Reviewed by: Andrew Cobbing, The University of NottinghamPeoples on Parade , a magisterial work that takes the reader on a guided tour through Victorian exhibitions, brings a sensitive approach to the emotive theme of humans on display. Often viewed with horror now, even at the time such exhibitions were trivialized as freak or dismissed as pseudoscience, notably by early anthropologists guarding their own field. Qureshi offers a more nuanced reading, exploring how some shows also contributed to scientific enquiry. The displayed people here are not typecast as passive victims, but present a range of experience--professional performers among them--with voices and agency of their own. In this beautifully crafted and elegantly written volume, headings appear in bold period fonts, evoking the promotional culture of the Victorian age. A host of colour plates allows respectful interrogation of how the shows were portrayed, not, as Qureshi stresses, to resurrect them as subjects of voyeurism today (10).Victorian audiences did not pay to see these people just for their rarity. Instead, the ethnically diverse population in metropolitan London created a consumer market of urban spectators fascinated by difference. Navigating the streets, pedestrians used the latest theories in phrenology and physiognomy to read the crowd and decode life histories of passers-by. Critiques of exploration and colonization also reminded people of social divides at home as terms like Street Arabs' (coined in 1847) gained currency to describe the urban poor. Similarly, promotional material for human displays drew heavily on a growing canon of travel literature, piquing the interest of a public already attuned to current affairs in foreign policy, society, and science.Chapters move thematically through the steps involved in staging this show. Actors are introduced in turn, starting with the showmen who presented humans for profit. Some were also driven by social, religious, or political motives, for example, George Catlin, who publicized the plight of Native (103). Aware of their customers' fixation with authenticity, they spun dramatic backstories to explain how the people on display were plucked from their own environment. Costumes and props were used to differentiate them from the ethnic minority residents in London. Feathered headdresses became obligatory after Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the 1880s, to meet their patrons' expectations of how real Indians dressed (121). Choreographed performances of song, dance, and ritual would emphasize their savagery, at some stage of development below the civilized Christian West.The focus then turns to exhibits themselves, from their provenance to the degree of agency they exercised in the final package. A select group of case studies reappear at each stage of their journey. From southern Africa arrive the Hottentot Venus (Sarah Baartman), the San bushmen, and the Zulus. From the Americas come the Aztec Lilliputians and members of the Anishinaabe tribe. Using consent theory Qureshi demonstrates that free choice was rare, although later in the nineteenth century some professional performers chose to go on show. Their control over their working lives also varied: Baartman was clearly unhappy with her humiliating treatment on stage, Native Americans resisted missionaries' attempts to convert them, and Zulu chiefs successfully appealed to English courts over contractual disputes. …