A Mutual Project: Architecture and the Imperial Foundations of American Missionaries in Nineteenth-Century Beirut

Abstract

This article focuses on the construction of the Syrian Protestant College from its foundation in 1863 to the beginning of the twentieth century and resituates American missionaries as covert imperial actors in nineteenth-century Beirut. It examines the close relationship between the missionaries’ increasingly imperial ambitions and their architectural establishment in the city, as evidenced by the private correspondence of the college’s founders. Here, architecture was neither a simple projection of “American” or evangelical culture nor a materialization of direct colonial control. Rather, architecture was tasked with multiple evolving roles as the missionary project grew more secure. This article traces the development of the college and its campus through three phases to illustrate how architecture and the missionaries’ imperial ambitions became mutually constitutive over time. In elucidating the nineteenth-century imperial foundations of the Syrian Protestant College it reconsiders both the nature of American imperialism in the Middle East and the central role of architecture in its construction.