Building Colonialism draws together the relationship between archaeology and history in East Africa using techniques of artefact, building, spatial and historical analyses to highlight the existence of, and accordingly the need to conserve, the urban centres of Africa's more recent past. The study does this by exploring the physical remains of European activity and the way that the construction of harbour towns directly reflects the colonial mission of European powers in the 19th century in Tanzania and Kenya. Based on fieldwork which recorded and analysed the buildings and monuments within these towns it compares the European creations to earlier Swahili urban design and explains the way European commercial trade systems came to dominate East Africa. Based on the kind of Urban Landscape Analyses being carried out in the UK and Ireland, Building Colonialism looks at the social and spatial implications of the towns on the Indian Ocean coast which contain centres of derelict and unused buildings dating from East Africa's nineteenth-century colonial era. The book concentrates upon towns in Tanzania and Kenya which were the key entry points into Africa for the nineteenth-century colonial regimes that were to so shape the destinies of the people of the continent.