Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

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Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London; Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, University of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz, University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. Titles include: Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors) ‘THE JEW’ IN LATE-VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE Between the East End and East Africa Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors) ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS Editors, Authors, Readers Colette Colligan THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture Dennis Denisoff SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950 Laura E. Franey VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE Lawrence Frank VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle Yvonne Ivory THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930 Jarlath Killeen THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland

10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Chung Hua University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-04

General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA

Stephanie Kuduk Weiner REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874

Diana Maltz BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900 Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (editors) VERNON LEE Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics Muireann O’Cinneide ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867 David Payne THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization Julia Reid ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Anne Stiles (editor) NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920 Caroline Sumpter THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE Ana Parejo Vadillo WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM Passengers of Modernity Phyllis Weliver THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910 Class, Culture and Nation Paul Young GLOBALIZATION AND THE GREAT EXHIBITION The Victorian New World Order

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–97700–2 (hardback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Kirsten MacLeod FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle

The Victorian New World Order Paul Young



Globalization and the Great Exhibition

© Paul Young 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–52075–2 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–52075–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Young, Paul, 1973– Globalization and the Great Exhibition : the Victorian new world order / Paul Young. p. cm. — (Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–52075–2 ISBN-10: 0–230–52075–8 1. Great Exhibition (1851 : London, England) 2. Great Britain— Intellectual life—19th century. 3. Great Britain—Economic conditions—19th century. 4. Globalization. 5. Crystal Palace (London, England) 6. Exhibitions—Great Britain—History— 19th century. I. Title. DA687.C9Y68 2009 941.081—dc22 2008041057 10 18

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For my parents and grandparents




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Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: The Millennial Dream

1

1 The Great Family of Man International, certainly Kinsmanship and common interest The unimaginative fantasy The huge household book The great and sacred mission Consensus gentium

17 17 22 31 38 47 53

2 Geography Made Easy The great map of mankind A geographical arrangement The world picture The force of mapping Bourgeois megalomania

57 57 63 71 80 89

3 Reorienting the World Ain’t it clear? The poetry of industry Criticism after poetry Stoppage versus progress The magic of the East The jewel in the crown? Tabula rasa The country and the city

94 94 98 104 111 120 125 132 140

4 Pax Britannica Dominance or degeneracy? England’s mission Ariel’s girdle

145 145 155 163 vii



Contents

viii Contents

169 181

Postscript: America, Anglobalization and the Great Exhibition

198

Notes

204

Bibliography

228

Index

241



The proof of the pudding Mission impossible

This book could not have been written without the help and encouragement of numerous individuals and institutions. My editor Joseph Bristow has been generous, rigorous and insightful. Paula Kennedy and Stephen Hall at Palgrave Macmillan were attentive and patient. Thanks to The Arts and Humanities Research Council and The British Academy who have kindly funded my research at different stages. I am grateful too for the assistance of staff at a number of different libraries. In particular, the resources at The British Library, The John Rylands University Library and the Special Collections at the University of Exeter proved invaluable. Many thanks go to the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Exeter. Colleagues there have provided me with a wonderfully stimulating, intellectually challenging environment in which to pursue my research. Earlier versions of parts of the chapters in this book have appeared in collections and journals. I am very grateful to the publishers of the following essays for allowing materials to be reprinted in a revised and extended form: “Economy, Empire, Extermination: The Christmas Pudding, the Crystal Palace, and the Narrative of Capitalist Progress,” Literature and History 14.1 (2005), pp. 14–30; “ ‘Carbon, Mere Carbon’: The Kohinoor, the Crystal Palace and the Mission to Make Sense of British India,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 29.4 (2007), pp. 343–58; “Mission Impossible: Globalisation and the Great Exhibition,” in Britain, the British Empire and the World at the Great Exhibition, edited by Jeffrey Auerbach and Peter Hoffenberg (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2008); “The Cooking Animal: Economic Man at the Great Exhibition,” Victorian Literature and Culture 36.2 (2008), pp. 569–86. Over the years that this project has come together I have been fortunate enough to benefit from the advice, support and wisdom of the following friends and colleagues (I guess it’s slightly misleading to imply that all of the below are friends, although many of them are very dear to me indeed. It is true to say, however, that I’ve never heard any of them state that they actively dislike me): Isobel Armstrong, Andrew Cooper, Tony Crowley, Emily Cuming, Terry Eagleton, Peter Faulkner, David Feldman, Ross Forman, Regenia Gagnier, Rachael Gilmour, Cora Kaplan, Jason Hall, Ken Hirshkop, Peter Hoffenberg, Martina Lauster, Sally Ledger, Robert Mack, Brian Maidment, Becky Munford, John ix



Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Plunkett, Angelique Richardson, Rick Rylance, Alan Shelston, Liane Tanguay and Ana Vadillo. Thank you all. At various times, in various ways, it meant a great deal. Especially you, Becky. Finally, my biggest debt of gratitude is to my family, and particularly my parents and grandparents – to whom this book is dedicated. But for the fact that they continually encouraged me to read books and pursue my education, I could have been a highly successful, highly paid professional football player.



x

What indeed does man know about himself ? Oh! That he could but once see himself complete, placed as it were in an illuminated glass-case!


(Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-moral Sense” [1873])




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Lying within hearing of Bow Bells, and surrounded by the architecture of financial capitalism, international venture and imperial power, the offices of Dombey and Son occupy a prime position in Charles Dickens’s narrator’s account of Victorian London: the Royal Exchange was close at hand; the Bank of England, with its vaults of gold and silver “down among the dead men” underground, was their magnificent neighbour. Just round the corner stood the rich East India House, teeming with suggestions of precious stuffs and stones, tigers, elephants, howdahs, hookahs, umbrellas, palm trees, palanquins, and gorgeous princes of a brown complexion sitting on carpets, with their slippers very much turned up at the toes. Anywhere in the immediate vicinity there might be seen pictures of ships speeding away full sail to all parts of the world; outfitting warehouses ready to pack off anybody anywhere, fully equipped in half an hour.1 Inspired by this metropolitan evidence of a global sovereignty, and the “hints of adventurous and romantic story” that it affords (87), Paul Dombey is convinced that a prosperous future awaits his family shipping firm: The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their boats; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. (50) 1





To be situated right at the heart of all this, it would appear, is to be filled with a fantastic confidence. The hub around which the world economy would seem to turn, Dombey’s London sustains international capitalist enterprise – in material, structural and psychological terms. Just around the corner from Dombey’s offices, however, is the shop of the ships’ instrument-maker, Solomon Gills. Set against Dombey’s systematic understanding of commercial interaction and global range, Gills is confused and intimidated by his city environment, and the new world it represents. Invoking “competition,” “invention” and “alteration” as disturbing rather than invigorating forces, Gills bemoans his inability to adapt: “The world has gone past me. I don’t blame it, but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same” (93–4). Ironically, then, the man whose wares – “chronometers, barometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps, sextants, quadrants, and specimens of every kind of instrument used in the working of a ship’s course, or the keeping of a ship’s reckoning, or the prosecuting of a ship’s discoveries” (88) – served to plot Britain’s empowered global status, now finds himself confronted by a world with which he cannot get to grips. Discussing the historical context of Dombey and Son, published in monthly parts between 1846 and 1848 under the full title Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and For Exportation, Raymond Williams sees the 1840s as “the decisive period in which the consciousness of a new phase of civilization was being formed and expressed,” highlighting the novel as a product of this “transforming, liberating and threatening time.”2 Edward W. Said notes the limitations of Williams’s analysis, which does not attend to the overseas expansion so important to the age.3 By heeding both scholars, we can discern in Dombey and Son not only a confidence but also a certain anxiety generated by Britain’s international position in the mid-nineteenth century. While Dombey encapsulates a mindset that saw the world in its entirety as something to be penetrated and profited from, Gill makes apparent the overwhelming nature of the expansive imperatives and economic transformations that characterized the period. Taken together, these two figures suggest a mid-nineteenth-century metropolitan consciousness that was excited but also somewhat unnerved by the way in which the world seemed to be opening up before Victorian society. The financial developments and technological advances associated with the continuing processes of capitalist growth and industrialization afforded Britain an unheralded and unrivalled opportunity for global expansion.



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But if the capital city bore testament to this extraordinary scope, it did so in a manner that defied comprehension. London thus begged an important question: given that the world was so clearly changing for the Victorians, and given that the Victorians were so clearly changing the world, was it possible to get this changing world into perspective? In March 1851 The Times brought to the fore and then answered just this question. Describing the capital as “a great commercial city,” distinguished by the varied and cosmopolitan “products of human industry,” the article nonetheless complained that as a result of the “diversity of trade and the impossibility of classification” it was hopeless to try and appreciate as “one whole” the material evidence of Britain’s global reach. London’s “innumerable shop windows” were arresting, “decked out with all that can attract purchasers,” but the ephemeral effect was one that prevented sustained consideration. Fortunately, the paper went on, a solution to this metropolitan confusion was at hand. At the forthcoming Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, to be held in Joseph Paxton’s purpose-built Crystal Palace, an international order of things would be brought into focus by means of a representative selection of commodities from around the globe. Suddenly, it seemed, everything would become clear: There the orderly arrangement of every contribution and the subordination of each part and object to the idea of one great and systematic display forces upon the mind a deep interest in that combined operation by which, when each exhibitor has his allotment completely furnished, the Crystal Palace will at once become a perfect epitome of the world’s industry – a Daguerrotype likeness, struck off in one moment, with mathematical precision, of the true “organization de travail.”4 The Exhibition, it appeared, would thus rid the Solomon Gills of the age of their confusion and anxiety. Where the world went past them in the streets of London, fragmented by a fleeting and commodified aesthetic, at the Palace it would be pinned down, systematized and rendered whole again. The display was therefore a comforting rationalization of the complex processes and interactions that made life in the Victorian metropolis what it was. However, the impact of the event that would become known and celebrated as the Great Exhibition was not to end there. For The Times, then, this was not some abstracted experiment aimed at reassuring a metropolitan audience disorientated by the urban impact of





modernity. It was instead a practical and totalizing endeavour that was to reduce humankind’s economic life to proper order beyond the glass of the Palace’s walls. When it celebrated the Exhibition as a photographic “organization de travail” the paper drew upon the widespread conviction that the way to understand the world was to understand the way the world worked, in the sense of laboured and traded in order to meet socio-economic demands. And to understand the way the world worked was to understand the way to make the world work correctly. So that the “perfect epitome of the world’s industry” realized by the display was a prescriptive as well as a descriptive achievement. It was in this sense that the Great Exhibition was believed to begin where Gills’s instruments left off, coordinating with precision and for the first time the material contents and industrial activities of a planet the topographic and environmental features of which previous European technologies had discovered and delineated. And it was in this sense that the Palace was celebrated as a watershed moment in the history of international economic relations. The display was to plot – in the twin sense of to map and narrate – a new world order. ∗

∗

∗

This book considers the Great Exhibition in relation to globalization. Globalization is a contested term, both in terms of its historical origins and defining features, but I understand it here as a process geared towards the integration of all global communities into a supposedly free-and-open world economy, a process driven by (although not necessarily originating with) mid-nineteenth-century industrial capitalist expansion, and a process characterized by the “compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole.”5 As a result of its focus, the present study examines the way in which the Exhibition was seen to have brought a changing planet into perspective, answering the question raised by both Dombey and Son and The Times, and in so doing generating a coherent and compelling story about the world. The critical contention that this narrative lay at the heart of the Exhibition is made with relation to political economy, a discipline held by some Victorian commentators to have brought the world to the cusp of a new era of commercial liberalization and economic interdependency. Discussing the logic behind this conviction, albeit in a different context, John Barrell notes the way in which the “institution of political economy” privileged the division of labour as it attempted “to vindicate



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the structure of modern commercial societies as, precisely, a structure, as something which, despite its arguably chaotic appearance, was available to be known, to be comprehended.” Because with comprehension typically came “the celebration of economic expansion and industrial improvement,” Barrell makes the significant point that political economy was “a discourse which had, for the most part, a good story to tell.”6 As we shall see, the Crystal Palace’s “good story” revolved around the conceit of an international division of labour, free-trade capitalism’s organizing paradigm for the global stage. This was the systematic structure of relations through which Dombey’s vision of a world governed by market laws of supply and demand could be worked up from an individual level to the level of nations, so that comparative advantage and competitive exchange became the only doctrine through which to regulate international commerce, and a cosmopolitan future of peace, progress and prosperity was guaranteed for all. An idealized account of free trade derived from political economy in this way furnished the Exhibition with its grand narrative, but in a wider context the revelatory global agenda with which the display became associated positioned the event comfortably within an Enlightenment tradition. As David Harvey has it, axiomatic to the Enlightenment was the belief that the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly. But this presumed that there existed a single correct mode of representation which, if we could uncover it (and this was what scientific and mathematical endeavours were all about), would provide the means to Enlightenment ends.7 The aforementioned image of the Palace as a mathematically precise photograph speaks directly to this assessment, and I shall return to it later in the book. For the moment I note that if the Great Exhibition was in this sense about the representative compression and control of the world, it was also conceived in terms of the spatio-temporal compression and control of the earth itself. Born of the advances generated by the Industrial Revolution, and popularly celebrated with relation to an enlightened, mechanized dominion over nature, steam-powered communication and manufacturing technologies were held to make the commercial compression of the planet economically viable on a hitherto unforeseen scale. So it was, this book argues, that a potent combination of political economy, Enlightenment rationale and the Industrial Revolution came together in an event that announced what Paul





Smith, writing elsewhere on what he defines as globality and totality, designates capitalism’s “millennial dream of a globalized, free-market economy.”8 In making this argument, however, it is not my intention to suggest that it was first and foremost the promotion of such a dream that drove the Exhibition’s organizers to hold the display. Nor should we accept that visitors to the Crystal Palace were necessarily inspired by such a dream. Two recent histories of the Great Exhibition, Jeffrey A. Auerbach’s The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display and John R. Davis’s The Great Exhibition, both published in 1999, have painted a far more complex picture.9 “According to traditional accounts,” writes Auerbach, the Crystal Palace “symbolized ‘peace, progress, and prosperity,’ and boldly asserted Britain’s position not only as the first industrialized nation and as the ‘workshop of the world,’ but also as the most advanced state, a paragon of liberalism.”10 Setting his study in tension with such accounts of the display, and the Victorian confidence it was held to encourage, Auerbach contends that the decision to hold the world’s first international industrial display was the result not so much of a desire to celebrate Britain’s predominance in the world as it was to remedy the perceived deficiencies that characterized British manufacturing design and production.11 Davis concurs with this assessment and, like Auerbach, notes the limits of scholarship that positions the Great Exhibition as a “much-visited and easily recognised landmark, representing industrial strength, commercial liberalism and enlightened cosmopolitanism.”12 Although they make clear that the display was indeed bound up with such ideas, then, both Auerbach and Davis also work hard to show the ways in which the Crystal Palace was a site at which a variety of differing, often contradictory economic, social, cultural and philosophical agendas was mobilized and energized. So if there is an air of “whiggish inevitability” to the way in which previous historians have “portrayed the exhibition as a monumental and monolithic event with a set of self-evident meanings,” then it is dissipated by the “[n]asty details and complicated issues” that Auerbach and Davis bring back to the fore.13 It is therefore important not to iron out the complexities that informed the Great Exhibition, and the diverse ways in which it was received. It is equally important, however, to keep in mind that a millennial dream of 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, social backgrounds and cultural influences to embrace and elaborate it – in numerous different ways,



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through many different media forms. Although recent historians of the Great Exhibition have been right to warn against interpreting the event in simplistic, triumphalist terms, then, we must hold onto the fact that the display nevertheless lent itself to a simplistic, triumphalist Victorian understanding of the world, and the position of Britain therein. It was simplistic because its globalized vision of international harmony based upon commercial symmetry was necessarily reductive. It was triumphalist because this reductive vision of global order not only promised so much for so many, but also positioned Britain in the vanguard – a world leader in terms of industry as well as ideas. This book examines the cartoons, catalogues, comic sketches, guides, lectures, maps, periodical debates, personal reflections, plays, poems, press reports, sermons, short stories, speeches and treatises inspired by the display in order to shed light on the way in which globalization took hold at the Crystal Palace.14 To read such texts with relation to cultural, economic, literary, philosophical and political outputs that both preceded and followed the display is to demonstrate the way in which the Great Exhibition became a decisive moment in the formation of a world picture that became durably embedded in Victorian society, that was transmitted throughout the nineteenth-century world, and that continues to exert a strong hold over global politics and culture today. However, while Globalization and the Great Exhibition foregrounds that the display was believed to announce a new world order, it does not argue that it generated a universal consensus. The Crystal Palace was held in various ways and for various reasons to spawn complications, discrepancies and conflicts that called into question the world picture with which so many commentators associated it. So if the first half of the book in particular links the display with a totalizing imperative to make perfect sense of the world, the study does not confuse expectation and ambition with achievement. The second half of the book turns to the idea that the Exhibition could be seen to make manifest the misguided assumptions, inadequacies, omissions and distortions of the grand narrative its globalized vision revolved around. But far from simply exposing the Palace in this sense as a failure, the thrust of this latter analysis is concerned with the way in which commentators explained away the problems concerning globalization that the display was believed to have made apparent. What becomes crucial to note here is the fact that as they recuperated a sense of how the Victorian new world order was to take hold of the peoples and terrains of the earth, so too these commentators opened up particular parts of the world as legitimate sites for imperial penetration and expansion. As my





discussion will stress, this is not to suggest that the Great Exhibition was a plot to legitimize hegemonic ambition. It is, however, to make clear that in plotting globalization the display was also seen to plot imperialism. With this contention in mind we turn now to a document published the same year that saw the completion of Dickens’s Dombey and Son and that was also concerned with the global impact of capitalist enterprise. ∗

