Exhibiting the empire considers how a whole range of cultural products – from paintings, prints, photographs, panoramas and ‘popular’ texts to ephemera, newspapers and the press, theatre and music, exhibitions, institutions and architecture – were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. It represents a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the relationship between culture and empire. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, individual chapters bring fresh perspectives to the interpretation of media, material culture and display, and their interaction with history. Taken together, this collection suggests that the history of empire needs to be, in part at least, a history of display and of reception. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British history, the history of empire, art history and the history of museums and collecting.

Imperialism is strikingly represented in its buildings. This work illuminates the dispersal of colonial culture and religious forms, social classes, and racial divisions over two centuries, from the establishment of colonial rule to a post-colonial world. It will be a vital reading for all students of imperial history and global material culture.

"The book challenges the common view that the Exhibition symbolized peace, progress, prosperity, and the emergence of an industrial middle class. Auerbach suggests instead that the Great Exhibition became a cultural battlefield on which proponents of different visions of industrialization, modernization, and internationalism fought for ascendancy in the struggle for a new national identity."--BOOK JACKET.

Museums and Empire is the first book to examine the origins and development of museums in six major regions of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyzes museum histories in thirteen major centers in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South-East Asia, setting them into the economic and social contexts of the cities and colonies in which they were located. Written in a lively and informative style, it also touches upon the history of many other museums in Britain and other territories of the Empire. A number of key themes emerge from its pages; the development of elites within colonial towns and cities; the emergence of the full range of cultural institutions associated with this; and the reception and modification of the key scientific ideas of the age. It will be essential reading for students and academics concerned with museum studies and imperial history and to a wider public devoted to the cause of museums and heritage

It has been said that the British Empire, on which the sun never set, meant little to the man in the street. Apart from the jingoist eruptions at the death of Gordon or the relief of Mafeking he remained stonily indifferent to the imperial destiny that beckoned his rulers so alluringly. Strange, then that for three-quarters of a century it was scarcely possible to buy a bar of soap or a tin of biscuits without being reminded of the idea of Empire. Packaging, postcards, music hall, cinema, boy's stories and school books, exhibitions and parades, all conveyed the message that Empire was an adventure and an ennobling responsibility. Army and navy were a sure shield for the mother country and the subject peoples alike. Boys' brigades and Scouts stiffened the backbone of youth who flocked to join. In this illuminating study John M. Mackenzie explores the manifestations of the imperial idea, from the trappings of royalty through writers like G. A. Henty to the humble cigarette card. He shows that it was so powerful and pervasive that it outlived the passing of Empire itself and, as events such as the Falklands 'adventure' showed, the embers continue to smoulder.

Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this more true than in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. This text examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times - in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. Several chapters look beyond World War I, when the most popular media, cinema and broadcasting, continued to convey an essentially late-19th-century world view, while government agencies like the Empire Marketing Board sought to convince the public of the economic value of empire. Youth organizations, which had propagated imperialist and militarist attitudes before the war, struggled to adapt to the new internationalist climate.

Examines the phenomenon of human exhibitions in nineteenth-century Britain and considers how this legacy informs understandings of race and empire today.

"International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor experience. This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors' stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the context of music, trading these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time. Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into broader debates about music's role in society"--Page 4 of cover.

A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears. Fluently written, A Turn to Empire offers a novel assessment of modern political thought and international justice, and an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire, intervention, and liberal political commitments.

In this book, Brenda M. King challenges the notion that Britain always exploited its empire. Creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship were all part of the Anglo-Indian silk trade and were nurtured in the era of empire through mutually beneficial collaboration. The trade operated within and without the empire, according to its own dictates and prospered in the face of increasing competition from China and Japan. King presents a new picture of the trade, where the strong links between Indian designs, the English silk industry and prominent members of the English the arts and crafts movement led to the production of beautiful and luxurious textiles. Lavishly illustrated, this book will be of interest to those interested in the relationship between the British Empire and the Indian subcontinent, as well as by historians of textiles and fashion.