Building Better: The Influence of Iberian and French Caribbean Architecture on the Built Environment of the British Atlantic

Often when exploring the earliest parts of the early modern period, scholars discover fewer boundaries between polities, cultures, and geographic regions. In examining the built environment of the Atlantic World, this is starkly reversed. English settlers in the Caribbean built English houses, sometimes including chimneys on the upper floors that would have been mostly unnecessary during winter and completely useless during summer. Other settlers drew their own architectural traditions, and especially the Spanish and Portuguese benefited from their warmer home climate to produce buildings that better accommodated the heat of the semi-tropical regions they colonized.

For the English, while Dutch stylistic elements like curving gables communicated a desirable association with late Renaissance mannerism, and were further spread by vernacular architecture, adopting French or Iberian design was repugnant, particularly in the Greater Caribbean where they were often in conflict. Writing about the home of the Portuguese governor on St. Jago on his way to Barbados, English traveler Richard Ligon was dismissive, “roomes like galleries-such as are in the meanest Innes upon London-way.” Later, encountering the sweltering houses of wealthy English planters in Barbados, Ligon saw the logic of Iberian design and attempted to persuade the planters to build houses he designed that had clear parallels to Padre Vago’s house on St. Jago, “but they did not or would not understand them.”

While the timing varied throughout the British Atlantic, the longer the English were in the Greater Caribbean, the more they were forced to look for architectural solutions to the climate, drawing on French and Iberian adaptation in the Caribbean to adapt their own built environments. These changes produced societies more comfortable with displaying what was hidden elsewhere – mixed race sexual relations, extreme violence toward slaves, and what was characterized as an “infantile” dependence by those in the mother country.