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“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products,” wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Driven by the need to extend markets, and exploit fully the potential for economic growth afforded by manufacturing and communication technologies, “civilized nations” were transforming the way the world worked. As a consequence, what Marx and Engels held to be self-sufficient economic seclusion was supplanted by transglobal networks of exchange, and “production and consumption in every country” was given a “cosmopolitan character.”15 In Dombey and Son the neighbourhood of Stagg’s gardens is rent to its centre by a railroad-inspired “earthquake,” one that paves the way for the arrival of modernity, allowing a thriving and dynamic commercial society to replace a deprived and stagnant socio-economic backwater.16 A similarly irresistible and modernizing seismic shift in “the national ground” of global economic relations was discerned by the Manifesto: The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image . . . Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.17



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Thus a world distinguished by “the universal interdependence of nations” saw the commercial needs of industrially advanced nations shaping the economies of nations less advanced in this regard.18 While Marx and Engels believed such developments were a necessary step towards the realization of global socialist destiny, they were clear that the coercion, exploitation and inequality that characterized the capitalist mode of production at a local level was played out on a global scale. The Communist Manifesto, Robert Young concludes, proposed “a radical theory of economic imperialism, in which the dynamic capitalist global economy creates and enforces both development and dependence.”19 In the light of the Manifesto’s analysis, the present study argues that the Great Exhibition served at once to promote this expansionist drive and to justify it to a metropolitan audience. It is in this sense that the Exhibition becomes significant to P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins’s recent contention that the study of imperialism and empires must be placed “at the centre of the study of world history and specifically the history of globalization.”20 Here they highlight in particular “modern globalization,” a process that began in 1850 and was “defined by the transformation of the state into the nation state and by the impact of the developing financial and industrial revolutions upon the non-European world.”21 Taking up this argument, and situating it in relation to the Manifesto, and Young’s reading of it, I shall examine how such developments and their non-European impact were conceived at the Crystal Palace. As the chapters that follow pursue this line of enquiry two key issues arise. First, it was technological, industrialized progress (machines) far more than financial sway (gentlemanly capitalists) that proved attractive to theorists and advocates of Western power, particularly as it could be related to imperial expansion. Where Cain and Hopkins propose a “dynamic relationship between the aristocracy and the financial and commercial sectors, which shaped the development of the British economy and the Empire,” I focus upon the way in which the Palace underscored in cultural terms “the triumph of industry” that the economic focus of Cain and Hopkins’s thesis refutes.22 Second, and leading on from this perceived industrial triumph, Exhibition commentary tended to efface from view any idea of the “globological perspective” that André Gunder Frank argues is crucial to a proper understanding of the “Rise of the West” as it must be related to a broad historical and geographical analysis of the operations of the world system.23 Proclaiming instead the rise of the West as a phenomenon





that resulted from exceptional and internalized socio-economic and intellectual factors, discussions of the Exhibition served to inscribe precisely the kind of historicized binary observed by Marx and Engels, bringing to the fore the idea of a world divided between communities that were rational, dynamic and progressive and those that were irrational, passive and backward. Both of these issues underpinned the Victorian conviction that far from simply shaping a pre-existing global economy, the developments of industrialization, alongside enlightened and liberal advances, gave birth to globalization. At one and the same time, they demanded that globalization was theorized as a necessary and corrective process that was done by European powers to the non-European world, thereby enabling the mobilization of previously un- or underexploited resources. Thus it was that the Crystal Palace legitimized the notion that failing, backward peoples and their lands could be integrated into globalized modernity only if they could be positioned as suppliers of raw materials to industrialized powers and as markets for the manufactured goods these powers produced. By explicating the logic behind this move, Globalization and the Great Exhibition traces the way in which the display’s millennial dream of a liberal global economy could be reconciled with the various formal and informal politico-economical mindsets and measures that it is classically argued characterize free trade imperialism.24 As a consequence, a particular emphasis falls upon the way in which Britain’s global responsibility was conceived at the Crystal Palace. Far from fighting shy of it, many Exhibition commentators welcomed the leading role the display’s host nation would play in fulfilling the expansionist, directive mandate that the realization of a globalized world was held to entail. Notwithstanding Auerbach’s warning, then, a deal of attention is paid to the fact that the Great Exhibition did promote the image of Britain as the Workshop of the World, albeit that more often than not it was non-European, primary producing communities that featured, as Eric Hobsbawm has it, as a “kind of planetary system circling round the economic sun of Britain.”25 One of the central aims of the second half of this book is thus to underscore that it was with relation to this planetary vision that Exhibition commentators were able to generate an authoritative and forceful account of the way in which the industrial capitalist penetration of non-Europe would engender its regeneration. A strong sense of a Victorian imperial mission emerged at the Crystal Palace.



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However, the years following the Great Exhibition did not witness the universal progress so many celebrants of this mission promised, but saw instead Britain and other Western powers developing their global positions in ways that often came at the expense of those peoples whose lands they de- and re-territorialized in accordance with metropolitan needs. This is not to propose that the Exhibition’s imperial vision was disingenuous, nothing more than the first instance of what Smith has designated the industrialized North’s “habitual practice of exploiting the South under the ideological cover . . . of ‘globalization.’ ”26 Neither is it to suggest that the ravages and wrongs of nineteenth-century industrial capitalist expansion were located solely in the non-Western world, just as it is not to argue that particular non-Western individuals and groups did not actively promote and benefit from integration within the circuits of industry and exchange this expansion opened up to them. But it is to recognize that Marx’s analysis of the bourgeois drive to create a world after its own image concerned a process that succeeded in creating core and peripheral economic zones that left non-European regions dependent upon and exploited by European powers. Whereas at the start of the nineteenth century, then, vertical class divisions within societies were not mirrored by divisions between global societies, by the end of the century “the inequality of nations was as profound as the inequality of classes. Humanity had been irreconcilably divided.”27 This final point is made by Mike Davis who, in Late Victorian Holocausts contends that as the great non-European peasantries were integrated into capitalist modernity, so too entire peoples and nations were rendered “famished peripheries” (291), left defenceless against the droughts, famines and pandemics precipitated by climatic events and the demands of metropolitan exploitation. Denied food as a result of their conscription into a London-centred world economy, and denied aid as a result of “Smithian dogma and cold-imperial interest” (11), millions – perhaps fifty million (7) – died across Asia, Africa and South America in the twenty-five years that ended the century. There was an assurance among commentators at the Great Exhibition that industrial capitalist expansion would avoid rather than promote such decimation. But there was also exhibited the kind of self-serving ambition, coupled with a scant regard for those peoples deemed incapable of developing properly on their own terms, which rendered such decimation an acceptable price to pay for a more integrated world system. “The route to a Victorian ‘new world order’ was paved with the bodies of the poor,” writes Davis (10). If this was an aspect of globalization that the Great Exhibition’s grand narrative could not countenance, the present study




12


demonstrates it is equally the case that it is an aspect of globalization from which the display cannot be disassociated. ∗

∗

“The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in Hyde Park, London, in 1851, opens nineteenth-century histories as if it was a revolution, a coronation, the last year of a war or the first of a parliament.” So begins Louise Purbrick’s introduction to her edited collection The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Asserting that “of course, it was none of these things,” Purbrick furnishes a useful review of the various ways in which the Exhibition has been treated by scholars.28 Whereas she moves through a succession of different studies though, two main schools of thought can be said to have dominated twentieth-century thinking about the display.29 Neither of them was especially keen to celebrate the event. But in condemning various societal values and trends they associated with the Exhibition, these two schools can be charged with producing reductive accounts of what the Crystal Palace meant and did in 1851. Typically linked with the mid-twentieth century studies of Yvonne ffrench, Christopher Hobhouse and Nikolaus Pevsner, the first school brought to the fore the idea that the display bore spectacular witness to the bourgeois vulgarity of Victorian society, promoting tasteless art and industry to arrivistes who knew no better.30 Thus Pevsner: “We can say that what appeals to the child, appealed to the big men with the heavy purses.”31 Connected with politically left-leaning work produced from the 1970s onward, and focusing on the international expositions that succeeded the Palace as well as the 1851 event, the second is associated in particular with analyses – appearing in this order – by Tom Corfe, Robert Rydell, Tony Bennett, Paul Greenhalgh and Timothy Mitchell.32 Alongside Marxist criticism, perhaps especially Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of cultural hegemony, such studies were influenced by Michel Foucault’s explication of knowledge, power and discipline, and by postcolonial theory. Discussing the first international display, although in a manner that could be applied to those works that considered other events too, John Davis suggests that accounts from the second school “tend to view the Great Exhibition from a viewpoint of moral righteousness, objecting to it, for example, as a piece of imperialistic propaganda or else as a project of the monied bourgeoisie at the expense of the poorly paid which exacerbated the social question, or even simply as a capitalist project.”33



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Later works by Thomas Richards and Andrew H. Miller were interested in the visual and textual aesthetics (and aestheticization) of Victorian commodity culture, and offered less reductive and differently accented ways of engaging with the Exhibition.34 In their 2007 edited collection of essays, Victorian Prism, James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers and Eileen Gillooly indicate that the focus of these two scholars upon the complex and contradictory character of the Exhibition encouraged a break from “one-note treatments” of previous historiographies, providing a bridge from “Stracheyite anti-Victorianism” of twentieth-century scholarship to a twenty-first-century stress upon the idea that the Exhibition “must be understood as encompassing no single meaning, as participating in no one internally consistent ‘grand narrative.’ ”35 Alongside the aforementioned works by Auerbach, Davis and Purbrick with which its editors situate Victorian Prism, I would add Peter H. Hoffenberg’s An Empire on Display to this assessment of the turn made by recent histories towards the multifarious character of the display. Hoffenberg’s insistence that we must understand exhibitions with relation to “tensions, uncertainties, and dissent, as much as consensus and hegemony” sits comfortably with Buzard, Childers and Gillooly’s demand that analysis of the Crystal Palace does not reify the event as a univocal historical landmark “at the midpoint of the century, at the heart of the world’s metropolis,” but focuses rather upon the “many unsynthesizable narratives, implications, tendencies, prospects, and problems that flowed into and out of Paxton’s glorified greenhouse, down to our own times.”36 This is the emphasis, then, that seems to constitute the prevailing and productive drive behind studies of the Great Exhibition, as well as international exhibition studies more generally. That being so, then Globalization and the Great Exhibition seems somewhat out of sync. As its title underscores, this book might very well be considered a “one-note treatment” of the event it associates with a simplistic and triumphant global vision. I suggest that this vision was rendered “at the midpoint of the century, at the heart of the world’s metropolis”; it was authorized by the kinds of terms and concepts (the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernity, Cosmopolitanism, Progress, and the Victorians) the monolithic and Euro-/Anglocentric character of which scholars across a range of disciplines have for some time been concerned to expose and challenge; and it is held to have given rise to a compelling and pervasive capitalist grand narrative. However, I seek not simply to rehearse this narrative, and the new world order it promoted, but to understand it critically, with relation at once to the intellectual trends, cultural





influences, material conditions, historical events and geopolitical factors that characterized its moment of production. In addition, the “good story” generated by the display is placed in dialogue with developments in modern critical theory. Such works are drawn upon in order to examine why this narrative’s logic was so compelling, and how it can be deconstructed. In the sense then that I am concerned throughout to expose the normative assumptions around which the Exhibition’s globalized story revolved, as well as emphasizing that this story was subject to contestation and liable to break down, this is a reading of the event that can be aligned with those valuable revisionist histories that have demonstrated, through theoretically influenced textual analysis as well as archival research, the protean, polyvocal nature of the display; the fact that, as Purbrick has noted, the Great Exhibition has been since its inception a site that has generated struggles over its meanings.37 I would agree with Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, then, when they urge that “unless we succeed in apprehending the irreducible plurality of both modernity and the Exhibition that has long been taken to signify it, we will not have superseded the dominant Victorian accounts of either phenomenon.”38 But as I have already made apparent above, and as the editors of Victorian Prism signal when they foreground the “dominant Victorian accounts” it generated and sustained, such refractive endeavour should not obscure the fact that the Great Exhibition was a site that was indeed seen to bring into focus a particular and empowering understanding of the world, and the position of Victorian Britain in it. In acknowledging Davis’s admonishment to those who would consider the Crystal Palace “simply a capitalist project,” while maintaining equally that the event must be considered in relation to capitalism’s global project, I am drawn to Henri Lefebvre’s claim that capitalism produces “abstract space, which includes the ‘world of commodities,’ its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state.”39 To position the Great Exhibition with regard to “the vast network of banks, business centres and major productive entities” (52), as well as transport and information lattices, upon which Lefebvre suggests such space is founded, is to heed his claim that the history of space is also the history of the way in which representations of space can be understood to “intervene in and modify spatial textures” (42). While such a line of analysis must be sensitive to Lefebvre’s insistence that the social production of space is characterized by multiplicity and struggle, it must also keep to the fore his contention that the “dominant form of space, that of the centres of wealth and



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power, endeavours to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there” (49). What I am not claiming here is that the Crystal Palace served to choreograph a singular form of hegemonic globalization that was then perfectly executed in the world beyond its walls. What I am asserting is that links can be drawn between the temporal as well as spatial aesthetics and politics the book associates with the display, and the fact that hegemonic forms of globalization continued apace in the years following the Exhibition’s close. With Judith Halberstam’s recognition that “hegemonic constructions of time and space are uniquely gendered and sexualised” in mind, I note here that lacking from the analysis is an examination of gender and sexuality with relation to the idea that the Palace promoted capitalist space and time.40 Neither is there room to think through some of the questions concerning class, space and the Exhibition that Peter Gurney and Brian Maidment have recently raised.41 Undoubtedly, there is room in both these areas for future work. The fact that the study does draw upon postcolonial theory in order to explore the Exhibition’s construction of global space and time certainly does not stop it from emphasizing that the display’s millennial dream tended to envisage a considerably more peaceful, progressive and liberated future for all peoples than did many contemporary accounts of how Western powers should conduct themselves in the world. But so too we shall find that the Great Exhibition can be understood to corroborate Said’s claim that Dombey’s “overweening self-importance, his narcissistic obliviousness, his coercive attitude” reflected an expansionist, sovereign spirit characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century British politics and culture.42 A brief chapter synopsis is useful at this point. Chapter 1 offers a careful consideration of the anthropological fantasy upon which the event’s globalized vision rested. In so doing it brings to the fore a sense of Victorian internationalism rooted in political economy, and drawing upon enlightened and Christian humanist convictions. Put simply, as it often was, this fantasy suggested that all peoples were both naturally and culturally inclined to enter into capitalist networks of exchange. Chapter 2 examines the geographical fantasy that was seen to follow on logically from this understanding of human life on earth. This was an understanding of the display that saw it revealing international commercial symmetry where before had been discerned only ecological diversity and industrial difference. Free trade was to allow humankind to capitalize upon the tremendous potential of such symmetry.





In contradistinction to the previous chapters’ account of the Exhibition, Chapter 3 introduces descriptions of the display that cast the Palace as a spectacular space, characterized by disorder and evoking disorientation and disbelief as well as desire. While such descriptions can be understood productively with relation to the notion that the Exhibition institutionalized the fetishistic, commodified aesthetic with which capitalism is now associated, attention is paid to the fact that these accounts were in tension with the abstracted and reductive globalized vision so many other commentators privileged. If this tension could not be resolved, the vision could be recuperated. The chapter is concerned with the fact that the Palace was seen to make manifest a historicized global geography, an order that allowed that the backward and decadent displays of non-Western societies could be juxtaposed with the socially inclusive and progressive industrial character of the West, particularly Britain. Building upon the fact that the Exhibition was thus seen to naturalize a drive to position what Marx called “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries” as satellite economies to civilized nations, Chapter 4 turns to consider the way in which Victorian imperialism was encouraged and legitimized. If the Palace announced free-trade capitalism’s Pax humana, it also sustained the idea of a Pax Britannica, an imperial order that rested upon the contention that it was Britain’s right and duty to penetrate parts of the world that could be usefully rendered adjuncts of metropolitan growth. Held to redeem and revitalize the benighted indigenes it encountered and incorporated, such expansionist enterprise was often acclaimed with a missionary zeal. But the Great Exhibition was not necessarily understood to substantiate this confident account of things. The Crystal Palace revealed a dark underside to the Victorian new world order.



