Empires are large. It is one of their signature qualities. As assemblages of different peoples and polities, empires link distant territories to each other by their very def inition: they are ‘large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space’; consequently, when studying empires, ‘[s]pace matters, size matters, and so does the character of space and sizeâ€â€¦
Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is usually associated with the writer and collector William Beckford, who built his Gothic fantasy house Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eight-eenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for over- arching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story …