In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, at the height of the industrial revolution, the study of Asian societies and their architectures might well have been regarded, at best, as an arcane distraction from the pressing issues of the day. Yet, it was Karl Marx’s interrogation—from the purview of his reader’s desk in the British Library—of the exploits of capital in Europe’s far-flung colonial empires and what he called the “Asiatic mode of Production” on which his seminal critique of the political economy of the modern world would be grounded. Within the domains of architectural and cultural theory, the scholarly tactics of Marx’s contemporary, James Fergusson, were comparably oblique, but the critical and theoretical objectives were no less ambitious. It was Fergusson’s concerted focus on “Indian and Eastern architecture” that would underpin one of the first and arguably still one of the most influential efforts of all time to frame a global history and theory of architecture. Methodically sustained over half a century and half a world of distance, Fergusson’s pioneering scholarship on Indian architecture in particular was sharpened and deepened, he believed, through the analytical acuity of the new photographic media of his age. The close-read-ing that these tools enabled of what he called the “stone book” of India’s pre-modern architectural heritage revealed what he believed were the “true principles of architectural art.” These were the principles by which he believed the architecture of modern (i.e. post Renaissance) Europe needed to be restored to the path of rational and authentic development and thereby saved from what he, among other contemporaries, regarded as its critically enfeebled state of revivalist mimicry.