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International, certainly Whether it is apocryphal or not, the story of the exact moment when it was finally decided to hold the world’s first international industrial display has become something of a legend for the Great Exhibition. Henry Cole, a significant member of the influential Society of Arts, and perhaps the key figure in the display’s conceptualization, co-ordination and realization, recalled the incident in his memoirs, playing up as he did so the moment’s dramatic tension.1 With the idea of holding a major industrial exhibition in London having been mooted already, Cole was anxious that Prince Albert, who had expressed guarded interest in the project, should come on board with the organization of the event. A visit to Buckingham Palace at the end of June 1849 was rewarded by a brief meeting with Albert, and Cole was able to pose his most pressing question: “I asked the Prince if he had considered if the Exhibition should be a National or an International Exhibition . . . The Prince reflected for a minute, and then said, ‘It must embrace foreign productions,’ to use his words, and added emphatically, ‘International, certainly.’ ”2 This meeting was only one of a number of critical points in the organization of the manifold display that would be held some two years later in London’s Hyde Park and, as I shall discuss, it would be misleading to assume that Albert’s statement served to set a specific and definitive agenda. If the forthcoming display was to be more than simply a way of surveying international industry, however, it would have to be an event that embraced foreign peoples, not simply their productions. Here global commerce, and more particularly free-trade capitalism, emerged as a critical conceptual framework. And it did so alongside the idea that the world’s first Exhibition of 17



The Great Family of Man


the Works of Industry of All Nations would attract visitors from all nations. As the opening of the Crystal Palace approached, Victorian observers were at once excited and unnerved by the notion that their capital city would be inundated with foreigners during the spring and summer of 1851. The Times suggested that, leaving aside British visitors to the Great Exhibition, it would be no “exaggeration to say that from the whole surface of the habitable globe . . . a million of persons will be attracted to London.”3 In an illustration included in Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank’s novel of the Exhibition, 1851: or, The Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys, Cruikshank depicted the Crystal Palace on top of the globe. Beneath the Palace a mass of peoples made their way up towards the display. The illustration was inscribed “All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition of 1851.” Accompanying this inscription was Mayhew’s observation that the Exhibition would “attract the sightseers of all the world – the sight-seers who make up nine-tenths of the human family.”4 In that the display was being presented primarily as an opportunity for study and not amusement, Mayhew’s use of the phrase “sight-seer,” newly coined but already carrying with it light-hearted associations, was somewhat provocative.5 This was also the case because these foreign guests did not necessarily inspire light-heartedness; some observers felt that the expected throng of international visitors to the metropolis would threaten the property, the prosperity and the personal safety of the host country’s inhabitants. Registering such reservations, the Crystal Palace and its Contents, a weekly journal that appeared for six months following the close of the Great Exhibition, published a piece entitled “The Great Exhibition and its Results.” Discussing the original nature of the display’s global scope, the article considered why the display’s organizers had invited all the nations of the world to exhibit their industrial produce. Surely, the article asked, Prince Albert, Henry Cole and the rest of the company involved in planning and promoting the display were concerned at the invitation’s extensive nature: “Like another Frankenstein, [the Exhibition’s organizers would] have been terrified at the vast army of observation, of various races and habits, which they have been the means of concentrating around the wealthiest and least defended capital in the world.”6 Ironically, given the link between the Exhibition’s international range and a drive to improve domestic design that I mentioned in the introduction, it is likely that this apprehension concerning “observation” related in no small part to the anxiety that foreign competitors would profit from British manufacturers’ expertise, particularly



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in matters relating to technological developments. In a wider sense, however, it spoke to a Victorian fear of the foreigner, one that could be associated especially with the mobbish threat raised by the recent European revolutions of 1848, but more generally with regard to unsettling ideas about cultural and racial difference. I shall discuss this alien menace in more detail in Chapter 4. For the moment it is significant that the article sought to close down the troublesome and dangerous notion of alterity, as well as offsetting concerns that important national secrets would be lost, with the assertion that what impelled Britain’s hospitable invitation to the entire world was a steadfast and justified belief in “the unity of purpose and interests of men.”7 So against those nationalist, xenophobic modes of thought that would keep foreigners out, the Great Exhibition was here celebrated for its founding conviction that superficial human difference was not nearly so important as essential human similitude. A little over a hundred years after the Exhibition had closed – and the Crystal Palace had been dismantled from its home in Hyde Park, moved to Sydenham and eventually destroyed by fire in 1936 – Roland Barthes published “The Great Family of Man,” an essay that represented his take on the anthropological project the Crystal Palace and its Contents saw inaugurated by the Great Exhibition. The piece discussed a Parisian display of photographs the aim of which, it asserted, “was to show the universality of human actions in the daily life of all the countries of the world.”8 In a critique that rehearsed and extended the methodology and logic deployed by the Crystal Palace and its Contents, Barthes analysed the way in which such global exhibitions worked to establish the “myth of the human ‘community’ ”: This myth functions in two stages: first the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism is insistently stressed, the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs are made manifest, the image of Babel is complacently projected over that of the world. Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs, and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least one hints that there is underlying each one an identical ‘nature,’ that their diversity is only formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould. Of course, this means postulating a human essence, and here God is re-introduced into our Exhibition: the diversity of men proclaims his power, his richness; the unity of their gestures demonstrates his will.9





When the Crystal Palace and its Contents raised the figure of Frankenstein it called to mind a distortive scheme to forge human unity from difference, the monstrous result of which bespoke the unnatural, coercive processes that had characterized its creation. As that article made clear, however, and as Barthes explained, the universal exhibition can be seen as an entirely different kind of operation, one that works against the notion that forceful artifice need be exerted in order that union might be achieved, and that refuses the idea that ultimate ends require particularities to be sacrificed. Thus it is that the global display is heralded as a cultural laboratory that orchestrates as an end the organic sum of its richly varied and distinctive parts. Contra the work of Mary Shelley’s scientist, here we have a unifying project that could celebrate rather than fuse together different skins and skulls. This chapter addresses the way in which the Great Exhibition was seen to magic unity in the face of human diversity, staging a triumphant victory for the insistence that underneath historical and physiological differences lay similitude and a concomitant capacity for community. If, for Barthes, this was the hallmark of the international exhibition, it has also been seen historically as the hallmark of global commerce. In Letters Concerning the English Nation, published in the 1730s, Voltaire singled out “the Royal-Exchange in London . . . where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of the infidel to none but bankrupts.”10 Voltaire’s analysis shows that the idea of the market generating such international unity was by no means a Victorian invention. What was heralded (in many quarters at least) as a Victorian invention, however, was free trade. And what will become clear in this chapter is the way in which political economy furnished Exhibition commentators with an anthropological fantasy, offering them a vision of human existence under commercially liberal conditions that sustained the “unity of purpose and interests” identified by the Crystal Palace and its Contents. More than simply the operations of Voltaire’s international market, then, free trade capitalism comes to the fore as the organizing principle through which this catholic community was conceived. Here, though, we will see the way in which enlightened and Christian humanisms fed into an understanding of life on earth derived from political economy. And in examining how the Exhibition was held to reveal the Great Family of Man, I shall explore the display as an event which announced an end of ideological conflict and the establishment of a global consensus,



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for with the revelation of an international family came the declaration of a new world order. Arguing that a combination of liberal economics and liberal democracy represent a globally valid state of affairs that settles (at least for the foreseeable future) the way in which humankind is to be in the world, Francis Fukuyama proposes an ideological evolution that has resulted, by the late twentieth century, in an “End of History.” Explaining this concept as the triumph of liberal philosophy and not the end of global events, Fukuyama notes, “A Universal History of mankind is not the same thing as a history of the universe. That is, it is not an encyclopaedic catalogue of everything that is known about humanity, but rather an attempt to find a meaningful pattern in the overall development of human societies generally.”11 So it is an effort to trace the emergence of modes of organizing human existence on which all peoples should be able to agree. Here his thesis foregrounds democracy as the “only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe” (xiii), emphasizing in the process the way in which democracy allows for a crucial element of human recognition to grow within society. This element of democratic identification works alongside economic self-interest in order to provide an adequate base for decent human interaction. Fukuyama is well aware then that “man is not simply an economic animal” (xvi). But he is equally insistent that man is an economic animal. And for Fukuyama capitalism represents the optimal method of socioeconomic organization, producing “unprecedented levels of material prosperity” throughout the world as a result of humankind’s universal desire – and therefore right – to compete freely according to the principles of comparative advantage (xiii). Democracy provides necessary humanist checks and balances, but capitalism makes the world go round. In contrast with Fukuyama’s analysis, the Great Exhibition’s end of History offered a global utopia fashioned through free-market economics alone. As we have already seen, it did so using the model of a family. What becomes interesting to note, then, is the way in which mid-nineteenth-century representations of globalization cast market forces with relation to goodwill and fellow-feeling, allowing the selfinterest of man the economic animal to be transfigured as a form of brotherly love that guaranteed human recognition. What is equally significant, and what the next section considers, is the fact that the Exhibition’s new world order was understood very much as the result of Britain’s peculiarly advanced ideological evolution.





Some two weeks after the Palace had opened, the Illustrated London News declared that London was not just “the capital of a great nation, but the metropolis of the world. The Exhibition has deprived it of its local character, and rendered it no longer English merely, but cosmopolitan.” The comment underscored the wisdom of Albert’s decision to invite the world, but it did so by drawing attention to what had become a significant link between Victorian identity and an internationalist sentiment. Casting this link in terms of a historic sea change, the paper went on to remark, “John Bull is no longer an ogre, but a genial and courteous gentleman.”12 John Bull’s decision to mend his ogreish ways, becoming instead a genial and courteous statesman, was taken up by the pronounced strand of Exhibition commentary that emphasized the display’s cosmopolitanism as the result of Britain’s special capacity to see the bigger picture. By asking the world to look beneath the impact of Babel, there to find essential similitude and the basis for capitalist consensus, Bull had proved himself a prophet of posthistory. That he had done so was in large part because of his forebear Adam Smith.13

Kinsmanship and common interest Opening his popular mid-nineteenth-century “anatomy of a nation,” the History of Civilization in England, Henry Thomas Buckle asserted that the science of political economy was crucial to the progress of humankind. It was some two hundred pages before the historian expanded upon this claim. When he did, it was Smith to whom he turned: In the year 1776, Adam Smith published his Wealth of Nations; which, looking at its ultimate results, is probably the most important book ever written, and is certainly the most valuable contribution ever made by a single man towards establishing the principles upon which government should be based.14 Underpinning this grand claim was the contention that the Wealth of Nations had exploded the myth of economic protectionism and established the theoretical foundation upon which could be built a new, internationalist commercial era. Prior to Smith, Buckle outlined, protectionist policies were based upon the mistaken belief that as one country gained by entering into a trading association so the other lost. The inevitable outcomes of the widespread commitment to the idea that the wealth of a country consisted in the gold it built up through exchange



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were unnecessary and stunting governmental interference and regulations, and rivalry and warfare between nations. The value of the Wealth of Nations, Buckle wrote, lay in its systematic revelation that a nation should strive to acquire the commodities it needed from the cheapest source it could find, rather than attempting to preserve a positive balance of trade. As a result of natural advantages and/or the development of particular industrial skills, the argument ran, different nations were better suited to fulfil different industrial roles. To open up domestic markets to foreign goods would allow for nations to capitalize upon this fact, rationalizing their economic activity via international divisions of labour, and thereby realizing that global markets could be understood in terms of mutual benefits not unilateral gains. Smith’s celebrated status as the father of free trade simplifies and distorts the range and complexity of his writing, as well as its relationship with other works of political economy. This is true not least with relation to the important analyses of David Ricardo and J. S. Mill, figures who would do much to develop, refine and promote liberal economics within Victorian society. But Buckle’s examination is useful precisely because it highlights 1776 as a watershed moment, bringing to the fore the idea of the Wealth of Nations as a text that freed up a natural system – distinguished by stability, harmony and general prosperity – to emerge in the world. As we shall see, this was typical of what the historian of economic thought G. R. Searle has described as “the vulgar version of Adam Smith handed down to the mid-Victorian generation.”15 But it should also be stressed that if Buckle’s analysis was based upon a somewhat crude and selective reading, it was not a misreading. Richard Teichgraeber remarks that, despite the vastness and complexity of the text, Smith set out in his introduction that he intended “to outline a plan for a world economy whose principal object was growth . . . at times he spoke of that plan as an ‘obvious and simple system of natural liberty.’ ”16 Buckle’s millennial optimism was in this way characteristic of arguments for free trade as they were popularly set out by proponents throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. At the heart of these arguments lay the idea of an international community that could collectively rationalize labour via exchange, and that was thus bound together by ties that cut across national differences. Seeking to explain the universal significance of free trade, the liberal MP Charles Hindley made a linguistic analogy: Free unrestricted commerce, Sir, assumes no narrow limits – her sphere is the world – she speaks not the language of a country – she




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For G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, this final proclamation serves as the slogan for the Enlightenment’s “potent unifying and universalising drive,” signalling “an edifying faith that ultimately there is one single family of mankind which can sing in unison the message of human unity.”18 Nineteenth-century arguments for free trade were not short of such faith, or the idea that it could grip the world. In 1833, three years after Hindley delivered his speech, the geologist and liberal political economist George Poulett Scrope detected the strong growth of an internationalist sentiment born out of familial bonds and a shared economic agenda, albeit that for him the recognition of global harmony was communicated in somatic rather than semiotic terms: A community of thought and feeling, a sense of kinsmanship and common interest, a kind of cosmopolitan sympathy is now establishing itself among bodies of men in every region of the globe; and millions of hearts now vibrate to the same chord, in conscious unison, from the Mississippi to the Ganges, from Torneo to the Cape.”19 Throughout this chapter I shall continue to think about the conceptualization of free trade as a mode of communicative interaction taking place at the level of the body and the mind, the heart and the tongue, human nature and universal culture. But it is Scrope’s suggestion that by the 1830s a transnational movement was building towards some kind of geo-political crescendo which is of concern here. Convinced as it was by the universal legitimacy and efficacy of Smithian economics, Scrope’s picture bears witness to the confidence mustered by proponents of free trade. However, such confidence in the idea of commercial liberalization did not really match the actuality of the situation; at the level of economic policy protectionism still held sway with regard to international relations. So while pan-European interest in favour of free trade gathered pace in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was not until Britain’s repeal of the Corn Laws in May 1846 that Smithian arguments for globalization were understood, rightly or wrongly, to have received genuinely ground-breaking legislative support.20 As the popular political economist J. R. McCulloch had



takes not its name – she says not “I am English,” or French, or German – but “I am a citizen of the world!” “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” [my translation: I am a man, and I consider nothing foreign to me that concerns mankind].17

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it, in presiding over the bill to lift prohibitive tariffs on imported corn, cheapening bread and strengthening Britain’s manufacturing base at the expense of an old agricultural order, “Sir Robert Peel has been in practice what Adam Smith was in theory.”21 Which is to say, Britain had put its money where its mouth was. Two points arise here. First, the developments of 1846 meant that the free trade lobby had a significant and concrete measure to which to attach claims concerning the onset of a new world order. Second, and interlinked, since free trade was felt to have a founding father in Adam Smith, now more than ever commentators could stress the crucial role played by Smith’s nation in realizing this era. No-one articulated these two points more clearly or forcefully than members of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League, headed up by John Bright and Richard Cobden. Giving an upbeat speech on the eve of the repeal of the Corn Laws, Cobden rehearsed the common notion that free trade represented a “great commercial revolution, or millennium,” one that would extend its “happy influences” to “every land on which the sun shines.” But unlike Scrope, Cobden emphasized here the need for legislative progress to be made in order for an interdependent and inclusive trading community to come into being. So he moved immediately to single out the initiative exhibited by his own nation in achieving this end, praising “the greatest commercial country in the world” for setting a liberal example that would encourage international “emulation.” Britain, Cobden maintained, was thus taking the lead in a process that resulted “in the progress, improvement, refinement, and civilization of the species.”22 And, as it was understood by many commentators at least, the decision to hold the world’s first international industrial display represented the final major step to be taken in realizing this united end. A neat course could be charted from Smith’s theory to Peel’s practice to palatial proof. Two articles from The Times, early on in the genesis of the display, are instructive. As the prospect of a British international exhibition was talked up in November 1849, the first began by considering a recently ended French exposition that, despite its original international ambitions, had been organized according to an “illiberal policy of ‘exclusion,’ ” thereby preventing the comparison of French industry with foreign wares. Turning to consider the prospect of Britain’s forthcoming display, The Times declared emphatically that “A nation of Hotspurs and a nation of Adam Smiths must be formed on very different principles.” With this guiding distinction established, the piece detailed how Britain, which had once “cherished the principles of monopoly,” had





adopted “a saner and more natural theory of interchange,” thus rectifying in part a “great mistake” of the human race. In echo of Cobden, it expected this course “will no doubt ere long be imitated by others,” although it stressed that Britain had no mandate to force other nations to follow suit: “all that we can do is to give them the greatest facilities for testing the results of our more liberal policy.” Having provided this historical context for the display, and having set out the responsibilities and limits of Britain’s vanguard position, the article announced that it was entirely “natural that England, the Power which has been the first to inaugurate the change of commercial policy,” should be the first to commemorate the industrial progress of the human race via an international display.23 Three months later The Times again emphasized that the Exhibition owed everything to a British breakthrough in the way the world and its inhabitants were understood, and stressed that the location of the display was entirely apt. While industrial conventions had been held before, it was, the paper stressed, “an idea as new as it was felicitous to consider all mankind as one people, and to transform the metropolis of Britain into the hospitable rendezvous of the world.”24 Anticipating as it did Barthes’s understanding of an exhibitionary universalism, the imperative “to consider all mankind as one people” did not necessarily imply a drive to unite global peoples via commercially liberal interdependence. But it was not hard to see the way it could. Certainly this was the case for the vast body of commentary that assumed that Britain’s hospitable international invitation to visit London in 1851 was by extension an invitation to join the Victorian new world order. Here a significant note of caution must be sounded, one that returns us to a point mentioned in the introduction. What follows will make much of the kind of free trade teleology – marked by the publication of the Wealth of Nations, the repeal of the Corn Laws and finally the opening of the Crystal Palace – that has been sketched out above. But if it is my contention that the globalized fantasy inspired by the Great Exhibition revolved around the idea that a 75-year period from 1776 culminated in the end of History announced at the Palace, the truth is that this view of things was far from uncontested. That this was so is not surprising. When Peel’s Tory government repealed the Corn Laws it had predictably split a party that was comprised so largely of landed interest. In the wider public sphere the debate between supporters of commercial freedom and those who advocated protectionism was still heated in 1851. On the world stage Britain, Belgium and Switzerland were the exceptions that proved the protectionist rule as regards commercial



