Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851

Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Peter H. Hoffenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754662419
• eBook ISBN: 9781317172260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

PART 1
England, Exhibitions and Empire

Chapter 1
Mission Impossible: Globalization and the Great Exhibition

Paul Young

I. Anglobalization

First published in 1857, Tom Brown’s School Days begins with a chapter entitled ‘The Brown Family’, in which Thomas Hughes’s narrator champions the values and actions of an exemplary body of the English population,¹ one to which national history has not sufficiently attended:

much has yet to be written and said before the English nation will be properly sensible of how much of its greatness it owes to the Browns. For centuries, in their quiet, dogged, homespun way, they have been subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their mark in American forests and Australian uplands.²

Hard-working and equally ‘hard-knocking’, these ‘homespun’ peoples are held responsible for establishing and maintaining England’s overseas glory. It is, the narrator attests, ‘the great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets … whose general diffusion I take to be the chief cause of that empire’s stability’.³ The security of this familial imperial order seems threatened, however, from developments within the mother country.

‘Oh young England! young England!’ exclaims Hughes’ narrator, ‘You who are born into these racing railroad times, when there’s Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year’. Such youthful dynamism, marked as it is with a profoundly different form of global perspective and propensity to travel, prompts unease. Pointing out that ‘You’re all in the ends of the earth’, the narrator is concerned to ask of his young countrymen, ‘why don’t you know more of your own birthplaces?’ The ‘racing railroad times’ are juxtaposed with ‘my time’, presented as a rural age which was regionally rooted and culturally secure:

And so we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs and stories by heart … We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys, and you’re young cosmopolites, belonging to all counties and no countries. No doubt it’s all right – I dare say it is. This is the day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that.⁴

To foreground the threat of industrial modernity in terms of an attack on a traditional rural order is a recurring trope of nineteenth-century writing. Hughes is interesting because this rural order is linked with a particular form of imperial authority and conquest, one grounded in values developed over centuries’ worth of agrarian enterprise in a ‘country-side which teems with Saxon names and memories’. Used to ‘treading on heroes’, and working ‘sacred ground for Englishmen’, it is small wonder that the Browns are capable of maintaining hard-won order in the world beyond their counties.⁵ But the Browns’ heritage is apparently in danger of being lost, and in losing grip on its traditional English way of life, with all its memories of the emergence of a strong, martial people, young England seems in danger of losing both its national identity and its empire.

As Hughes’s novel makes clear, the critique of a nation characterized by industrial advances and a burgeoning internationalist spirit found sustenance in the Great Exhibition of 1851. From its inception, the world’s first international industrial display was presented as a truly global event, one which aimed at once to celebrate the material progress humankind had made and coordinate those advances in order that the world could work together. Recent Exhibition scholarship has been concerned to point up the display’s multifarious character, correctly refusing the notion that this was a monolithic event inspired by unshakeable Victorian confidence, and drawing attention to the fact that political expediency dictated the display was not proclaimed, at an official level at least, a festival of free trade.⁶ It is important, then, not to iron out the historical, political and cultural complexities which informed the Great Exhibition and the diverse ways in which it was received. However, it is equally important to keep in mind that free trade’s supposed power to realize a peaceful and progressive new world order furnished the event with a grand narrative capacious and cogent enough as to enable those with a range of political leanings to embrace it. This story of a pacific, cosmopolitan shape of things was at odds with a vision of a peculiarly English empire created by the ‘hard-knocking’ exploits of the Brown army. But if modern Britain privileged the railroad above the rural, the global above the local, and commerce above conquest, the Great Exhibition bore testament to the fact that a sense of nationalist pride and missionary zeal was by no means lost from the global order with which Hughes associated the display. Set against Hughes’s condemnation of ‘young England’ as an age which was losing its national character and international standing, then, was the celebration of a world super-power embarked upon a process which Niall Ferguson has recently dubbed ‘Anglobalization’.

In the introduction to Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Ferguson is drawn to a vision of global commerce as expounded by Richard Cobden, leader of the Manchester School of Economics, and the popular face of Victorian free trade economics. For Cobden, the beauty of international commerce lay not only in the fact that self-interest guaranteed trade was a consensual and mutually beneficial activity, enriching all nations at the expense of none, but also that commerce acted as a ‘grand panacea’, serving to ‘inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world’.⁷ Quite rightly, Ferguson disputes the notion of such ‘an international system of multilateral cooperation’ arising spontaneously. Instead, he points out the coercive character of the process, drawing attention to the way in which Britain imposed its economic will through imperial interaction with nations and peoples in the non-European world. Concerned as it was to establish economic satellites which would feed with raw materials its population and manufacturing base, at the same time as providing markets for manufactured goods and capital investment, nineteenth-century Britain was never adverse to applying economic, political or military pressure to those so-called peripheral or underdeveloped regions it sought to subsume, whether by formal colonial annexation or informal free trade imperialism; gun-boat diplomacy and not mutual interest propelled much Victorian global expansion.⁸

