian Ocean. Why is it important for you to uncover and tell their stories?

I’ve always been very interested in who was doing what in history, because I’m interested in what the motives were. Colonial architecture is often treated as sort of black and white: there’s a conquering country that builds copies of something from the homeland in the new land. And my question has always been: who were the people actually building these buildings and what were their motivations? You end up finding out that the motivations were quite entangled indeed, whether the people were enslaved or non-enslaved and no matter what their cultural background was.

I’ve also always been interested in what some people call hybridity – in what kinds of techniques and styles non-European people bring into the colonial buildings they construct. For example, there were many Indians in the Mascarenes and some in Madagascar who were enslaved or indentured workers. They were famous for a kind of masonry and type of waterproof roof that were unknown anywhere else. So they got paid quite a lot of money – in some cases even more than whites – for bringing this skill to colonial building projects. I’m looking at what different groups of people like this bring to the table.

You point out that many of the workers were enslaved. What does your book have to say about slavery in this part of the French Empire?

There were different kinds of slavery there than the type we’re most familiar with from the transatlantic slave trade, what’s called chattel slavery. There were Indigenous forms of slavery in Madagascar practiced by the Malagasies. There were types of slavery from India. And these mixed with chattel slavery to form unique kinds of slavery we don’t see anywhere else. For instance, it was often elites who became enslaved in Madagascar.

Conceptions of race are also very different in the region. Ile Bourbon (now La Réunion) is the only place I’ve ever seen where, after two generations, mixed race families officially become white again. So when a French man married a Malagasy or Indian woman the children would be considered mixed race. But the grandchildren would be considered white again. This is unheard of in other French colonies. Many of the founding families of the colony were mixed race, so it gave them a good deal of political power and made racial categorizations less stringent than other places in the empire.

Taken together, do the three books you’ve written about French colonial architecture tell a larger story about architecture and imperialism?

The French wanted to promote a metropolitan style in their imperial architecture – buildings that looked like Paris and Versailles. They wanted to emphasize the French brand, as I’ve referred to it. My books show the ways in which the metropolitan model gets changed across the empire. And it always gets changed, because the ideal is just an ideal. When you’re on the ground in the different colonies, you can try to build something that looks very French, but you’re always connecting with other people, other materials, other stories, and other cultures that change things.

You hold the Alfred and Isabel Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s. Has that position helped you to complete the research that has gone into your books on the architecture of the French Empire?

It’s had a very large impact through the Bader Research Fund that I receive. The Bader Chair enabled me to build on other funding I received from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant and a grant from the National Endowment of Humanities and do things I would not have been able to do otherwise. It has allowed me to think sideways a bit, or outside the box.