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policies.25 So whether one looked nationally or internationally, free trade was very much a divisive issue. With such fissures in mind, and concerned their proposed venture might not get off the ground, the Exhibition’s organizers were careful how they conceived of and presented the event. Although the Royal Commission was in the main (but not wholly) comprised of figures sympathetic to commercial liberalization, political expediency coupled with financial considerations demanded that the display was not officially promoted as a specific attempt to remove international trade barriers. Instead, supporters of the Exhibition worked hard to sell it, in broad terms, with relation to the improvement of art and labour, the promotion of peace and progress, and the dissemination of Christian truths and values. Speaking to the efficacy of these labours, and making manifest that the display did not demand consensus, the same Times article that hailed the novelty and felicity of the display’s universalism attested to the way in which the forthcoming Exhibition had collected “on the same platform prelates and non-conformists, peers and tradespeople, ambassadors and manufacturers, Whigs and Tories, Free-traders and Protectionists.”26 With the display underway, Punch concurred, arguing that the Crystal Palace presented a pliable text, one that could signify different things to different people. “All sorts of morals grow out of it, or are tacked on to it,” the satirical journal alleged, furnishing contemporary support for Jeffrey Auerbach’s recent argument that the display was a “protean event with numerous possible meanings.”27 It would be a mistake then, to understand the Great Exhibition in terms of a monologic narrative authored by its ideologically consistent organizers, supported by its politically homogenous backers, and signed up to by all those who entered the Palace. That said, however, and as was mentioned in the introduction, it would be equally remiss to ignore the extent to which as Exhibition commentators searched for a way of responding coherently to the world’s first international display many of them found the totalizing logic of free trade’s “good story” difficult to resist. This is not to say that such commentary had overtly to state that the Crystal Palace was about the need to scrap protectionism, although some of it did. But it is to say that, as they reflected upon the way in which the Exhibition might fulfil those broad goals outlined above, observers were drawn to the capacity of the display to reveal a global economy organized according to the principles of comparative advantage and competitive exchange, and thus distinguished by an international division of labour and the unrestricted flow of commodities in line with market laws of





supply and demand. This was a liberal vision of globalization that found little room for isolationism, national tariffs and balance-of-trade considerations, and found a great deal of time for the notion that the mid-nineteenth century marked the point at which it was finally possible to make the world work properly. Of all the morals Punch associated with the Crystal Palace, then, it was the Free Trader’s to which representations of the event – whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously – consistently returned: “A wonderful sight: Illustrates admirably the interdependence of nation and nation, and proves, to demonstration, that the principles of Free Trade are those of nature and common sense.”28 “Nature and common sense” maybe, but the point was that these principles were held by free traders to have been historically obscured by culture and dogma, often tied up with vested interests and parochial nationalisms. Thus the gripping idea of the Crystal Palace as an international meeting-point where Scrope’s hitherto intangible “community of thought and feeling” could emerge and a posthistorical era begin. Again, Punch was quick to spot the way in which such an understanding of the Palace privileged the role Britain was to play in uniting the peoples of the earth. In 1850, the journal proposed that the Exhibition would mark the first time since the confusion and dispersal of Babel that humanity had been brought together and treated as one: 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.29 A year later, immediately prior to the display’s opening, the journal’s readers learnt that Mr. Punch had been “peeping into the Crystal; the Paxton Crystal.” There, his earlier expectations of palatial concord orchestrated by a friendly host were confirmed: 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 fraternizing.30



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If such visions did not make specific mention of free trade, it would be difficult to conceive of a context other than Smithian economics with which to think through the newfound, harmonious and British-led character of such internationalist sentiment. (By way of a parenthetical elaboration, George Eliot’s Mr. Brooke would render explicit what Punch had here implied, as he expounded a philosophy of industrialist capitalist progress to Middlemarch’s townsfolk: It won’t do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on – trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples – that kind of thing – since Adam Smith, that must go on. We must look all over the globe: – “Observation with extensive view,” must look everywhere “from China to Peru,” as somebody says – Johnson, I think, The Rambler, you know.31 That this statement led to Brooke beating a hasty retreat from his eggthrowing addressees said much about his own inadequacies as a public speaker, coupled with the provincial politics of the weavers, tanners and Tories of Middlemarch to whom he spoke. Published forty years after the events it described, the irony that Middlemarch had this weak and inarticulate character give voice to what would become a master narrative of the Victorian age was sharpened by the fact that right between Brooke’s ignominious speech and Eliot’s novel came the event that leant this narrative such definitive form.) Throwing a different light on the idea that the Palace would reconcile human differences, but similarly casting the Victorians as exemplary global citizens, Henry Cole adopted an interesting line of reasoning in order to explain why the Exhibition had occurred where and when it did. In the history of the display that he included in his introduction to the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, the massive threevolumed work commissioned by the Society of Arts to give a description of everything on show in the Palace, Cole suggested that “an event like this Exhibition could not have taken place at any earlier period, and perhaps not among any other people than ourselves.”32 Lecturing later, as part of a series of addresses marking the close of the Crystal Palace, Cole elaborated this historical and cultural specificity. But he did so in strikingly universalist terms, terms that sat comfortably with the ideological commitments and rhetorical characteristics of the free trade movement. Citing The Times’s claim that “an average Englishman” was a “born cosmopolite” (and calling to mind Daniel Defoe’s




30


What more natural than that the first Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations should take place among a people which beyond every other in the world is composed of all nations. If we were to examine the various races which have been concerned in the production of this very audience, we should find the blood of Saxons, Celts, Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Hindoos, and probably even Negroes, flowing among it.34 The celebration of British racial impurity in a climate where polygenetic arguments concerning distinct and degenerative racial types were becoming increasingly pronounced was, as we shall see, a bold but important strategy. For the moment I note the way in which such a mixed ancestry introduced the notion of genetic makeup to the idea that Victorian cosmopolitanism was the result of doctrinal advances. Whether conceived of historically or biologically, or both, though, the point is that John Bull was ideally placed to recognize what Scrope referred to as humanity’s “kinsmanship and common interest.” If Smith’s genius was his ability to move beyond a prohibitive and distortive nationalism, the Great Exhibition allowed the Victorians to claim Smith’s genius as their own, generating a nationalist pride from a cosmopolitan character and concomitant internationalist sentiment. Declaring “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good,” it was, Smith famously advised, the market’s “invisible hand” that meant that free competition led to a harmonious, self-regulating system.35 But first to realize the system. The horny hand offered by Bull in the Palace was not so much an act of market intervention as an act intended to free up the market’s hand to work its magic. And so, if it was extended by a figure who could claim to have other people’s best interests at heart, it was only because such sentiment coincided with his own material welfare. Notwithstanding, Victorian observers could continue to insist that the offer was genuine, and that the familial order thus engendered would see all flourish at the expense of none. Unsurprisingly then, Exhibition commentary played up the idea that Bull’s palatial pronouncements were received positively by his global audience. That it could do so was the result of the anthropological fantasy that underpinned political economy, and to which we now turn.



portrait of “The True-Born Englishman” as “that het’rogeneous thing,” “A Metaphor invented to express / A Man a-kin to all the Universe”),33 Cole remarked that it was fitting that “the most cosmopolitan nation in the whole world” had hosted the display:


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George Stocking has argued that the Great Exhibition was an event that forced observers to think about the differences that separated the progressive and stationary societies of the world, leading them to “formulate the basic principle of the ‘comparative method’ of sociocultural evolutionism.”36 His introduction to Victorian Anthropology focuses upon conceptions of “civilization,” particularly as defined against barbarism or savagery, in the hundred years before the Palace. Considering political economy, principally in its Smithian form, Stocking remarks a Eurocentric bias that leads him to claim that, for nineteenth-century thinkers, “the arena of free trade in which the pursuit of individual advantage operated automatically for the good of all was quite explicitly the ‘universal society of nations throughout the civilized world.’ ”37 So Victorian political economy was a discipline associated with a drive to distinguish between global peoples, ordering human differences hierarchically, and suggesting an antithesis between savagery and civilization. And the Crystal Palace was an occasion that encouraged the distinctions it drew. Chapters 3 and 4 (below) discuss the Great Exhibition in similar terms: hence the hasty nature of the sketch drawn. Here, however, there is more to be said about Victorian political economy, and its visions of human life. When he proposes that political economy’s commercial arena was concerned exclusively with the civilized world, Stocking is quite rightly drawn to the fact that the discipline was bound up with an understanding of societal progress that privileged an increasingly complex division of labour and its associated technological advance. In so doing political economy gave authoritative substance to the category “civilization,” typically charting a series of socio-economic stages from hunter-gatherer to pastoral, to agrarian, and finally to commercial society and civilized modernity. Because they were inclined to map this model of stadial development in geo-historical terms, political economists often figured global commerce with relation to coeval international communities. However, at the same time it must be borne in mind that political economical discourse was characterized by an expansive, totalizing tendency. Elaborating the tension this created with relation to the discipline’s central figure, Regenia Gagnier remarks that political economists from Smith to J. S. Mill conceived of Homo economicus as representing “a particular kind of man, the product of a particular economic class and race at a particular moment in global market relations,” but also as “man as such, that is, universal human nature.”38 In contrast with



The unimaginative fantasy


Stocking’s analysis, and in line with the inclusive scope of this latter conceptualization, then, G. R. Searle notes that political economy “often caused offence by implying that human nature was everywhere the same and that little notice need be taken of regional traditions and idiosyncrasies. Economic laws (and the principle of utility too) . . . supposedly had a universal validity.”39 A cause of offence in some quarters, maybe, but, as the commentary considered in the previous section made clear, political economy’s supposedly universal validity could become a cause of celebration for those interested in the promotion of free trade. Thus it is that my reading of the Crystal Palace problematizes the conclusions reached by Stocking with regard to Victorian political economy, and the restricted nature of the arena it delimited. To address this problem is to focus upon Homo economicus, political economy’s anthropological fantasy. This was the figure that allowed Exhibition commentators to suggest that John Bull’s universal invitation to join his new world order met with a positive response. Before considering such commentary in more detail, though, it is necessary to say a little more about this figure, as far as that is possible. For, as we shall see, if Economic Man was the hero of the story the Victorians told about globalization, he was a limited and abstracted character, more at home on a tropical island or in a small rural village than in the bustling, diverse and commodity-packed streets of modernity’s greatest metropolis. Two key points come to the fore here. Inherent in political economy’s catholicism was the idea that competitive exchange was a universal inclination. But as Searle suggests, an emphasis upon utility as the key with which to comprehend the material conditions of human life was crucial also. Turning initially to Homo economicus and utility, we can then move to consider in a little more detail the way in which a propensity to exchange gave shape to that vision of an interdependent global community to which Exhibition commentary was so attracted. “The solitary and isolated hunter or fisherman, who serves Adam Smith and Ricardo as a starting point, is one of the unimaginative fantasises of eighteenth-century romances a [sic.] la Robinson Crusoe,” wrote Marx in 1857. Marx argued that political economists positioned Homo economicus “not as an historical result, but as the starting point of history; not as something evolving in the course of history, but posited by nature, in conformity with their idea of human nature.”40 Ten years later he observed again that “Moderate though he is,” Robinson Crusoe’s experiences provided political economists with a “favourite theme.” The qualified nature of this remark is misleading; Marx went on to detail that



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the castaway was compelling because of, not in spite of, his moderation. With only a few needs to satisfy (and these to be satisfied with “a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting”), Crusoe’s economic life is eminently comprehensible. This fact is reinforced when, “like a true-born Briton,” he begins a stock-book that lists, in a “simple and clear” fashion, the useful objects that comprise his wealth, and the labour-time they have cost him to produce.41 Removed from his home only to remake it upon his South American island, and there able to catalogue with precision and brevity his industrial endeavours and bodily needs, Crusoe was thus for Marx the man political economists had in mind when they sought to understand the motivations and desires of their discipline’s mainstay. No doubt with Marx’s observations in mind, and drawing upon Ian Watt’s classic analysis in The Rise of the Novel, Terry Eagleton remarks that since its “hero regresses to a time before the division of labour,” there is “an artisanal nostalgia in the book – a puritanical, lower-middle class longing for a more decent, more transparent world of labour and consumption, a society of use rather than luxury.”42 If such a regressive model served political economy well, it clearly also raised tensions with the way capitalism operates, and by the end of the nineteenth century Crusoe was no longer fit for purpose. Such a summary of events is offered in the light of The Insatiability of Human Wants, where Gagnier charts the shift in economic thinking from the 1870s that saw the subjective, insatiable (psychological) drives of late Victorian Economic Man usurp the basic, objective (sociological) needs of his stolid elder brother. So it was that an economic discourse that privileged in general terms the human body, and downplayed the notion that consumer demand might change over space and time, gave way to one that let go the interest in such finite and universal needs, and refocused instead upon infinite, unpredictable and specific tastes. In line with this account of late Victorian Economic Man, Chapter 3 explores the argument that the diverse range of commodities and consumers gathered together by the Great Exhibition might be understood to have signed his sibling’s death warrant. But for the moment we hang onto the idea that midnineteenth-century Homo economicus, as embodied by the industrious efforts and limited needs of Robinson Crusoe, was alive and well. It is worth underlining that the intention here is not to suggest that political economy pre-1870 conceived of human life under capitalism in terms only of satiable requirements. Adam Smith asserted in the Wealth of Nations that “After food, cloathing [sic.] and lodging are the two great wants of mankind.” But he also insisted that humanity aspired to more





than the fulfilment of such basic wants. Set against the desire for food, which was limited “by the narrow capacity of the human stomach,” Smith noted the “altogether endless” desires that took over once the appetite was satisfied.43 While I highlight Gagnier’s analysis of a shift in economic thought, and note the way in which Marx’s writings on the link between political economy and Crusoe speak to the earlier understanding of Homo economicus she outlines, I do not argue that mid-nineteenth-century political economy was conceptually bound by the human stomach. I would, however, argue that the field at this time tended to foreground a kind of economic universalism that privileged somatic needs and the utilitarian goods through which they could be met. As we shall see, Exhibition commentators maintained that the Crystal Palace, just like Robinson Crusoe’s stock-book, laid out in a simple and clear fashion the “useful objects” that could be associated with a cross-cultural, transnational understanding of human existence. So the idea that the Palace made manifest that the world could work together can certainly be seen to have drawn upon political economy’s celebration of Crusoe’s moderate island life. And yet, and as Watt points out, if Defoe’s novel provided an “illustration of Homo economicus,” establishing in the process a capitalist “culture-hero,” it did so by turning its back on exchange, and “the social nature of all economies.”44 It is in this sense that the shipwrecked islander sustained only part of political economy’s unimaginative fantasy, and the interdependent global order it was held to announce. To address the discipline’s foundational idea of exchange, and the way it sustained this order, we can turn first to Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness. This book had appeared to great acclaim in the same year as the Great Exhibition, and was written while Spencer was a sub-editor on the Economist, the economically liberal journal founded in 1843 to promote the repeal of the Corn Laws. In line with the liberal economic politics of the journal, and appealing to a providential order of things in a manner his later works would resist, Spencer used his book to assert that protectionist trade restrictions were “idolatrous.”45 Perhaps surprisingly, bearing in mind his later association with Social Darwinism, and its emphasis upon racial struggle and eugenics, he maintained that this was so because historical, national and climatic features of human difference obscured a constitutional, God-given characteristic that not only rendered all men equal but also suggested that they might be united through free trade. The “right of exchange” was posited as a “sacred” right that existed “as



