This book examines the competing architectural trajectories of Jesuit and American Protestant missionaries in nineteenth-century Lebanon, leading to the foundation of the two oldest and most important universities in Lebanon, the Université Saint-Joseph and the Syrian Protestant College (today, American University of Beirut). Resituating missionaries as powerful actors within a complex history of inter-imperial contestation in the Ottoman Empire, it uncovers the covert imperial relationships and ambitions that structured their architectural and urban establishment in Beirut. Missionary competition engendered “collective colonialism,” embedding a divisive logic in the city's urban foundations. The book charts chronological and ideological shifts in this collective project, unfolding across three scales: the territory, the city, and architecture. By recovering the urban role of these non-state, foreign actors in a city under Ottoman rule, the book reconsiders architecture’s political agency and the nature of colonialism in Ottoman Lebanon.

Yasmina El Chami is an architect and assistant professor in architectural humanities at the University of Sheffield. She holds a BArch from the American University of Beirut, an MPhil from the Architectural Association, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her work explores the architecture of informal imperial actors in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Eastern Mediterranean. El Chami’s research has been supported by the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Essen; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; the Graham Foundation; the Institute of Historical Research, London; and the Cambridge Trust. She has received several awards for her work, including the SAH Founders’ Award (2026) and the Society of Architectural Historians Hawksmoor Medal (2020). Her writing is published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2024); Architectural Theory Review (2025, 2021); ABE: Architecture Beyond Europe (2021), and in edited books.