Description
The records of African businesses owned by Unilever and preserved at the company archives in Port Sunlight, Merseyside, offer a unique lens through which to study architecture and construction in decolonising Anglophone West Africa. Files related to the construction firm Taylor Woodrow, publicity images, and photographic material show the business opportunities created by both colonial development and decolonisation, and the strategies deployed by British companies to Africanize and thus maintain a profitable presence in post-colonial West Africa. Beyond these particularities, the archive encapsulates broader conceptual and methodological questions. How to understand on the basis of a European archive the role of local elites and increasingly devolved governments in the shaping of the built environment? How to trace mobilities of expertise as part of political economies evolving beyond the colonial rule? How to read commercial data and publicity material in order to understand the agency of local professionals and contractors in the transformations of cities and landscapes? Workshop participants will debate the opportunities and limitations of the Unilever archive with invited scholars who will contextualize the material from Port Sunlight in non-European archives, notably West African.Convenors:
Łukasz Stanek (Univ. of Michigan)
Ewan Harrison (Univ. of Manchester)
Contributors:
Warebi Brisibe (Univ. of Port Harcourt)
Iain Jackson (Univ. of Liverpool)
Kuukua Manful (SOAS)
Claire Tunstall (Unilever Archives)
Nwola Uduku (Univ. of Liverpool)
Rixt Woudstra (Univ. of Amsterdam)
Albena Yaneva (Univ. of Manchester).
| Period | 22 May 2023 → 25 May 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | PORT SUNLIGHT, LIVERPOOL, MANCHESTER , United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- Archive
- Post colonial
- West Africa