Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Over the breadth of three centuries, Britain established a globe-spanning
system of colonies, dependencies, and territories that answered to the
English Crown. 1 Tentative maritime expansion in the 16 th Century
accelerated rapidly in the 17 th Century due to commercial competition
from France as well as other European nations and manifested in
settlements on North America and the West Indies. As Britain’s
commercial influence grew, the amount of territory considered under
British rule increased in tandem. Though some colonized regions
Figure 2, Calvin Klein advertisement
severed ties with the British, specifically the American colonies, many other regions remained under British
control. The African interior as well as Australia, New Zealand, and India were eventually acquired and
assimilated into the commercial fabric of the Empire. At the end of the 19 th Century, Britain comprised
roughly one fourth of the globe and counted at least one fourth of the world’s population as its own. 2 While
these extremely varied locales retained a fair bit of their cultural identities, especially in the African colonies
where governmental control was not nearly as tight fisted, certain principles of beauty and art were
espoused by colonization. As trade was the main impetus for British involvement in the broader world, the
British Western aesthetic infiltrated the indigenous populations, if only because British taste decreed what
goods were considered important. Some aesthetic principles, however, predate the British Empire and
hearken back to an earlier time, in ancient Greece. Many Greek ideals were adopted by Rome and were
spread (or enforced) through the rise of the Roman Empire, linking uniformity of aesthetic theory to the
wide-spread dominance of one ruling body.
While current Western aesthetic theory has been repeatedly redefined by the natural progression of
history, many modern concepts of aesthetics can be traced back to ancient times. One needs only to look to
current men’s underwear catalogs (see fig. 2) to see the influence of such ancient works as Polykleitos’
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