City, Crown, and the Staging of Global Commerce: The Royal Exchange in Early Modern London

In the architectural history of early modern London, the seventeenth century has always seemed an unpromising time to look for expressions of English national identity. Rather, it is the courtly works of Inigo Jones and the city churches of Christopher Wren that have been posited as characterizing the "style" of the period. Architectural historians of early modern London have challenged this conventional viewpoint, which has been developed primarily on the basis of John Summerson's two classic volumes, Georgian London (1945) and Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (1953), both of which inform the view of Palladianism as a normative model of explanation until the mid-twentieth century. Most previous studies have focused on discovering hitherto unknown architectural exemplars that fill the gaps left by the "Summersonian" typological approach that seeks to construct the common building style of a period. This dissertation, instead, introduces a new approach to understanding the architectural identity of seventeenth-century London, taking a well-known building, the Royal Exchange, as an exemplar whose epithet was "Great Britain's Glory" and the "Eye of London," but whose architectural presence has nonetheless not been considered as representative of the city and the nation, although it was proudly deployed as the iconic image of the city and of the nation, particularly from the seventeenth century onwards. By focusing on the perception of space in seventeenth-century London that is understood as theatrical in the visual and textual representations of the Royal Exchange, this dissertation navigates the construction process of the spatial specificity of the Royal Exchange. While identifying the theatrical mode of spatial perception, this study examines the building via a tripartite structure, considering it through the lens of three thematic subdivisions: the "Walks," an open courtyard for world commerce, as a microcosmic world between the market and the theater; the "Pawns," a nexus of enclosed long and narrow walkways for luxury shopping, as a stage for self-fashioning; and the facade of the building as the face of the city and the nation. Each chapter demonstrates that the iconic status of the Royal Exchange was not bestowed by any particular designer, but was, in effect, driven by the following changes in early modern London: England's growing power in global commerce, the luxury consumption of the emerging commercial bourgeois in the pursuit of the privileged status of the English gentleman, and the city's tense relationship with the crown. This dissertation proposes to understand architecture of early modern London not as a static, fixed entity, but as a constituent of performativity.