Brighton's Royal Pavilion: How British Colonialism Brought Indian Architecture Home

On the seafront at Brighton stands a building that refuses easy categorization — the Royal Pavilion, a pleasure palace commissioned by the Prince Regent in the late 18th century, its silhouette shaped by domes and ornamental forms drawn from the Indian subcontinent. It is a monument to a truth that empire rarely advertised: that colonial power moved aesthetically in both directions, with the colonizer absorbing and redeploying the visual languages of those it dominated. The pavilion endures today as a museum and a quiet provocation, asking visitors to consider how cultural extraction can wear