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Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries, in distinctions of race. You may put men on opposite sides of a river or a chain of mountains; may else part them by a tract of salt water; may give them, if you like, distinct languages; and may even colour their skins differently; but you cannot change their fundamental relationships. Originating as these do in the facts of man’s constitution, they are unalterable by the accidents of external condition. (296–7) Continuing this theme, Spencer noted that “The moral law is cosmopolite – is no respecter of nationalities: and between men who are the antipodes of each other, either in locality or anything else, there must still exist the same balance of rights as though they were next-door neighbours in all things” (297). Despite this emphatic commitment to the idea that exchange transcended all physical and cultural peculiarities, Spencer trod carefully here. On the one hand, he indicated that a “fundamental relationship” existed between all men. On the other, he drew a distinction so that in matters economic it was “rights” and not lifestyle that rendered antipodean men “neighbours.” If this was an important distinction, it was not one to which, as we have seen, political economy was always sensitive. Adam Smith set out clearly in the Wealth of Nations that society “grows to be properly what is a commercial society” only once a division of labour has been “thoroughly established,” enabling every man to live by exchange, and thus to become “in some measure a merchant.”46 However, as Gagnier noted, if the capacity to live by sophisticated exchange mechanisms was shown to be the result of culturally and historically specific circumstances, the capacity to exchange was not. Thus Homo economicus emerged in the Wealth of Nations as a figure underwritten by Smith’s emphasis upon “a certain propensity in human nature . . . the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Confusingly, Smith went on to propose that this inclination was more likely to be bound up with man’s “faculties of reason and speech,” than it was to have been hard-wired as part of “human nature.”47 To this extent, and as Noel Parker remarks, it is unclear as to whether the propensity to exchange was “an original feature of human nature, or the first consequence of human culture.”48 Notwithstanding, exchange was linked with both reason and speech, and it was universal; Smith moved immediately to stress that the propensity to



much between members of different nations as between members of the same nation”:


exchange was “common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals.”49 Commitment to the idea of exchange as a universal became key when Smith examined international economic relations. Beginning with the home, Smith maintained that a “prudent master of a family” would never “attempt to make at home what it would cost him more to make than to buy.” This model of domestic economy gave way to an invocation of three neighbours – a tailor, a shoemaker and a farmer – whose self-interested division of labour ensured a rational and prosperous life. It was with these reassuringly sensible figures in mind that Smith led the reader to consider the bigger picture. Hence familial commonsense was couched as catholic rationale, and an example of quotidian village life was extended to the world at large: What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage.50 In this way Smith set out the international economy as a community populated by differently advantaged neighbours, all of whom realized the value of a free market based upon comparative advantage. And the ease with which he switched here from the local to the global could be inspiring. The remainder of this chapter and the next provide a wealth of evidence illustrative of the way in which popular nineteenth-century accounts of this Smithian view of things worked at once to naturalize humanity’s inclination towards competitive exchange, and to suggest that international peoples were “next-door neighbours in all things.” Two points should be noted. First, although predating the particular communication technologies with which he deals, this was an integrated, homogenous vision of life on earth similar to Marshall McLuhan’s famous description of that “simultaneous ‘field’ in all global affairs” that meant that “the human family now exists under the conditions of a ‘global village.’ ”51 Second, the mechanics of this village were understood in accordance with a model that saw Homo economicus invoked metaphorically to represent the nation-state. Like other political economists, McCulloch was fond of Sir Dudley North’s remark, from Discourses of Trade (1691), that “the world as to trade is but one nation or people, and therein nations are as persons.”52 Taken together, these



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two points opened up the prospect of an international community without necessarily factoring in those geo-historical issues concerning stadial development that were also raised by political economists, and that could be understood to limit free trade’s arena. Illustrating Searle’s point that not everyone was convinced by this understanding of things, Friedrich List’s Outlines of American Political Economy perfectly encapsulated his discipline’s expansive, totalizing tendency, even as it poured scorn upon it. Since the Wealth of Nations neglected to take into “consideration the different state of power, constitution, wants and culture of the different nations,” the German economist argued, Smith’s work was no more than “a mere treatise on the question: How the economy of individuals and of mankind would stand, if the human race were not separated into nations, but united by a general law and by an equal culture of mind?”53 Calling into question the position summarized by North, this can be read as a powerful and far-reaching critique of free trade liberalism, one which ultimately refused the idea that capitalism furnished the natural system with which to order the economics of human existence. But that is not how it was meant. In The National System of Political Economy List elaborated his position by explicating the self-serving ambition of the European orthodoxy he called “cosmopolitical economy.” Without rejecting “the idea of a universal confederation” built around liberal market economics, List emphasized here that classical economists ignored the fact that such a system could serve to enrich some nations at the expense of others. For List, then, a proper commercial union of nations was dependent upon “a large number of nationalities” attaining similar “levels of industry and civilization, political cultivation, and power.”54 Such a state would be reached not via free trade, but by emerging nations, such as Germany or America, adopting protectionist policies until such time that their economies could compete on an equal footing with older European powers, particularly Britain. Apologists of free trade, he insisted, “assumed as being actually in existence a state of things which has yet to come into existence.” Thus, whereas they promised a naturally occurring union resulting in mutual benefit, List saw a coercive process resulting in “a universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the supremacy of the predominant manufacturing, commercial, and naval power.”55 The link between a desire to promote free trade and a drive to secure hegemony through the exertion of global power is pointed, and we return to it later in the book. For the moment “cosmopolitical economy,” and the peaceful, progressive and supposedly consensual story it





generated about the international free market is of concern in a wider sense. As he reflected upon his own late-twentieth-century version of this cosmopolitan narrative, Francis Fukuyama noted that, “What is emerging victorious . . . is not so much liberal practice, as the liberal idea.”56 Drawing attention to the universalist assumptions of “cosmopolitical economy,” with its indiscriminate insistence upon general laws and equal cultures, List brings to the fore the fact that it too trumpeted the same kind of posthistorical victory. All peoples, in all their various forms, were constitutionally inclined to exchange, via mutually beneficial competition, a body of goods that were relevant to their everyday lives. Thus ran the logic of the global village fantasized by proponents of free trade. And by facilitating the call for “observation with extensive view,” the Great Exhibition allowed the idea of this global village to be put into practice. Reflecting on this fact, commentators were drawn to the idea that the Palace realized a Baconian as well as a Smithian prospect of nature.

The huge household book “The Light for All Nations” was one of a handful of interesting and provocative articles about the Great Exhibition that appeared during 1851 in the Family Herald, a popular weekly literary magazine aimed at a lower-middle-class readership. Concerned with the way in which the human subject came to experience the world, the piece described analogously man’s experiential condition as one in which he wore “a pair of coloured spectacles,” separating him from natural phenomena. It went on to explain that false consciousness was the result: “All the falsified tints of nature begin to assume the appearance of true and natural tints, and he ceases to be aware of the delusion that has been practised upon him.” This was true of everyone: Now all men are at present wearing these coloured spectacles . . . If he lives among Popish or Protestant bretheren . . . If he be a churchman, or dissenter, or infidel, Jew or Mahometan, Pagan or nothing at all . . . If he be tory, whig, or chartist, free-tradist or protectionist – noble, gentle, or simple – it matters not, he has his coloured ray of light. Given the broad-ranging character of its national and international audience, such divergences of opinions were sure to be evident at the Crystal Palace: “What an immense variety of tints, therefore, we must



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have at the World’s Fair! And what an immense variety of judgements thereon!”57 In reminding us that the Exhibition did mean different things to different people, and could be appropriated for a variety of often contradictory positions, the Family Herald also raised the possibility that disagreement might be particularly pronounced because of the foreign guests expected at the display. A hundred years later, Benjamin Lee Whorf’s essay “Science and Linguistics” discussed different languages in terms similar to the article’s depiction of coloured spectacles, arguing that they structured essentially distinctive relationships between groups of speakers and their world. Describing such conditioning as both enabling and restrictive, Whorf used visual imagery, setting out “a new principal of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe.”58 He proposed his theory of linguistic relativity in contradistinction to the notion of pre-linguistic “correct, rational, or intelligent THINKING,” a process that led all observers to formulate the same understanding of the world, whether they spoke “Chinese or Choctaw.”59 In contrast to the Family Herald’s contention that the display would serve to make manifest only the impossibility of different subjects seeing things in the same light, this section is concerned with the fact that for many observers the Crystal Palace was an event distinguished by its capacity to engender universal consensus by material means. Parodying such claims, the pamphlet Mr Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition included a spoof catalogue detailing exhibits to be shown in Hyde Park on 1 April 1851. Listed as exhibit number 2000 of the Fool’s Day display were “Glasses, for enabling everybody to take the same view of everything, so that there will be no disagreement on nothing.”60 If this consensual outcome fell in line with an orthodox position on the Palace, the mechanics of the process by which it was reached did not. Drawing upon precisely that idea of pre-linguistic, correct, rational and intelligent thinking against which Whorf offered his work, a tremendous body of writing – and weight of authority – maintained that the display served to remove men’s coloured spectacles, bringing to light the world as it really existed, for all people, at all times, in all places. As I have stated, such universalism was closely bound up with the idea that the display revealed the logic of free trade capitalism, an idea that relied on political economy’s anthropological fantasy, and that in turn sustained the notion that human unity based around a peculiar recognition of self-interest and brotherly love would characterize the new world order. But, as Whorf recognized, the concept of pre-linguistic





thought must be understood more widely in terms of an idealization of modern science, as a systematic realm of inquiry concerned with the singular, incontrovertible truth of the matter. Such a conceptualization is associated particularly with the Enlightenment, and here the work of Francis Bacon is at once foundational to and representative of the notion that scientific enterprise would lead all rational observers to the same picture of the universe. Committed to the notion of a pre-linguistic human intelligence, Bacon was concerned that language acted as a distortive medium. Setting out this belief in the essay “The Praise of Knowledge,” Bacon argued that “by seeking things in words” the “happy match between the mind of Man and the nature of things” was “forbidden.” Culturally and historically contaminated, language transmitted age-old errors and unfounded beliefs, disallowing the generation of objective knowledge that could be achieved only once the philosopher prioritized the thing at the expense of the word. To do so was to prosper, since to be granted a “prospect of the order of nature” was to “discern the riches of nature’s warehouse as the benefit of her shop,” endowing the “life of man with infinite commodities.”61 In line with this commodified vision of a match between mind and matter, the economic imperatives associated with the Exhibition were held to be the result first and foremost of its capacity to validate scientifically what the world was. Before elaborating this link between science, economics and capitalism, and thus drawing a connection between Homo economicus and Homo scientificus, it is necessary first to consider in a little more detail the mechanics and logistics of the display. This will in turn help demonstrate the way in which the material scale, innovative character and visual scope of the Palace lent themselves to the idea that, in the words of Richard D. Altick, the Exhibition gave “practical realization to Bacon’s advocacy of things over words as instruments of knowledge.”62 It was by investing in this idea, and the commitment to a secular humanism that it bore with it, that Exhibition commentary could herald the great family of man as an inherently rational family. Having decided to host the world’s first international industrial display, and finally settled upon London’s Hyde Park as the location to hold it, its organizers opened up to competition the task of designing the building in which the event would take place. But on receiving some 250-odd proposals, from home and abroad, the building committee remained decidedly under-whelmed. Joseph Paxton’s design of the structural phenomenon for which Punch would coin the name “Crystal Palace” arrived late in the day, and only came to prominence as



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a result of fortuitous coincidence and the architect’s talent for selfpublicity.63 Hastily conceived on scraps of paper, and hurriedly pushed and pulled through the planning processes, the building was acclaimed as an overnight success, and became celebrated as the antithesis of the “ornate,” “redundant” and costly structures that had otherwise been proposed.64 Measuring between 1848 and a more appropriate 1851 feet in length (a discrepancy apparently the result of whether some additional iron framework was taken into account), the Palace covered nineteen acres and enclosed thirty-three million cubic feet. It comprised a ground and upper floor, and featured a central nave, running in an east–west direction and bisected by a north to south transept. The size and the cruciform aspect of Paxton’s design rendered such religious terminology apposite, and I shall consider the idea that the Palace served to sanctify commerce and industry. But it is also true that such a traditional frame of reference seemed out of keeping with a prefabricated superstructure that marked so clearly a radically new industrial aesthetic. Alongside its tremendous dimensions, the most impressive feature of Paxton’s structure was the fact that modern industrial techniques meant it could be made entirely from iron and glass.65 Drawing attention to the Palace as an embodiment of modern industrial order, and stressing that Britain was to be found at the head of this order, the Official Catalogue declared that, had it been possible to display only foreign exhibits at Hyde Park, it would have been perfectly acceptable to have represented the industrial position of the nation through the building alone.66 The mathematician and philosopher Charles Babbage agreed, declaring there was little to be found on display within the “crystal envelope” to compete with the structure sheltering “the splendid results of the advancement of civilization.”67 Upon entering the Palace, the powerful visual impact of this incredibly light and airy building was added to by the efforts of Owen Jones, a celebrated interior and pattern designer. That said, Jones was at pains to downplay the dramatic consequences of his endeavours, and play up the idea of an orchestrated aesthetic that was conducive to focused and rigorous observation. Along with the miles of calico that was hung from the roof in order both to cool the building and reduce glare, he maintained that his colour scheme – which used blue, white and yellow paint on the iron girders of the building, with a fabric in Turkish red adorning the Palace’s upper-level galleries – cast “a neutralised bloom over the whole of the [building’s] contents.”68 Here the Illustrated London News concurred, remarking that the decorations were “sufficiently brilliant to give lightness and purity of effect,” without providing a “rival





polychromatic attraction” to the things on display. With satisfaction, and counter to the suggestion that the “envelope” trumped its contents, the paper noted that “The Building was for Exhibition, and not the Exhibition for the Building.”69 This was auspicious, because there was certainly a great deal to exhibit. In fact, however, it proved an exaggeration to claim that the display represented the Works of Industry of All Nations. As well as British exhibits, both domestic and colonial, thirty-four foreign states contributed to the display.70 Notwithstanding this relative national shortfall, the estimated one hundred thousand exhibits, displayed by almost fourteen thousand individual and corporate exhibitors, allowed commentators to cast the event as a truly global endeavour, one which was relevant to humankind in its entirety. As it looked forward to the opening of the Palace, The Times declared there was to be revealed a “world-wide comprehensiveness,” while another commentator anticipated the “gathering up of all that is admirable and elegant, and costly and useful, into one huge glass cornucopia.”71 The Crystal Palace and its Contents indicated that such excitement had not been misplaced. The Exhibition had proved, claimed the journal, to be “the richest assortment of natural products and manufactured wares, of machinery and philosophical instruments, from all quarters of the globe, which the world ever saw collected together.”72 Also writing retrospectively, the Exhibition guide and commentary Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace offered its readers a more extended analysis of the display’s scope: One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Great Exhibition is its vast comprehensiveness. Nothing was too stupendous, too rare, too costly for its acquisition; nothing too minute or apparently too insignificant for its consideration. Every possible invention and appliance for the service of man found a place within its all embracing limits; every realization of human genius, every effort of human industry might be contemplated therein, from the most consummate elaboration of the profoundest intellect, to the simplest contrivance of uneducated thought.73 The image of the Great Exhibition as “one huge glass cornucopia” suggests a celebration of material abundance. But Tallis’s History made clear that its subject was not simply about variety and profusion; the representation of the display with relation to its “all-embracing limits” speaks to a confidence that the world was a finite and knowable entity, and that, in gathering this material together, the event realized a definite order of things. 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young


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With the focus here upon the idea that the Palace structured a particularly scientific form of connection between mind and matter, and given Altick’s aforementioned observation, the frame of reference deployed by the anonymously authored The Palace of Glass and the Gathering of People as it invoked this order is unsurprising. Remarking that the display unfolded before the spectator “like the pages of a volume,” its writer concluded that the event realized “Lord Bacon’s idea of a philosophia prima”: “Here we have the very thing – the huge household book of the world’s furniture, bound in covers of crystal.”74 Such an assessment fell in line with a strong emphasis in 1851 upon vision as a privileged medium, and the Palace as a neutral, pure realm. Over and above “sounds, savors, odors [sic.], and sensations from the touch,” maintained one Exhibition pamphleteer, sight “contributes more to knowledge than any of the other senses.”75 Two weeks into the display, The Times elaborated that what distinguished the event was its capacity to engender a detached way of seeing things: “The truth is just now we are an objective people. We want to place everything we can lay our hands on under glass cases, and to stare our fill.”76 Thus the Exhibition was seen as fulfilling the Baconian dictat that held that to perceive the world properly was to render redundant not only the content but also the forms of other knowledges. In line with this thinking, Arthur Lamb – whose fictional correspondence, penned by the writer and wit Douglas Jerrold, featured in the Illustrated London News – instructed his wife to get rid of his now-defunct representations of the world: “Dear Doll, – Burn all my books of travel; put ’em in the fire for heretics and false witnesses. I have seen the world . . . the world as it is – the real world.”77 In an article that worked through the humanist implications of the Crystal Palace as a Baconian prospect of Nature, the Illustrated London News began by proposing that since science was “everywhere the same,” then (pace Whorf) “the minds of all men are somewhat alike”: He [man] comes everywhere to comprehend it in the same manner. There are not two astronomies, two mathematics, or two chemistries – one for England and another for Italy; there are not separate sciences for every distinct country, but only one science for all. This similarity or uniformity of knowledge constitutes the true brotherhood of mankind.78 Having set out the idea of pre-linguistic rationality and scientific fraternity, the piece went on to propose that the Great Exhibition was an event “opposed to chimeras and shams of all kinds.” “It is,” the paper argued, “a deadly foe to unrealities.” That being so, then the realities 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young



