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Book Review
An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. By PETER HOFFENBERG. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. ISBN 0–520–21891–4. Pp. xxvii + 418. Appendix, bibliography, and index.
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Between 1854 and 1911, over thirty colonial exhibitions opened to the public across the British Empire from Calcutta to Melbourne, from Delhi to Queensland, demonstrating the unprecedented energy of cultural professionals, scientists, administrators, entrepreneurs, colonial officials, and bureaucrats across British territories interested in recreating the empire in their own image. Highlighting the underexamined features specific to post–Crystal Palace (1851) imperial exhibitions, University of Hawaii professor Peter Hoffenberg's 277-page history examines post-1851 British imperial exhibitions sprawled over three different continents and draws impressively from countless documents excavated from over twenty-five different archives. |
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Historians are by now familiar with works on nineteenth-century exhibitions that have emphasized imperial spectacles and visual displays as powerful frameworks through which the public learned to envision the colonial order. Cultural historians of imperialism have argued exhibitions to be virtual experiences that refashioned the European understanding of the colonial hierarchy,1-3 generating cultural representations and stereotypes that persist to this day.4-6 As it stands now, however, much of the scholarship devoted to this subject focus on individual exhibitions or on segments within larger individual world's fairs to illuminate their particular modes of representation and displays. While Hoffenberg does not deviate much from the theoretical arguments of his predecessors, he presents a much broader picture, albeit for the British Empire alone, by taking to task the fifty years of exhibitions and the vast human communication networks that brought them to fruition. |
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Hoffenberg arguesthat latter nineteenth-century exhibitions, which incorporated the use of "large-scale cultural events and institutions," were more dynamic and effective in alluring the public to imperial visions than their predecessors had been, and were designed specifically to integrate the masses as important ticket buyers to the exhibitions (p.3). Featuring more popular forms of spectacle and fantasy, post-1851 exhibitions were an essential part of what Hoffenberg calls the "new" imperialism, in which the interests of the cultural and political elite in naturalizing colonial domination and endorsing an increasingly mechanized form of industrial expansion across the empire converged. The result was more than a half-century of spectacles that dazzled people of all classes and race with the dual aura of imperial fantasy and British technological advancement (p.211). |
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