Expertise and Empire: Fortification Building and the English Ordnance Office, 1660-1714

Abstract

This dissertation examines the integral role played by military engineers, and the state institution that deployed and oversaw them, in the making of the British Empire. The second half of the seventeenth century was a formative moment of English imperial expansion. As England accumulated a growing number of colonies and extended its claims farther into indigenous territories, the state simultaneously sought to centralize the empire’s administration from London. In this contradictory moment of expansion and consolidation, military engineering emerged as a means of imposing English power on distant and diverse colonial territories. To trace this history, the study focuses on a single government institution, the English Ordnance Office. Traditionally charged with the supply of arms for the army and navy, between 1660 and 1714, the Ordnance Office became the institutional center for fortification building both within England and throughout its empire, and it established and oversaw a cadre of engineers who managed building projects from Tangier to Ireland, Newfoundland to Jamaica. This profound transformation depended on complex negotiations among engineers, officials, and laborers with distinct fields of expertise, working across unfamiliar and unpredictable geographies far from the metropole. The dissertation toggles between England and its colonies to trace this growing, if tenuous, centralization of colonial fortification. Examining projects in North Africa, Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, it reconstructs how the English state used engineer training, bureaucratic systems, visual representations, a global trade network, and the expertise of engineer-agents to weave together an engineering apparatus capable of defending—and constructing—an empire.