An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (review)

Abstract

The rise of cultural studies generally and the study of visual culture in particular has renewed interest in institutions of display, particularly museums and exhibitions. Current studies of exhibitions generally note their role in naturalizing imperial ideology and focus on events in the metropolitan center such as the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, the series of Universal Expositions in Paris, or the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in South Kensington. But as with so many things, exhibition culture was not simply a feature of the colonizing country. It was itself an imperial export. The distinguishing feature of An Empire on Display is that Peter Hoffenberg not only sets English expositions and their colonial displays in a western, international context with a particular eye to events in France and the United States, but gives an account of expositions and their audiences in the colonies themselves.