A01=Peter H. Hoffenberg
australia
Author_Peter H. Hoffenberg
britain
british empire
calcutta
Category=JBCC
Category=NHD
Category=NHF
colonial identity
colonialism
commercial goods
commonwealth
crystal palace
edwardian england
edwardian history
england
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic scenes
festival of empire
great exhibition
great exhibition of 1851
great war
history
imperial identities
imperialism
india
industrialism
london
museums
nationalism
nonfiction
postcolonial
sydney
technology
tourism
transnational
victorian culture
victorian england
victorian history
wallahs
working machines
world war one
ww1
Product details
- ISBN 9780520218918
- Weight: 862g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 20 May 2001
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The grand exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which Peter Hoffenberg examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the British Empire. He focuses on major exhibitions in England. Australia, and India between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Empire sixty years later, taking special interest in the interactive nature of the exhibition experience, the long-term consequences for the participants and host societies, and the ways in which such popular gatherings revealed dissent as well as celebration. Hoffenberg shows how exhibitions shaped culture and society within and across borders in the transnational working of the British Empire. The exhibitions were central to establishing and developing a participatory imperial world, and each polity in that world provided distinctive information, visitors, and exhibits. Among the displays were commercial goods, working machines, and ethnographic scenes. Exhibits were intended to promote external commonwealth and internal nationalism. The imperial overlay did not erase significant differences but explained and used them in economic and cultural terms.
The exhibitions in cities such as London, Sydney, and Calcutta were living and active public inventories of the Empire and its national political communities. The process of building and consuming such inventories persists today in the cultural bureaucracies, museums, and festivals of modern nation-states, the appeal to tradition and social order, and the actions of transnational bodies.
Peter H. Hoffenberg is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hawaii.