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[Men] have similar wants, and learn similar means of gratifying them . . . Their moral nature is similar, and the external world is the same for all. These common features and intimate relationships were known before the Exhibition; but it has intensified them all . . . It has especially made evident and palpable to all the universal prevalence of a common industry, directed to similar purposes, and guided by similar rules. The differences between the productions of China and France, of Hindostan and the United States, are not so remarkable to reflecting minds as their similarity. Thus not only did people the world over think in essentially the same way, but also their lives depended upon the fulfilment of certain common material goals through common material things. To realize this was to realize that a scientific brotherhood of mankind, and the earthly sway such fraternity entailed, related to the idea of economic interdependency. And here, of course, the universal propensity of Homo economicus to enter into competitive exchange relationships was bolted on to the capacity of Homo scientificus to see the world in the same logical, singular light. Under the heading “You Must Translate; ’Tis Fit We Understand,” Punch observed that as “a consequence of the anticipated influx of foreigners” attracted to London by the Great Exhibition, “shopkeepers and others are understood to be making arrangements to get their goods, as well as their words, translated into several tongues”: The sausage merchants are preparing to get their German sausages translated into French, and a dealer in sweet-stuff intends bringing out an English and Italian version of his Spanish liquorice. French rolls are to be done into Dutch; the Dutch ovens are to be translated into French, and a large ironmonger has ordered a quantity of Italian irons in Dutch metal.79 The journal was having fun with the idea that the Exhibition would deploy things instead of words as instruments of scientific knowledge, giving material shape to a narrative that was at once univocal and universal. The point was, as Punch was well aware, and as another Exhibition essayist made clear, that the Palace was held to furnish “a reflex of the book of Nature, translated into human language.”80 More than simply the rational language of science, though, this was the rational language of capitalism. 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young


the Exhibition worked to establish related to the material drives of humanity’s economic existence. The paper continued:

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Following Bacon in underscoring the commodified benefits of a match between mind and matter, and detailing the communicative unity it established, it was no accident that Punch was drawn to food, Smith’s “great want” of mankind. If the notion of the Exhibition as a text that could be understood by all peoples owed much to a Baconian idealization of human intelligence and scientific enterprise, it was equally indebted to political economy, with its twofold insistence upon humanity’s constitutional inclination to exchange and its sociological understanding of man’s needs. It is in this latter sense that the description of the Palace as a “huge household book” was particularly appropriate. Calling to mind the domestic roots of “economy’s” etymology, it returns us to the idea that the Exhibition acted like Crusoe’s stock-book, cataloguing those quotidian items by which people everywhere met their moderate bodily wants. Here food served an obvious and compelling illustrative function, providing evidence not only of material commonality but also of rich grounds on which to base an international trading community. While food could be seen to give appealing form to the logic of globalization, a point considered briefly in Chapter 2, it is true to say that most Exhibition commentators were content to figure the universally significant commodities the Palace supposedly placed on show in terms that were as abstracted as that unimaginative fantasy whose needs they were held to satisfy. Certainly this was the case in an analysis of the display carried out by the Economist. Reflecting upon what had been learnt in the newly closed Palace, the journal declared that visitors had been overwhelmingly impressed by the fact that “similar arts are used to gratify similar wants from ‘Indus to the Pole’.” Such commonality demanded the world work together: In all there is something elsewhere desired; with all there are the means of traffic and exchange; and the “men of one blood” may be bound by commerce together in the close and endearing ties of one family. Multitudes saw this truth, shared this conviction, and have been made more affectionate and more kindly members of the great brotherhood.81 Writing before the display opened, but nevertheless rehearsing the thrust of this abstracted analysis, the clergyman Thomas Binney insisted that it was humanity’s Creator “who made exchange of productions a mutual want, necessity or convenience; – and who thus established the law of commercial intercourse.”82 With this liberal theology established, and in direct contradistinction to the Family Herald, Binney proposed 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young



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however unable most of them [international Exhibition-goers] may be to understand the spoken languages of all the rest, all will be able to read and to interpret what will be written everywhere on the whole scene, and to comprehend the import of the common voice that shall seem to be arising from the objects around them . . . Everything will speak of oneness, brotherhood, – the same nature, the same faculties, the same Father, – the folly and wickedness of men not “living together in unity.”83 Thus the celebration of an international community that discerned, after Bacon, “the riches of nature’s warehouse as the benefit of her shop.” And not a dissenting voice to be heard. As he declared his own version of such a global consensus, Francis Fukuyama underscored that just as modern science (which he holds to have been fathered by Bacon, Descartes and Galileo) is rational and universal, so too capitalism is the mode of production with which to institute its achievements.84 He maintains liberal capitalism’s millennial dream is founded not only on the idea of the free market working in tandem with modern science to conquer nature, but also on the firmly held belief that it would be impossible for free-thinking, rational beings, in full possession of the facts, to think otherwise. Elaborating on the way in which their inherent rationality leaves both science and capitalism “potentially accessible to everyone regardless of differences in culture or nationality,” Fukuyama suggested a Universal History was not “an encyclopaedic catalogue” of human affairs, but rather an attempt to find a “meaningful pattern” in the way humans should best live their lives.85 A century or so earlier the Great Exhibition was held to stage a convincing combination of the two concepts Fukuyama here separated: it presented a comprehensive catalogue of human industry; and it revealed by way of an objective material narrative that such a prospect brought to light a universally legitimate global order. The idea that all peoples at the Crystal Palace were led by the same physical – or textual – evidence to the same picture – or script – of the universe was thus proof positive not only that history had ended, but also that this fact had been internationally ratified.



that the interdependent implications of men’s material similitude would take the form of a linguistic universalism at the Palace. According to this line of reasoning, and in true Baconian fashion, the Great Exhibition would make sense of the world to the world:


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The year 1850 saw Alfred Tennyson appointed Poet Laureate, as well as publish his magnum opus In Memoriam. The body of this poem called to account modes of cognition, pointing up the historical relativity of the “little systems” with which humankind explained its condition, and doubting the worth of a knowledge born only of “things we see.” The epilogue, however, had spoken, Of those that, eye to eye, shall look On knowledge; under whose command Is Earth and Earth’s, and in their hand Is Nature like an open book.86 Connecting vision, knowledge and material sovereignty, and doing so via such a Baconian image, the stanza (thus detached from the poem, and Tennyson’s lack of faith in the capacity of empirical observation to realize such a position) might well have served as the epigraph to the Great Exhibition. But such secular triumphalism was inappropriate. Significantly then, and as Gillian Beer has noted, while the Exhibition was intended to celebrate the material “profusion and variety” that so enriched human life, its motto “insisted upon another owner.”87 Psalm 24, chosen by Albert and printed widely throughout Exhibition literature, introduced a significant theological qualification to what might otherwise have seemed an entirely worldly gathering: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the / Fullness thereof; / The world, and they that dwell therein.” How then to reconcile this religious doctrine with the event’s secular agenda? Some commentators refused the legitimacy of such an attempt, claiming the Crystal Palace was no more than a temple devoted to mammon. The anonymous author of Belshazzar’s Feast condemned the Exhibition, which he or she felt moved men to worship the “gods of gold and of silver, of brass, of wood and of iron,” and to glory in the “capabilities in the world to make a feast.”88 Responding to the idea that the display served to promote “social comfort and happiness as wide as the human family,” encouraging “brotherhood among the nations,” the pamphleteer maintained, “God would have us strangers here, content with such things as we have, without making it our business to increase or improve them.” The conclusion was unequivocal, and in contradistinction to Punch’s aforementioned celebratory depictions of John Bull’s mission in the Palace: “The reversing of the judgement at Babel is left for the



The great and sacred mission


kingdom of God at Jerusalem. He that scattered must gather.”89 Writing as “A Spiritual Watchman of the Church of England,” another theologian complained that by encouraging humanity to “pry into the laws by which the Almighty governs His creation,” the Great Exhibition was fulfilling the serpent’s role in the Eden story. It was, this observer sniffed, “grandiloquent moonshine” to speak of “the great sacrament of nature and the priesthood of science.”90 This was a representative position, and these two voices were joined by a number of others. But, as indicated, it would be quite wrong to characterize the resultant debate in polarized terms, with the idea of material enrichment via scientific endeavour set against religious piety. This section turns instead to consider commentary convinced that there was divine ordination underpinning the earthly order of things disinterred by the Exhibition’s “household book.” In so doing it demonstrates how the Crystal Palace is illustrative of, and was important to, the way in which political economy was Christianized in the nineteenth century. A tract by the Reverend P. Macfarlane, entitled The Crystal Palace, Viewed in Some of its Moral and Religious Aspects, is notable for the way in which it contradicted the religious positions set out above, and serves as a useful introduction to what follows. Considering the Great Exhibition as a glorification of humankind’s capacity to subdue and control the earth, Macfarlane considered how far such a spectacular demonstration of “material and mental progression” served to “promote or retard the purely spiritual interests of our race?”91 Here he was quick to point out that “Science and art, in their proper sphere, are handmaids of religion,” adding that the “deeper you penetrate into the secrets of nature, the closer do you approach the God of nature.”92 In line with such thinking, Macfarlane went on to emphasize the way in which material knowledge worked to ensure that God’s will was done on earth: Genuine piety does not consist in asceticism, but at once sanctions the use and prevents the abuse of the world . . . The Christian, therefore, should take his protest not against industrial or artistic progress, but against the fancy that to make such progress vain and to enjoy its fruits, are the only or the chief ends of mans [sic.] being.93 Without rehearsing in any detail the specifics of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the notion of “genuine piety” raised by Macfarlane can be clearly tied to Max Weber’s understanding of “worldly asceticism.” What is of interest is not the particular influence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European Calvinist theology upon



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the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, but rather, and in more general terms, the religious valuation of a rational, systematic engagement with what Weber termed “the market-place of life.”94 For Macfarlane what sanctioned the “use” of earthly resources was not only the fact that free trade systematized via interdependency humankind’s relationship with its environment, but also that it did so in such a way as to ensure familial recognition and harmony. Thus, as well as acclaiming “the great sacrament of nature and the priesthood of science,” he insisted that by “making the prosperity of every nation interwoven with that of every other, it [the Great Exhibition] will more firmly fasten bonds already formed, and draw together by their common interests, people between whom no previous tie existed.”95 Other commentators followed suit, casting protectionism as a sin that prevented global wealth being efficiently mobilized and effected the continued separation of God’s children. It was in this way the notion that free trade would engender bornagain familial unity among the scattered races of humankind became the particular concern for religious commentary. In an 1850 speech that became a touchstone for other Exhibition commentators, the liberalminded Bishop of London, Charles Blomfield, stated his intention to consider only the pacific and thus Christian principles of the forthcoming display, leaving to others the task of elaborating “the commercial and manufacturing benefits” of the display. But such a position was difficult to abstract from the politics and rhetoric of free trade. Thus the Bishop maintained that worldwide “mutual interdependence” would be the result of an event that worked “to induce men of different countries to regard each other as friends and brethren engaged in the diffusion of one common peaceful object, and bound by common interests to encourage and aid each other in its promotion.” The idea that this would “consolidate the social fabric,” engendering “a new order of things,” was rendered explicitly religious with what was to become an oft-repeated avowal: “God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth.”96 The winner of a nation-wide competition aimed at publicizing the display, J. C. Whish, was inspired by this speech, although he was notably less careful with the way he framed the relationship of the display with commercial liberalization. Describing free trade as a divinely ordained “scheme of life, appointed for mankind in general,” and insistent that the peoples of the world originated from “common stock,” not from “different parents,” Whish maintained that the international peoples and products gathered together by the Palace furnished a unique





opportunity to examine how humanity should regulate its earthly existence in order that the curse delivered at Shinar might be overcome, if not reversed. In a conclusion that made explicit what others were content to imply, the essayist proposed that the Exhibition served as a textual edifice that was to prove “to our race a kind of compensation for the Tower of Babel.”97 Commentary such as this points towards a powerful and mutually supportive relationship between cosmopolitan political economy and Christian ideas concerning humankind’s fundamental similitude. And in so doing it makes particularly clear that this combination of Enlightened and Christian humanism challenged not only the restrictive antithesis of civilization and savagery that was remarked by Stocking, but also polygenetic accounts of racial difference. Taking 1850 as its point of departure, although careful to draw links with earlier lines of thinking, Christine Bolt’s Victorian Attitudes to Race notes that Anthropology tended to study both the physical features and cultural characteristics of its subject matter. Bolt sets out that within the context of ever more significant debates staged between polygenists and monogenists over the origins of humanity, race, as a marker of both physical and cultural traits, was increasingly explicated in essentialist and antagonistic terms by anthropological thought. So it was that polygenists looked to linguistics as well as physiology as a means of establishing racial hierarchies, taxonomies that were used in order to argue for racial exclusivity as well as superiority.98 Set against such polygenetic accounts of the world, mid-nineteenthcentury arguments for free trade lent themselves to a monogenetic, and thus religiously orthodox, mode of thought. As will become clear in Chapters 3 and 4, these arguments did not disallow the hierarchical classification of humankind. However, they did problematize the essentialist racial boundaries forged by polygenetic anthropological enquiry. And they did so in ways that engaged and rebutted both physical and cultural sides to polygenetic arguments. Hence, the monogenetic “family of man” associated with the development of free trade was figured physiologically, with an emphasis upon shared blood and common somatic needs. At the same time, and as Adam Smith established, the propensity to exchange was not a corporeal impulse, but a process linked to reason and speech; Economic Man was not an instinctive animal, but rather a rational and a cultural creature. If philological inquiry could propose that distinct groups of humanity originated from different linguistic backgrounds, then political economical thought could put forward exchange as a cultural universal, a type of language that bound



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all peoples together. Emerging out of this twofold assertion of human similitude, the idea that free trade served as compensation for Babel did not claim that economic interdependency would efface from view the cultural and physical differences that had resulted from the dispersal of humankind. But it did assert that, in confusing and scattering humanity, God had not willed the tribes of men to remain isolated forever. Widely reported and reprinted throughout 1850 and 1851, and used as an introduction to the Official Catalogue, Prince Albert’s first public speech concerning the Great Exhibition provides a neat conclusion to the way in which the event’s secular agenda took on religious significance, and pulls into focus more generally the idea of a Victorian new world order. Delivered on 21 March 1850, the occasion was the final and grandest of three banquets organized at London’s Mansion House as a means of generating financial and public support for the Exhibition. Reporting Albert’s address, which was to become an incredibly popular explication of the rationale, aims and outcomes of the Great Exhibition, The Times noted it was given in a dining hall dominated by “two colossal figures representing Peace and Plenty, the former with a wreath encircling the globe.”99 Underneath these potent symbols the paper detailed the lavish and international fare enjoyed by the diners; dishes included tortue à l’Anglaise, tranches de saumon à la Tartare, baron of beef, hams and tongues ornamented, ris de veau à la St. Cloud, homard à la Indienne, Rheinish and Italian creams, Maraschine jellies, Charlotte à la Russe, gateau à la Duchesse, boudin St. Clair, grapes, oranges, apples, nuts, dried fruits and preserved ginger. Given the tenor of the speech that was to follow, it was apt that the long list of national and international luminaries that comprised the audience had thus feasted on the benefits of cosmopolitan co-operation. For, without saying so directly, the Prince used the occasion to announce an end of History wrought through liberal capitalist globalization. Albert began by noting that the climate of the mid-nineteenth century was characterized by change. This change was figured teleologically: “We are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to the accomplishment of that great end to which, indeed, all history points – the realization of the unity of mankind.” The prediction of unity was immediately qualified, however, in line with the idea that human distinctions could be overcome but not overturned: “Not a unity which breaks down the limits, and levels the peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the earth, but rather a unity the result and product of those very national varieties and antagonistic qualities.” While the “achievements of modern invention” meant that the “distances





which separated the different nations” were “gradually vanishing,” the Prince emphasized the formation of a global community that preserved difference, thus capitalizing upon the “great principle of the division of labour.” Describing this principle as the “moving power of civilization,” he noted that different peoples and nations contributed variously to the advancement of all branches of science, industry and art. Industrial capitalist logic was quickly brought to the fore in this explanation of interdependence. Without making explicit mention of free trade, Albert made clear that humankind’s material welfare would improve as it realized its capacity to mobilize international resources via self-regulating market forces: “The products of all quarters of the globe are placed at our disposal, and we have only to choose which is the best and cheapest for our purposes, and the powers of production are intrusted [sic.] to the stimulus of competition and capital.”100 Keen to avoid the charge of overplaying the importance of such earthly considerations, the Prince stressed that there was a providential order at the heart of this industrial endeavour, rehearsing as he did so the providential justification of material conquest: So man is approaching a more complete fulfilment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world. His reason being created after the image of God, he has to use it to discover the laws by which the Almighty governs his creation, and, by making these laws his standard of action, to conquer Nature to his use . . . Gentlemen, – THE EXHIBITION of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.101 Although most reports of the speech ended here, Albert in fact concluded by reiterating that universal interdependency on earth was bound up with God-given design; the goods to be displayed at the Great Exhibition, he maintained, were “blessings” from the Almighty, blessings that would be bestowed upon humanity only “in proportion” with the “help” that individuals and nations “were prepared to render each other.”102 Moved by the speech to compose The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Poem, William St. Clair was left in little doubt that the address signalled an end of ideological conflict, and the emergence of a post-historical global



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community. Unlike Albert, he did not allow political expediency to prevent him from spelling out the foundations on which this millennium would rest. The speech, he wrote, in the poem’s introduction, “is the monstre serpent which swallows up all the little ones; the grand intelligible idea which swallows up every unintelligibility. This is the idea, – and it may justly be called a princely one, – which will soon cement the broken and disordered fabric of human society. O what a glorious sequel to Free Trade!”103

