Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition is the first book to situate the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 in a truly global context. Addressing national, imperial, and international themes, this collection of essays considers the significance of the Exhibition both for its British hosts and their relationships to the wider world, and for participants from around the globe. How did the Exhibition connect London, England, important British colonies, and significant participating nation-states including Russia, Greece, Germany and the Ottoman Empire? How might we think about the exhibits, visitors and organizers in light of what the Exhibition suggested about Britain’s place in the global community? Contributors from various academic disciplines answer these and other questions by focusing on the many exhibits, publications, visitors and organizers in Britain and elsewhere. The essays expand our understanding of the meanings, roles and legacies of the Great Exhibition for British society and the wider world, as well as the ways that this pivotal event shaped Britain’s and other participating nations’ conceptions of and locations within the wider nineteenth-century world.

The exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which this book examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the Empire. It focuses on exhibitions in England, Australia, and India from the Great Exhibition to the Festival of Empire.

The extraordinary palm: diverse and prolific, symbolic and often sacred, essential and exotic (and at times erotic), exploited and controversial. The signature greenery of the tropics and subtropics, these record-breaking plants produce the world’s biggest and heaviest seed, the longest leaf, and the longest stem. In the superbly illustrated, similarly extraordinary Palm, Fred Gray portrays the immense cultural and historical significance of these iconic and controversial plants, unfurling a tale as long and beguiling as their bladed fronds. As Gray shows, palms sustained rainforest communities for thousands of years, contributing to the development of ancient civilizations across the globe. But as palms gained mystical and religious significance, they also became a plant of abstractions and fantasies, a contradictory symbol of leisure and luxury, of escaping civilization and getting closer to nature—and at times to danger and devastation. In the era of industry and empire, the palm and its myriad meanings were exported to far colder climes. Palms were shown off as exceptional performers in iconic greenhouses and used to clothe, romanticize, and glamorize an astonishing diversity of new places far from their natural homelands. And today, as millions of people worldwide consume palm oil daily, the plant remains embedded in consumer society—and mired in environmental controversy.

Drawing on a wide range of archival evidence, Abigail McGowan argues that crafts seized the political imagination in western India because they provided a means of debating the present and future of the country.

Beyond the great exhibitions, expositions universelles and world fairs in London, Paris or Chicago, numerous smaller, yet ambitious exhibitions took place in provincial cities and towns across the world. Focusing on the period between 1840 and 1940, this volume takes a novel look at the exhibitionary cultures of this period and examines the motivations, scope, and impact of lesser-known exhibitions in, for example, Australia, Japan, Brazil, as well as a number of European countries. The individual case studies included explore the role of these exhibitions in the global exhibitionary network and consider their ?marginality? related to their location and omission by academic research so far. The chapters also highlight a number of important issues from regional or national identities, the role of modernisation and tradition, to the relationship between capital cities and provincial towns present in these exhibitions. They also address the key topic of colonial exhibitions as well as the displays of arts and design in the context of the so-called marginal fairs. Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840-1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins therefore opens up new angles in the way the global phenomenon of a great exhibition can be examined through the prism of the regional, and will make a vital contribution to those interested in exhibition studies and related fields.

The little-known art of Berlin Work was once the most commonly practiced art form among European women. Pictorial Embroidery in England is the first academic study of both pictorial Berlin Work and its precursor, needlepainting, exploring their cultural status in the 18th and 19th centuries. From enlightenment practices of copying to the development of an industrial aesthetic and the making of the modern amateur, Berlin Work developed as an official knowledge associated with notions of cultural and scientific progress. However, with the advent of the Arts and Crafts movement and modernist aesthetics, Berlin Work was gradually demoted to a craft hobby. Delving into the social, cultural and economic context of English pictorial embroidery, Pictorial Embroidery in England recovers Berlin Work as an art form, and demonstrates how this overlooked practice was once at the centre of cultural life.

Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of ‘cities of light’ and ‘hearts of darkness’ coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848–1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies.