A Tale of Eight Cities: Mirosław Sadowski’s new research project on selected post-colonial cities and their histories

By Mirosław M. Sadowski – posted on 14 July 2025

Exam boards finished, graduations completed, diplomas handed out, resit questions written… This, of course, means that this time of the year has come again – academic summer! Our Dr. Mirosław M. Sadowski talks about his new exciting research project.

Can a colonial project be internally focused? When it comes to France, UK, Spain, or Portugal, we tend to think about warships sailing off to foreign lands – and the atrocities that followed. Empires, however, were sometimes focused inward, rather than outward. China and Russia are most typical examples, however my research project is focused on an oftentimes overlooked empire: the Empire of Brazil.

In 2023 and 2024 I conducted two research visits to Rio de Janeiro, learning how following the 1822 independence from Portugal, Brazil did not become a republic but a monarchy, with the son of the Portuguese king crowned Emperor of Brazil, Pedro I. While short-lived (Brazil became a republic in 1889 following discontent among the elites regarding the abolition of slavery by the last Emperor and his daughter), what followed was an imperial project mimicking those taking place in the other places around the world, however one focused internally, turning the country into the Latin American powerhouse full of inequalities Brazil is today.

Remnants of the difficult past are weaved into our cityscapes, virtually palpable in the buildings, museums, monuments, street names… This project, evoking the Dickensian masterpiece, proposes to investigate eight post-colonial cities and their histories, four from an internal empire, and four from an external one. Entitled A Tale of Eight Cities: Legal and Political Perspectives on Brazilian and British Imperial Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century, it ventures to study the ways in which built and immaterial post-colonial heritage continues to shape and reshape the post-colonial reality today.

Cultural heritage, considered to belong to not only one group in particular but rather to the whole of humanity (Wangkeo 2003, 192), as symbolised by the popular UNESCO’s world heritage lists, even when not contested presents a unique array of legal problems. With its very concept contravening the foundation of the Western legal system by – in certain instances – limiting some of the property rights belonging to its owner (Zeidler and Łągiewska 2021, 665), cultural heritage plays an important role in the establishment of a group’s official narrative, carrying with it – be that material or immaterial heritage – collective memories of the past into the present (Vecco 2010, 324; O’Callaghan 2012). Which memories will be selected and conserved for future generations is in most instances a political question, with those in the positions of authority deciding, oftentimes arbitrarily, what should be preserved and what may be destroyed, reconstructed or removed given the usually easily contravened legal frameworks on heritage protection (Astor et al. 2019, 339).

These questions become particularly problematic in cases of so-called contentious heritage, being those cultural objects that lead to conflict either by their very existence, or by their placement or the narrative surrounding them (Ristic and Frank 2020, 1). These may include monuments of the former regime, items taken out of their countries of origin and displayed in museums abroad, cultural objects highjacked to support a particular narrative and in certain cases whole built complexes constructed in a particular architectonical style immediately associated with a certain period in time or a group in power, etc. (Vos Eckersley 2023, 137). Typically encompassing the various types of heritage raising a number of contentious issues, both inside and outside the groups in question, is the imperial heritage, directly linked to the question of imperial memory. Imperial memory is a concept which I proposed with two colleagues as being related to “a type of collective memory held by a society that ceased to be a metropole but that continues to employ the different colonial narratives of the ‘glorious past’ as a major element of their identity (i.e., imperial identity)” (Sadowski et al. 2024, 1127).

The fate of imperial cultural heritage in the 21st century, alongside the memories it carries within and the narratives used to build identities upon it, is at the centre of the project. As such, the four cities of the British Empire to be studied are:

  • Glasgow – The ‘Second City of the Empire’, showcasing Britain’s global influence in the 18th and 19th centuries.
  • Dublin – A city that had to reinvent itself as the capital of an independent Ireland after British rule.
  • Delhi – A site of one of the largest urban decolonisation projects in history.
  • Cape Town – A city that underwent heritage reconfiguration post-colonialism and post-apartheid.