Consensus gentium To return to the point where this chapter began: in The “Great Exhibition” Spiritualized Henry Birch expressed amazement at the multi-cultural, ethnically diverse crowd he claimed to see within the Palace. “From whence have all these people been gathered?” he wondered: They include men of every clime and colour:- the European, the American, the Indian, the Chinese, the African, the Greenlander, the white, the black, the brown, the red; all the forms and figures, shades and colours of the human family . . . They include men of all religious creeds and forms, and perhaps of no creed at all:- the Jew, the Pagan, the Mahometan, the Infidel, the Christian! In this vast assemblage, men of all nations, climes, colours, creeds and circumstances, meet and mingle in one promiscuous throng!104 Suggestive as it is of unsystematic heterogeneity, the promiscuity of the throng discerned by Birch is striking, calling to mind not only the Frankenstinian fears of the Crystal Palace and its Contents, but also Barthes’s observation that the international exhibition works by first projecting “the image of Babel over that of the world.” Where Barthes has the production of unity following on from this plurality, however, Birch had already established that what distinguished the Crystal Palace was its power to engender a “common feeling of universal brotherhood,” a sense that would expel “the demon of war,” and encourage a “spirit of peace and harmony among the kingdoms of this world” (4). In line with the systematic rationality of an international division of labour, the fact that the Exhibition fostered such global solidarity was the result of the display making clear to its international audience the logic of free trade interdependency: “while Providence has given some peculiar advantages to one country and some to another, the interest of





all is to encourage the kindliest feelings, and to promote the most extensive intercourse in the exchange of their various commodities” (5). Thus the Great Exhibition had established, in fundamental terms, that to be human was to admit the logic and appeal of international free trade. The work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz allows some concluding remarks to be drawn concerning this conviction. Discussing various attempts “to locate man amidst the body of his customs,” Geertz foregrounds Western interest in the idea of a consensus gentium: “the notion that there are some things that all men will be found to agree upon as right, real, just or attractive, and that these things are, therefore, right, real, just or attractive.” He remarks that as it has been understood by late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology, this notion has prompted a substitution of “the eighteenth-century image of man as the naked reasoner” for the idea of man as a cultural animal, whose life was split between specific cultural traits the result of historical accident, and generic cultural predispositions that all peoples shared.105 The thrust of Geertz’s argument is to emphasize that there is very little difference between this Enlightenment conception of man and the idea of man generated via cultural universals; both modes of thinking tend towards formal overviews that furnish very little information about the content of different people’s lives. Attacking the kind of empty generalizations that he associates with his discipline, and usefully bringing together a fetish for reason with one for culture, he notes the futility of a “Baconian search for cultural universals, a kind of public-opinion polling of the world’s peoples in search of a consensus gentium that does not in fact exist” (40). Geertz thus raises his key question: “Can this halfway house between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries really stand?” (39). As it has been set out in this chapter, humanity’s propensity to reason and to exchange, and the interdependent global neighbourhood it sustained, inhabited just this halfway house. In line with the aforementioned confusion remarked in Adam Smith’s explication, exchange was bound up with human nature, but at the same time it was characterized in terms that marked it out as a form of language, and culture in a wider sense. Hence Marx proposed Economic Man as a concept that was for political economists a start point of history, “a product of human nature.” But hence also it was the pronounced sociological emphasis upon a generic corpus of wants and needs that meant that Homo economicus came to life properly as he entered into the realm of capitalist culture, exchanging those universally significant goods he recognized to be useful and cheaper to buy than to manufacture. It was this blurring of naked reason and cultural similitude, this “unimaginative fantasy”



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of universal human needs and shared economic logic, which became so crucial to the idea that the Exhibition had indeed staged a Baconian opinion poll of the world’s population, generating an international consensus among its palatial audience. This was the point so vividly underscored by the “men of all nations, climes, colours, creeds and circumstances” that Birch alleged the Palace brought together. But this allegation was false. Despite the excitement in the build-up to the display’s opening, forecasts concerning the vast number and colourful nature of foreigners who would attend the Great Exhibition proved to be wildly optimistic. Davis estimates that during the six months the Exhibition was open 58,000 non-Britons arrived in the country, the vast majority of them from Europe. This stood in contrast with an annual average of around 21,500 visits in the three years prior to 1851, and prompted a deal of disappointment.106 In “Where are the Foreigners?” Punch expressed its dismay that the “gorgeous visions” and “various jargons” that it had hoped to see and hear upon London’s streets had not been realized. So the sightseers who made up, as Mayhew had it, “nine-tenths of the human family” were not in fact thronging around Hyde Park in 1851. That this family failed to take on human form at the Exhibition, however, did not serve to diminish the widespread conviction that, in making clear the systematic and united way in which humanity was to be in the world, the Exhibition celebrated its existence. And it did so in an empirically verifiable way. “Let observation with extensive view Survey mankind from China to Peru.” Unlike Brooke, Punch was accurate in its Johnsonian quotation, but not quite accurate as regards the stated aims of the Exhibition. What the Palace did was to organize an objective index of humankind’s industrial output. What the Palace did not do, however, at least in terms of its prevailing rationale, was to survey mankind directly. A rhetorical commitment to the cosmopolitan character of the palatial audience added weight to the idea that the Exhibition revealed the new world order, but it was the exhibits themselves that were held to represent the peoples and nations of the world, thereby structuring a universally comprehensible narrative concerning globalized interdependency. The fact that this “huge household book” was not actually read by the world did not interfere with the idea that it was legible, whether one hailed from China or Peru. A consensus gentium had been established, then, but the opinion poll had been conducted by proxy. Attesting to the totalizing character of what Barthes called “the myth of the human community,” and articulating the way in which it





assumed religious as well as a secular significance, the lawyer and writer Samuel Warren concluded that the display “told of Man, in his relation to the earth; Man, in his relations to men; Man, in his relations to God.”107 These were dynamic rather than static relations. Having thus located Man, Prince Albert had made clear that he should fulfil his “great and sacred mission,” conquering nature to his use. It is to the idea of the display as a map that aimed to co-ordinate this familial mission that we now turn. If Homo economicus furnished the Exhibition with a leading man, it is also the case that the Palace worked to establish the way in which the world was his stage. To put this differently, we move now from people to space, and from anthropology to geography.



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The great map of mankind For Daniel Defoe, at least as he wrote under the guise of Mr. Review, man was made not only to trade, but also to trade freely. Bemoaning the fact that a pursuit that tended towards the prosperity and health of the world was accounted dishonourable, and foreshadowing the logic articulated by those nineteenth-century proponents of free trade who followed Smith and Ricardo, the essay “Mr. Review Plumps for Free Trade” found Defoe wondering at the gentry who “pretend to despise families raised by trade.” Such a disingenuous reaction, Defoe intimated, was born of parochial prejudice. In contrast to this peculiar narrow-mindedness was positioned the “true-bred merchant.” A “universal scholar,” the merchant is positioned outside the debilitating contingencies of culture and history: He understands languages without books, geography without maps; his journals and trading voyages delineate the world; his foreign exchanges, protests, and procurations speak all tongues. He sits in his counting house and converses with all nations, and keeps up the most exquisite and extensive part of human society in a universal correspondence.1 Defoe cast commerce as a true calling, and the merchant as the cosmopolite capable of binding humankind together. Lending credence to this understanding was the notion that the very shape and content of the world – its material character, richness and diversity – could not be properly explained without recourse to a global capitalism based upon territorialized comparative advantage. 57



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What the merchant recognized, Defoe insisted, was that to look at the world was to see an environmental entity that too was made for trade. In “Of Divinity in Trade” he elaborated this thesis, proposing that God had instituted an “order of nature” that “made trade necessary to the making of the life of man easy, and towards accommodating one part of the world with what they might want for their conveniences from another.” Where Adam Smith would later stop shy, Defoe was explicit in linking market forces with providential design; commercial intercourse was dependent upon the fact that things had been “first ordered by the wise hand that governs the world.”2 Commenting on this essay, Terry Eagleton notes that Defoe sees “Nature itself as a kind of capitalist, who in its unfathomable bourgeois wisdom” has set the world up for economic enterprise. Hence bodies are able to float so that ships can trade; stars enable navigation; rivers lead straight to “the eminently plunderable resources of other countries”; animals can be tamed and thus exploited; coastlines harbour shelter; and the peculiar distribution of raw materials and manufacturing interests mean that every nation has something to sell in return for the things it demands.3 A century and a half later the Crystal Palace Game promised players a “Voyage round the world; an entertaining excursion in search of knowledge, whereby geography is made easy.”4 The game in fact appeared in tandem with the reopened Palace at Sydenham. But its tag-line speaks instructively to the way in which commentators at the Great Exhibition figured the revelatory character of the display in 1851. The point in introducing the chapter with relation to Defoe is that his delineation of an “order of nature” whereby trade could make “the life of man easy” casts in relief the confidence behind such commentary. Observers at the Exhibition consistently brought to the fore the idea that the Palace had revealed a systematic pattern to the distribution of industrial resources and talents, one that an international division of labour would rationalize, rendering humankind’s life on earth simpler and richer. In the words of one commentator, then, the display constituted “a vast scheme of human labour.” But such labour had “hitherto been prosecuted at random and without any knowledge or appreciation of the system that pervaded it.”5 So the “good story” the Crystal Palace told about the world had a simple plot. But it was not simply plotted. Defoe’s merchant existed in a kind of pre-modern state of grace. Instinctively able to discern the true economic state of affairs, realizing a kind of Baconian prospect of nature without recourse to either books or maps, he acted outside the parameters of modern scientific endeavour at the point that marks for many the historical cusp of its inception.



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While his non-representative means of generating knowledge differed, however, the universal legitimacy of his status, coupled with his capacity to harness nature for humanity’s benefit, fell very much in line with the enlightened conviction that the world could be properly regulated if it could be objectively and truthfully encapsulated. If this was a difficult enterprise, we have already seen that by the mid-nineteenth century it was one that many Victorians felt themselves well equipped to take on. In place of an instinctive feel for commercial symmetry, then, Exhibition commentators proposed the Crystal Palace as a scientific cartography, maintaining that the display generated via comprehensive scope, visual clarity and taxonomic precision a global perspective that opened up to humankind the opportunity for providentially inspired interdependency. Building upon the conceit of the Exhibition as a Baconian book that opened up and commodified “nature’s warehouse,” this chapter examines the geographical fantasy that followed logically on from the anthropological idealization set out in the previous chapter. The focus of the investigation thus falls upon efforts to concretize a capitalist conception of global space as a basic co-ordinate of reality, generating a vision of the world as a stage (providentially) designed to house the rational and emancipatory acts of Economic Man. Like Defoe, Exhibition commentators distinguished nature, and through nature space, with relation to the operations of an international market. Unlike Defoe, however, they did so by highlighting the need to represent in order to comprehend the world. Hence they cast the Palace as a revolutionary and revelatory form of map, one that served at once to catalogue the world and to plot the way in which the new world order was to take shape. Before turning to consider such commentary, however, it is worth setting out in a little more detail the interrelationship between enlightened endeavour, capitalist rationale and global space that energized it. Focusing upon the Enlightenment project to emancipate humankind from false beliefs, thereby to enrich its material life through the scientific domination of the natural world, David Harvey argues that since space was held to constitute a “fact” of nature, it followed that it could be organized “to celebrate and facilitate the liberation of ‘Man’ as a free and active individual, endowed with consciousness and will. It was in this image that a new landscape was to emerge.”6 In Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space, Neil Smith concurs and goes further, rejecting the idea that space is “a basic co-ordinate of reality,” and insisting that it is “the societal mode of production which binds space and nature together in a single landscape.”7 Thus,



Geography Made Easy


under the socio-economic conditions of capitalism nature becomes an arena within which (liberated) humanity must exchange competitively in order to survive and prosper, and space becomes its “logical corollary” (66). When he invokes The Communist Manifesto in order to discuss “the production of space in its [capitalism’s] own image,” Smith argues that this drive to take hold of the world accelerated in the midnineteenth century, urged on by the advances of industrial capitalism (xiii). Here, Harvey is in agreement, noting that post-1850 “capitalism became embroiled in an incredible phase of massive long-term investment in the conquest of space.”8 Elsewhere he elaborates, observing that “the evolution of the geographical landscape of capitalist activity is driven remorselessly by round after round of time–space compression,” and emphasizing that “the trend towards globalization” is inherent to those advances in communication and transportation that allow capitalism to profit from its capacity to reduce spatial barriers via time.9 This point returns us to Prince Albert, who noted the “distances which separated the different nations” were “gradually vanishing” before the “achievements of modern invention.” It reminds us too of a subject raised by the introduction. For Marx and for Dickens alike the mid-nineteenth century marked a historical moment to be figured in geological terms, with the developments of the industrial revolution prompting the rapid, violent evolution of a new landscape. Echoing these depictions, Thomas Hardy’s “The Fiddler of the Reels” features an old Wessex gentleman ruminating on the year of the Exhibition as “an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit line, at which there occurred what one might call a precipice in time. As in a geological ‘fault,’ we had presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute contact.” Given the link between the train and “earthquakes” drawn by Dickens in Dombey and Son, it is interesting that Hardy chose to characterize this overriding “sense of novelty” not only with the Crystal Palace but also with the introduction of “the new railway into South Wessex.”10 As we shall see, the train stood out as a harbinger of modernity, and in the popular phrase of the day was held to annihilate space and time. While Hardy was concerned with the impact of this symbol and bearer of progress upon a particular region, for other commentators – Dickens and Marx included – the reach and the effects of the train, and associated industrialized technologies, were to be conceived of in genuinely global terms. It is important to note here, then, and this will be picked up more substantively in the second half of this book, that if the mid-nineteenth century saw the Victorians herald free trade as an end of history, it also saw them excited about the way in which



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a new world order would be shaped by a seismic round of time–space compression. Capitalist expansion is thus dependent upon communicative compression. This is the point made by Paul Smith when he remarks that “Adam Smith’s fantasises about how navigation systems, sea routes, and canals would carve out a world-wide system of Enlightened capitalist dominance.”11 But, as will become clear, Adam Smith was always concerned about the need to visualize such a system in order to bring it effectively into being. It is in this sense that globalized compression becomes crucial in representative terms, as Harvey notes when he discusses the “rules of perspective of the modern era.” Here, it is the conception of the world from “the standpoint of the ‘seeing eye’ of the individual,” the “science of optics” and the emergence of maps that implied the “ability to see the world as a knowable totality” that are significant.12 And here Anne McClintock furnishes us with an illuminating reading of the way in which this project to visualize the world was conceived of in the second half of the nineteenth century. In order to explicate this Victorian mode of ordering things, McClintock borrows from Mary Louise Pratt’s work. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation Pratt is concerned to explore what she casts as a critical if concealed connection between the emergence of a Eurocentric form of scientific confidence and the European penetration and exploitation of the non-European world. Using the publication of Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae as a start point, and contrasting its totalizing interest in the contents of the earth with the capacity of cartography to represent the world only through “slender line on blank paper,” she posits a “mutual engagement between natural history and European economic and political expansionism”: Claiming no transformative potential whatsoever, natural history differed sharply from overtly imperial articulations of conquest, conversion, territorial appropriation, and enslavement. The system created . . . a utopian, innocent vision of European global authority, which I refer to as an anti-conquest.13 Although hegemonic intentions are denied by what is held to be a purely scientific operation, thus it is that a classificatory capacity to extract things from “other peoples’ economies, histories, social and symbolic systems” becomes tied with an ability to order and control global space in accordance with the capitalist demands of metropolitan powers.14



Geography Made Easy


Building upon Pratt’s analysis, McClintock proposes a potent disciplinary combination of natural history and cartography that saw “hosts of explorers, botanists, natural historians and geographers set out with the vocation of ordering the world’s forms into a global science of the surface and an optics of truth.” She sees such an endeavour as an imperial “conversion project, dedicated to transforming the earth into a single economic currency, a single pedigree of history and a universal standard of cultural value – set and managed by Europe.” But this was no easy task. McClintock argues that, in attempting “to unroll over the earth a single ‘Great Map of Mankind,’ and cast a single, European, male authority over the whole of the planet, ambition far outran effect for quite some time”: “The promoters of the global project sorely lacked the technical capacity to formally reproduce the optical “truth” of nature.15 However, it was not until the second half of the century that this totalizing project could be considered to have come properly into effect. It did so, McClintock contends, with the emergence of the “commodity spectacle,” a form she associates in particular with photography. That being so, and as McClintock indicates when she discusses the Great Exhibition as “a new form of mass consumption” and “a new form of commodity spectacle,” then the Crystal Palace marked the birth date of this great global map.16 Picking up on a point raised in the introduction, a word of caution concerning the notion that the Great Exhibition was thus seen to map global capitalism. Philip Langdon’s remark that at the Exhibition “a panoramic emphasis on the broadest geographical and geological realities” was intended to situate “each and all in the same secularized landscape of commerce and natural history” is particularly helpful to our conception here of the Crystal Palace as a cultural technology for the production of capitalist space, dovetailing neatly with McClintock’s explication of the Victorian “science of surface” and “optics of truth.”17 While I am convinced that the Exhibition was in this sense seen to commodify the world, however, I see a tension between the idea of the “commodity spectacle” raised by McClintock and the globalized fantasy this project associates with the display. The tension, which develops out of the anthropological idealization of the previous chapter, is explored in Chapter 3. For the moment what is of note is that, while it was the exhibits on view in the Palace that sustained its great global map, it was a relational conceit of the national space these things were held to represent that was to prove crucial to the idea that the display made geography easy. Thus the organizing principle behind the conviction



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A geographical arrangement “[T]he act of holding an exhibition was a spectacular endorsement of the philosophical project of political economy,” notes Louise Purbrick, concerned specifically with the event of 1851.18 Addressing Victorian and Edwardian industrial exhibitions more generally, Peter Hoffenberg concurs and elaborates: “These spectacles did not just represent the idea of political economy or mirror its processes; they were political economies themselves.”19 These analyses are right; over and over again commentators made clear the fact that they felt that a capitalist model of socio-economic organization bound together the various goods on display in the Crystal Palace. But that this was so was not straightforward, and to consider in more detail why such a structure of relations emerged demands that attention is paid both to the way in which exhibits were classified and arranged in the Palace, as well as to the character and concerns of the mid-nineteenth-century discourse of political economy. Such a focus allows us to address briefly contemporary as well as Victorian debates over the role of the nation-state as regards the realization of a properly functioning globalized order. Discussing an American dream of globalization as it can be related to political events of the late twentieth century, Neil Smith outlines a new world order that promised not just an end of history but an end to geography – at least as it has been defined with relation to the nation-state: In business schools throughout the United States and East Asia and in financial boardrooms around the world, the new message for the 1990s held that a borderless world now prevailed, and nation-states were fatally weakened by new global flows of capital, information, people, and ideas. The rise of new financial markets and their virtually instantaneous technological accessibility rendered space, place, and borders superfluous.20 Also analysing late capitalism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri agree with Smith’s account of this dominant paradigm, arguing that as the



that the Crystal Palace served to co-ordinate humanity’s mission to conquer nature to its use comes to the fore, and we turn to consider in detail the idea that the display made manifest the territorialized way in which an international division of labour would function.