However, such exertion of global hegemony can be seen, in Ferguson’s rhetoric, as ‘a good thing’. Thus explaining Anglobalization, Ferguson heralds ‘the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization’, one which he maintains tends to damage ‘hitherto privileged or protected social groups’. After Cobden, he also draws attention to the concomitant flow of Western ‘knowledge, culture and institutions’ which industrial capitalism engendered. This magnificent achievement, Ferguson opines, can be set against the slavery, famines and massacres documented by other histories of British imperialism; Anglobalization must be must be seen as proof positive that the legacy of Empire is not just ‘racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’.⁹

Surprising in Ferguson’s analysis is the cursory attention he pays to the Great Exhibition. As this chapter demonstrates, the Crystal Palace was seen as a cartographic validation of free trade’s new world order, setting out an Anglocentric industrial and cultural mission at the same time as it further opened up the world to British hegemonic ambition. But in reading the Exhibition as an event which plotted, in the twin sense of mapped and narrated, Victorian expansion in the non-European world, this chapter refuses Ferguson’s disassociation of Anglobalization from racism and xenophobia. Perhaps less surprising in Ferguson’s paean to capitalism is the fact that it takes him some 370 pages before he remarks upon ‘the lopsided nature of economic globalization’.¹⁰ In making the modern world, Britain should also be understood as instrumental in a racialized and xenophobic process which structured global inequality along lines of colour as well as cultural difference, and eradicated millions of those peoples Victorian commentators were content to term savages or barbarians. An examination of the way in which Exhibition commentary represented non-European peoples reveals a mindset which not only justified such exploitative trading relationships, but sanctioned the violence which accompanied them. Counter to its grand narrative, then, the Exhibition exposes to view the structures of feeling and exertions of power over which abstracted celebrations of an ‘optimal’ mode of production, whether orchestrated by mid-nineteenth-century free trade ideologues or modern-day neo-conservative historians, would seek to pass.

II. ‘Man-akin to all the Universe’: John Bull’s Hand of Friendship

Managing a sneak preview of the Crystal Palace, prior to the display’s opening, Punch was delighted to inform its readers of the sight which had met its eponymous hero’s eyes:

Immediately on his first peep into the Crystal, Mr Punch found himself fulfilling the request of JOHNSON –

‘Let Observation with extensive view,

Survey mankind from China to Peru.’

He beheld the whole of ADAM’s race collected together for the first time since they were seated together on the plain of Shinar – shaking hands together, with JOHN BULL in their midst, instructing them in that only genuine mode of fraternising.¹¹

Presumably, this imagined vision did not come as a surprise to Mr Punch. A year earlier, his journal had offered its readers a hint of what was to come:

Now, for the first time since the world was parted
By differing tongues, round Shinar’s tower of old,
One nation, horny-handed and strong-hearted,
The grasp of friendship out to all doth hold.¹²

Punch’s emphasis upon Shinar, site of the Tower of Babel, was a recognition at once of an essential human unity, at the same time as it signalled the tribal diversity which had resulted there from the presumption of humankind. It was also a register of the widely held conceit that, in the words of one prizewinning Exhibition essayist, free trade was a divinely ordained ‘scheme of life, appointed for mankind in general’, and that in promoting its cause the Great Exhibition would prove ‘to our race a kind of compensation for the Tower of Babel’.¹³ Premised upon the notion that the peoples of the world not only shared the same basic wants and needs, but a propensity to exchange as well, this form of compensation for Adam’s race was sprung from Adam Smith. And if this notion was commonplace, so too was the interlinked idea that Britain had a key role to play in facilitating global economic interdependency.

Upon first hearing of plans for a forthcoming international industrial display, a leading article from The Times remarked that it was entirely ‘natural’ given its commercial history that Britain would host the event. Heralding the nation as Adam Smith’s country, the leader welcomed its ‘return to a saner and more natural theory of interchange’, one which, no doubt, would ‘ere long be imitated by others’.¹⁴ For many Victorian commentators, Cobden foremost among them, Robert Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 established Britain as a free-trading source of inspiration to other nations. And after the manner of The Times, this triumph in policy was related directly to the provenance of Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Stripped of its complexities, the text was acclaimed by many Victorians as the bible for ‘a world economy whose principal object was growth … an “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”’.¹⁵ Understood thus, the Great Exhibition was celebrated as part of a wider Smithian project; it was a British-led endeavour which, in the words of Roberts Stephenson, author of a guide to the Palace and London in 1851, worked towards the removal of ‘those mischievous and absurd restrictions upon manufacturers and commerce which were the offspring of former ignorance and animosity’, thereby tending ‘to a simple system of common arrangements for the commercial world’.¹⁶ If the genius of Smith was to see beyond protectionist orthodoxies which reified national boundaries at the expense of such a simple system, the genius of the Exhibition was to make manifest this fact.

In acclaiming the Exhibition as ‘a series of displays of national industry, each methodically arranged’, Stephenson emphasized that ‘many advantages will arise ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 England, Exhibitions and Empire
• 2 Europe, the Orient, and the Spaces in Between
• Select Bibliography: English-Language Secondary Sources
• Index