Neoclassicism, Race, and Statecraft across the Atlantic World

Thomas Jefferson understood classicism as the highest form of architectural expression, the white race as the highest expression of humanity, and a democratic Republic as the most virtuous expression of government. Yet his particularly articulate triangulation of aesthetics, race, and nation making—all born of the Enlightenment—has a history. Using a series of three vignettes from across the Atlantic world, this article argues that neoclassical architecture has been too long divorced from the social, economic, and racialized infrastructures of nation making, somehow distanced from the commercial and financial capital necessary to fund the establishment of states and the theories of race that undergird empire. Before Jefferson, this triangulation was subtle, but the fact that these implicated discourses were difficult to see did not render them impotent in their moment, nor should they be unrecognized in ours.