<em>Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order</em>, by Paul Young

Abstract

Reviewed by: Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order Joseph W. Childers (bio) Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, by Paul Young; pp. x + 249. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, $89.00. The very title of Paul Young’s book, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, raises a number of issues that drive the arguments of this excellent new study, underscoring Young’s thoughtfulness as he struggles with the assumptions that surround discussions of the Great Exhibition and Victorian culture. From the outset, Young notes that one of the main terms with which he has chosen to frame his project, globalization, is fraught with intellectual and ideological baggage that makes it a difficult signpost for the analysis he is undertaking. Yet he also recognizes that a large part of what his study attempts is to come to terms with how an event like the Great Exhibition generated a “coherent and compelling story about the world” (4). In order for his own account to have some purchase, Young realizes that he must rely on a broad and useful conception of globalization, and he draws on Roland Robertson’s pithy characterization of the phenomenon as a “compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole” (qtd. in Young 4). Of course many concerns are raised by this definition, not least the Eurocentric (indeed, Anglocentric) features of the narrative that emerged from the Crystal Palace in 1851. Young is aware of and attentive to the problems with such a characterization. He goes to some pains in his introduction to outline the subtleties of his argument. In a moment of notable even-handedness, he points out that while recent historians have been “right to warn against interpreting the [Great Exhibition] in simplistic, triumphalist terms,” we must nonetheless “hold on to the fact” that the narrative it generated was informed by “a potent combination of political economy, Enlightenment rationale, and the Industrial Revolution” and that this combination did indeed lend itself to “a simplistic, triumphalist Victorian understanding of the world” (5). This very dichotomy is a grounding feature of the structure of Young’s book. Although his study foregrounds the belief that the Great Exhibition announced a new world order, it does not argue for a consensus around that belief. Thus, the first half of the book, especially, “links the display with a totalizing imperative to make perfect sense of the world,” yet is true to its intent not to “confuse expectation and ambitions with achievement” (7). The second portion of this study is more in line with what might be expected from an ideological-historical study of this sort: it examines the ways in which the Exhibition itself produces shortcomings in the narrative it ostensibly promotes. And while this [End Page 555] perhaps undoes any surprises we might hope to glean from Young’s readings, his analysis itself is insightful and makes a useful contribution to the current scholarship surrounding the Exhibition. For Young, the Exhibition stands as a kind of metonym—and an ideological starting point—for the “hegemonic forms of globalization” that have created the very real inequities that persist in our own century. And, to his credit, Young is always concerned to identify the inconsistencies of the totalizing narrative that emerged in relation to this symbol. Emphasizing the insistence of free-market capitalism and, implicitly, the Victorians’ residual faith in the dulcifying effects of participation in commerce, Young’s analysis begins with a look at the concerted Anglo-European effort to establish what he terms “Victorian internationalism” as the predominant, organizing ethos of the new world order (15). This new understanding—and organization—of the world depends partly on naturalizing capitalist impulses, creating a network of exchange in accordance with the then-dominant principles of political economy. This network, as Young puts it, is informed by a “fantasy” that suggests all are culturally (and thus “naturally”) inclined to participate in it (30, 37). From such a premise, the Exhibition could be read as revealing what Young describes as an “international commercial symmetry” enabled by a “geographical fantasy” that allowed for...