And the four cities of the Brazilian Empire selected for study are:

  • Salvador de Bahia – Brazil’s first capital and one of its most diverse cities.
  • Rio de Janeiro – The second capital and political centre of the Brazilian Empire.
  • São Paulo – The economic powerhouse of modern Brazil.
  • Brasília – A planned capital envisioned as free from the past, yet still enshrining the imagery of empire through its modern heritage.

In order to achieve its aims, the project will employ a combination of legal-doctrinal and theoretical analysis. The legal-doctrinal research will be both desk- and in situ-based, focusing on primary sources such as legislation, case law, policy documents, and official speeches, alongside secondary sources, including academic literature and newspaper articles. While the vast majority of these sources are available online, some of these sources (local heritage protection ordinances in particular) are only available in hard copy, accessible in the local government offices in the eight cities.

The overall collation of sources will provide a foundation for assessing how various legal frameworks are interacting with post-imperial heritage. They will then be subjected to an in-depth analysis using a legal semiotics approach (Wagner 2010, 78). This method uncovers the dynamic relationships that law has with society and culture through a focus on the interactions between legal language and the visual – in this case, the post-imperial cultural heritage. Thus, a space for an exploration of the ways by which law attempts to manage and curtail the cultural representations of the difficult past will be opened, leading to the uncovering of the tangible and intangible nuances of the heritage case studies.

The research will then be enriched by a postcolonial perspective, drawing on Laurette Bristol’s framework (Bristol 2012, 15-16) to foster a dialogue between past and present, informed by social justice. This postcolonial analysis will permit an assessment of the relative success of legal approaches to colonial heritage management. By synthesising doctrinal and theoretical methods, the project aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of legal engagements with post-imperial cultural heritage, and policy outcomes, which, informed by the case studies, will link the imperial past, the legal present and the social future in the hopes of learning best practices and making recommendations for the reuse and readaptation of post-imperial heritage in other cities around the world.

References

  1. Astor, A., M. Burchardt and M. Griera (2019). Polarization and the Limits of Politicization: Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral and the Politics of Cultural Heritage. Qualitative Sociology 48:337-360 at 339.
  2. Bristol, L. (2012). Postcolonial Thought: A Theoretical and Methodological Means for Thinking through Culturally Ethical Research. In J. M. Lavia et al. (eds.), Culture, Education, and Community (15-32) at 15-16.
  3. O’Callaghan, P., ‘Collective Memory in Law and Policy’ (2012) Legal Studies 32: 642–660.
  4. Ristic, M. and S. Frank (2020), Contested Pasts in Divided Cities. Introduction. In M. Ristic and S. Frank (eds), Urban Heritage in Divided Cities Contested Pasts (1-13). Oxon: Routledge at 1.
  5. Sadowski, M.M., R. M. Rego and A. Carmo (2024). Memories of a Glorious or Difficult Past? Portugal, Padrão dos Descobrimentos and the (Lack of a) 21st Century Reckoning. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique preprint:1-21 at 1127.
  6. Vecco, M. (2010). A definition of cultural heritage: From the tangible to the intangible. Journal of Cultural Heritage, 11, 321-324 at 324.
  7. Vos, C. and S. Eckersley (2023). Introduction to Part II. Encountering contested belongings in public places. In S. and C. Vos (eds), Diversity of Belonging in Europe. Public Spaces, Contested Places, Cultural Encounters (137-138). Oxon: Routledge at 137.
  8. Wagner, A. (2010). Mapping legal semiotics. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique 23: 77-82 at 78.
  9. Wangkeo, K. (2003). Monumental Challenges: The Lawfulness of Destroying Cultural Heritage During Peacetime. Yale Journal of International Law 28 (1):183-274 at 192.
  10. Zeidler, K. and M. Łągiewska (2021). Liberalism Versus Communitarianism in Cultural Heritage Law. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 34, 657-668 at 665.