Britain, the Empire and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (review)

Jeffrey Auerbach and Peter Hoffenberg's collection demonstrates how the Great Exhibition continues to provide fertile ground for exploring the world of Victorian culture. The nine essays that comprise Britain, the Empire and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 are by a group of international scholars from history, literature, and art. Each investigates British ideas about race, politics, and empire through the lens of one of the most discussed events of the Victorian period. As Auerbach argues in his introduction, this study places the Great Exhibition "not just in a national or imperial but in a global context" (x). This approach treats the event as a moment when the British collected, represented, and displayed their own understandings of their role as an expanding world power. The collection is divided into two parts: the first considers representations of British colonial possessions at the Exhibition, and the second examines responses to the displays of nations not formally tied to the British Empire. Auerbach, a foremost scholar of the Great Exhibition, pulls these two sections together through the idea of "informal empire" and argues for expanding the reach of the British imperial idea beyond those regions that paid direct allegiance to the Crown.

Two thematic essays open the collection and set the tone for this global approach. Paul Young's "Mission Impossible: Globalization and the Great Exhibition" takes on Niall Ferguson's notion of Anglobalization and analyzes the Exhibition as a representation of imperial hegemony. In "The World within the City: The Great Exhibition, Race, Class and Social Reform," Kylie Message and Ewan Johnston read the event as an early expression of imperial cosmopolitanism embedded with a didacticism reflecting mid-century obsessions regarding Britain's global status. As Message and Johnston argue, Exhibition displays demonstrated "global solidarity through the expansion of an increasingly shared marketplace" but were "also designed to benefit the national good" (28).

The remaining essays take a case study approach, analyzing in detail how different regions represented themselves and were represented by Exhibition organizers. Relatively minor displays from places like Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland gain elevated significance through a postcolonial approach that places these contributions in a wider historical context. In the case of New Zealand and Australia, a nascent nationalism found early expression in the selection process determining which items would go on display. In his second contribution to the collection, Johnston argues that although the relatively small display of indigenous products subsumed New Zealand within the rhetoric of imperialism and exploitation, the Exhibition represented an originary moment in securing its status as a settler society, and later a nation closely tied to the British Empire. Hoffenberg's attempt to understand Australia's poor showing at the event takes an institutional approach and looks to the decisions made by the Australasian Botanic and Horticultural Society to explain how Australians distinguished themselves from other neighboring colonies and the aboriginal inhabitants. The lack of a cohesive Australian national identity, coupled with the distance from London, led organizers to send materials that the commission requested—mainly unusual or unique curiosities like wombats and a gigantic lily used to make rope. Future exhibitions allowed Australia to make a better showing and take hold of its own representation. As Hoffenberg concludes, "Australians came to better understand themselves in light of comparisons made at overseas exhibitions" (120).

The nationalist aspirations of Britain's "white" colonies found expression in the halls of the Great Exhibition in other ways. Louise Purbrick's "Defining the Nation: Ireland and the Great Exhibition of 1851" reads the decision not to grant Ireland an independent display as indicative of its colonial status within the British Isles. Purbrick's analysis of how the products on display in the "Irish court" were represented in the press demonstrates how Irish nationhood in the metropole attested to its own ambiguous status within the British Empire.

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