“primary factors of production and exchange – money, technology, people, and goods – move with increasing ease across national boundaries,” so too there is a relational decline in the power of the nation-state to “regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy.”21 Plans for the layout of international exhibits at the Great Exhibition appeared to announce a similar end to geography and promised a similar diminution of the nation-state’s economic control. June 1850 saw the Illustrated London News include a diagram presenting a bird’s eye view of an exhibitionary space, housed within a “monster edifice,” divided into four main sections: raw materials, machines, manufactures, and sculptures and fine arts.22 This was not idle speculation on the paper’s part. The Official Catalogue confirmed that the event’s Commissioners had desired there to be a “positive arrangement of articles in the building,” and that, as such, “each similar article should be placed in juxtaposition, without reference to its nationality, or local origin.”23 This arrangement did not seek to replicate the way in which a global market organized around a nexus of free-flowing exchanges would operate. But unhindered by the geographical boundaries of the nation, and unconcerned with questions of locality, it could certainly be seen to encourage such a cosmopolitan order of things. Understood thus, what the Illustrated London News had produced, then, was a blueprint for a borderless world. The possibility of such an internationalist plan was owing in large part to the work of Exhibition Special Commissioner Lyon Playfair. A member of the Royal College of Chemistry and the College of Mines, Playfair had been entrusted with the formulation of a classificatory scheme equipped to deal with the international diversity and material abundance that the Exhibition would bring together. Refining a tripartite system apparently suggested by Prince Albert, Playfair had come up with the aforementioned four-pronged taxonomy. These sections, which broke down into thirty sub-sections, were held to foreground the production process in a manner denied by Albert’s scheme (which had not included Machinery as a separate section). In an incident that was made much of at the time, Playfair staged a contest that pitted his classificatory scheme against one proposed by the Commissioner of the French display at the Crystal Palace. As Playfair recorded the incident in his own memoirs, by winning the competition he proved that, while the Frenchman’s system was both “logical and philosophical,” the value of his own scheme lay in the fact that it was one that “manufacturers could most readily understand.”24 Other Exhibition commentators took up this idea that Playfair had hit upon a way of ordering things that fulfilled an economic agenda.



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Thus the Official Catalogue was at pains to point out that Playfair’s taxonomy was “determined by commercial experience,” and that it had been devised in consultation with “manufacturers of all branches” as well as “Eminent men of science.”25 In direct echo, William Whewell, Royal Society Fellow and co-founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, also recommended the scheme as “one determined by commercial experience,” adding that “practical” knowledge, such as could be found in the “Trades’ Directories of Birmingham and Manchester, and other great Manufacturing towns,” had dictated Playfair’s endeavours. Giving the introductory address for a series of lectures held after the Palace had closed, Whewell argued that the function of the industrial displays held in France between 1806 and 1844 had been greatly diminished by the “confused,” “abstract” and “artificial” classificatory schemes employed there. The result of a French propensity for philosophical abstraction, he maintained, was found “in practice to separate things naturally related, and to bring together objects quite unconnected with each other.”26 If it was perhaps not surprising to find a Tory attacking such idealism with the kind of vehemence Edmund Burke reserved for the French Revolution, it is somewhat more notable that Whewell did so in order to extol the virtues of a kind of organic bourgeois praxis.27 Suggesting Playfair’s efforts represented the first attempt “to do in the artificial world what has already been done in the natural by the labours of Linnaeus, Cuvier, and others,” The Times reminded its readers that the French had contributed positively to taxonomic work. And it also developed Whewell’s thrust. Heralding the chemist’s labours as an opportunity to codify “in precise and orderly form the scattered and miscellaneous statistics of trade,” the paper made clear the fact that these efforts aimed to render global commerce an altogether more efficient form of enterprise.28 Playfair’s scheme, and thus the event it served, was held “practical” in the dual sense that it was not ideal and it was useful. In other words, it was real and could be turned to account. With regards to the first of these distinctions, Jeffrey Auerbach comments that it was “a testament to the power and status of commerce that everything in the world could be organized along commercial lines.”29 Since commentators consistently privileged world trade in universal terms, “could” might here be replaced by “should.” The fact that The Times figured the taxonomy with relation to the work of Linnaeus and Cuvier underscored the objective, foundational status afforded to the concerns of capitalism, and speaks directly to the mutual engagement Pratt and McClintock remarked between natural history and economic expansionism. Turning



Geography Made Easy


to the second feature of the system, however, it is notable that, unlike natural history, celebrated for its capacity to incorporate everything, living or dead, this was an order projected to co-ordinate a reductive engagement with the material world. Towards the end of 1850 The Times proclaimed that the forthcoming display would serve as “a museum to exhibit all the productions of nature and art, and a universal competition to bring out all the powers in man in whatever concerns his material welfare.”30 Museums, the piece implied, were characterized at once by accuracy and stasis; this was an event that desired the former but not the latter. The most evident competition going on in the Crystal Palace saw a jury system, organized with relation to Playfair’s scheme, judging exhibits and awarding prize medals accordingly. The awards made by the juries were announced midway through the summer and, as John Davis notes, those awards fell in line with a drive to improve aesthetic principles, privileging as they did “aspects of design rather than workmanship.”31 Such favour sharpened the sense of many Exhibition commentators that there was an undue emphasis placed upon the aesthetically valuable rather than the commercially viable product. Chapter 3 expands on this tension. With the display’s reductive imperative in mind, however, I note that, since Playfair’s taxonomy was held to realize a perfect comparative structure, it followed that the Exhibition served to highlight that certain raw materials, machines and manufactures were, for one reason or another, of a higher quality and/or more cost efficient than others. An international round of evaluation would thus demand that particular resources, techniques and products were discarded in favour of superior alternatives. Albert brought this to the fore when he declared that with “the products of all quarters of the globe” to hand, it was simply a matter of choosing the “best and cheapest for our purposes.”32 Some things belonged in the market, others in the museum. Quite understandably, nineteenth-century industrial capitalism has been seen as inaugurating a dizzyingly diverse and proliferating global commodity culture. Indeed, and as I shall discuss in Chapter 3, for many twentieth-century historians the Great Exhibition and the world’s fairs that followed marked the inception and cemented the hold of this culture. Somewhat removed from this understanding, and returning us to the anthropological universalism of the previous chapter, we have here the idea of arranging exhibits side by side in order to decide which was most suited to the collective, utilitarian “purposes” of humankind. Such restraint sits a little uncomfortably with the modern conceptualization of commodity exchange premised upon irrational, insatiable



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desires not rational, moderate needs. But as Neil Smith made clear, and as Hardt and Negri underlined, the fact that this “universal competition” was to be staged within a borderless crystal world sits very comfortably with triumphant accounts of late capitalism as decentred and deterritorialized. It would seem, then, something of an embarrassment that the forward-thinking taxonomy that was to synchronize just such a fluid, free-flowing world order never emerged. If the Great Exhibition was to signal the end of protectionism, it was unable to do so by signalling the end of geography and the nation-state. Having confirmed that a “positive arrangement” of exhibits within the Palace would have best suited the display’s rationale and agenda, the Official Catalogue went on to note, in rather resigned tones, that in fact “No choice remained but to adopt a geographical arrangement.”33 In an admission that did little to support the Exhibition’s account of the midnineteenth century as an era of increasing international communication and co-operation, the Catalogue recorded that the distances separating nations rendered efficient contact between participants impossible. Reports of the death of space and time, it appeared, had been greatly exaggerated. Left without crucial details as to the exact nature and quantity of goods particular countries intended to exhibit, the organizers had little option but to settle for a national form of segregation. It was decided therefore that the Palace would be split in half; British and colonial goods occupied the western side of the building with foreign products situated in the eastern side. While some colonial exhibits were shown alongside British goods, with Ireland notably subsumed within the British section, in the main the colonies and foreign nations displayed their goods within areas assigned to each individual colony or country. Nations were assigned positions in the Palace according to a system that meant, roughly speaking, that countries nearer the equator were also nearer the centre of the building. While the Catalogue seemed somewhat half-hearted in praising a system that meant the “position of each country is determined in the building by its own latitude,” the Edinburgh Review adopted a more upbeat tone, suggesting that “this happy idea of assuming the transept as the equator and proceeding according to Mercator’s projection solved many difficulties,” and acclaiming “a geographical distribution” that accorded with the “terrestrial relations of each state.”34 The fact that the Exhibition re-institutionalized geography in this way, apparently privileging the work of a sixteenth-century cartographer over the breakthroughs made by political economists such as Adam Smith, certainly seemed to compromise the display’s functional



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capacity, as well as its implicit free trade agenda. Concerned to emphasize this former point, the article from The Times, which had cast Playfair in the same light as Linnaeus and Cuvier, made clear that “the usefulness of the whole show must largely depend upon an arrangement of its contents founded as much as possible upon the classification referred to.” It was with some disquiet, then, that the piece moved to advise its readers that foreign countries might not fall in line with the scheme. “A desire to please the eye,” it suggested, might interfere with the distribution of exhibits “in an orderly and systematic manner,” and thus disrupt “the inquiries of those who visit the Crystal Palace not for amusement but for study.”35 A week later and the same paper was appeased. A correspondent’s visit to the Palace resulted in the contented and striking appraisal cited in the introduction: There the orderly arrangement of every contribution and the subordination of each part and object to the idea of one great and systematic display forces upon the mind a deep interest in that combined operation by which, when each exhibitor has his allotment completely furnished, the Crystal Palace will at once become a perfect epitome of the world’s industry – a Daguerrotype likeness, struck off in one moment, with mathematical precision, of the true ‘organization de travail’.36 April 1851 saw The Times follow this up by congratulating the organizers of the Great Exhibition for the meticulous manner in which they had laid out the world for inspection. Having collected exhibitors from “every portion of the globe” –including “the great Continental communities . . . the semi-barbarous nations of Asia and Africa, the rising states of the Western world . . . our vast colonial empire” – the Exhibition was now characterized by a “worldwide comprehensiveness.” Continuing its praise, the paper noted that nearly 20,000 packages had been “deposited in their places according to a plan which does not violate nationalities, but nevertheless adheres to an orderly classification.” Such an arrangement would furnish “the most ample opportunities for pictorial effect, and yet enable the philosophic mind to carry out without obstruction the labours of comparison and observation.”37 The paper’s confidence in the display’s orderly character was in part due to the fact that Playfair’s classificatory scheme had been applied in broad terms to the arrangement of things in the British side of the Palace, and still more haphazardly to foreign courts. The Times was not alone, though, in



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suggesting that the “geographical arrangement” of the Palace served the display well. While it was vigorously disputed by other commentators, then, there was a sustained emphasis upon the idea of the Exhibition, in the words of one observer speaking at the end of the event, unfolding “before us, in perfect order, the products of the labour of all the world.”38 It is the character of this “perfect order” as it can be related to the discourse of political economy that is important here. The geographical distribution of exhibits – a procedure that mapped the “terrestrial relations of each state” – could be held to reify the national tariff barriers that were felt by anti-protectionists to distort the way the world should work. But not necessarily so. As we have seen with Defoe’s vision of the earth’s commercial symmetry, to map terrestrial relations could be seen to plot free-trade relations. And as Sir Dudley North made manifest when he cast the world as one people, wherein nations were persons, far from prohibiting an understanding of commercial liberalization, the nation could come to the fore as the unit around which it was based. Picking up on the ideas of Defoe and North, and consolidating them with reference to the work of Smith and Ricardo, mid-nineteenthcentury proponents of free trade often privileged the complementary specificity of national economies, as they discussed conceptions of comparative advantage. Thus Richard Cobden: If nature had intended that there should be such a natural isolation, she would have formed the earth upon a very different plan, and given to each country every advantage of soil and climate. My country, for example, would have possessed the wines, oils, fruits, and silks, that have been denied to it, and other countries would have been endowed with that abundance of coal and iron with which we are compensated for the want of a warmer sun.39 As had Defoe, Cobden went on to distinguish this order of nature with relation to a Providential wisdom that had decreed that “different nations may supply each other with the conveniences and comforts of life.” The emphasis here upon soil and climate was in keeping with the notion of a God-given pattern, but there was more to global commerce than the profitable organization of the world’s ecology. Again this point was recognized by Defoe, who observed in “Mr. Review Plumps for Free Trade” that “the differing genius of the people of every country prompts them to different improvements, and to different customs.”40



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J. R. McCulloch followed suit, noting that free trade would allow the distribution of labour throughout the world in a manner best suited to “the genius and capacities of every people.”41 The idea of a distinctive national character or spirit as a distinguishing virtue to be set against the shortcomings of others becomes significant in Chapters 3 and 4, particularly as regards to socio-economic development. At present I note only that just as a person’s industrial role might be dependent upon physical, intellectual and/or habitual factors, so too nations were conceived to be more than the sum of their ecological parts. As stylized as it was reductive, this economic reading of the nationstate explains why commentators at the Great Exhibition posited that a geographical arrangement of things made perfect capitalist sense. As such, it makes clear why they argued that it was necessary in order that the benefits of commercial interdependency became apparent. Less than a month after the Illustrated London News’s diagrammatic anticipation of the Palace’s layout, Richard Horne anonymously penned “The Wonders of 1851” for Household Words.42 The article remarked Prince Albert’s wish for a “fusion of the productions of all nations” and, in line with the argument that such an arrangement mirrored free-trade rationale, suggested that this scheme seemed to encourage the amalgamation and fraternization of one country with another. Not wishing to upset royalty, but convinced that the plan was wrong, Horne noted that the “feeling is excellent,” but nevertheless expressed fears that the scheme would promote “utter confusion . . . amidst the heterogeneous masses.” Questioning whether the productions of each country should be kept separate, Horne answered rhetorically: “This appears the natural arrangement, or how should anyone make a study of the productions of any special country?”43 Following this line of reasoning, many observers concluded that the great advantage of the Great Exhibition lay in the fact that its floorplan allowed for the study and comparison of individual nations, and not just the study and comparison of individual products. Only thus could be discerned the providential interlock between nature, nation and commerce. The irony was, then, that the physical distance that had prevented the fusion of international things at the Exhibition could now be seen to have promoted the systematic integration of nations beyond the walls of Paxton’s structure. Far from having failed it, by fulfilling Albert’s wish to reveal a global unity the result of the “peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the earth,” the Palace constituted precisely the kind of cartographic feat the new world order required.



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Following the publication by James Wyld, Geographer to the Queen and Consort, of a map of the North Pole in 1849, Punch was moved to declare its admiration for the sheer scope as well as the accuracy of Wyld, who was acclaimed as the finest cartographer of the day. “His industry certainly goes to the utmost limits,” recorded the journal, before observing that perhaps his endeavours were now complete: “We doubt if there is the smallest scrap of the world left him now to make a map of. He has scoured the whole globe, as clean as a new door-plate, and left the name “Wyld” engraved in large letters . . . The force of mapping can surely no further go.”44 In suggesting the endpoint of Wyld’s mapping project, however, Punch had somewhat underestimated the ambition and talents of its subject. Wyld’s Great Globe in London’s Leicester Square opened in 1851. In what was quickly to become his most fêted cartographic achievement, the map-maker had effectively turned the world inside out, allowing his visitors to enter the earth in order to observe its physical geography. Sixty feet in diameter, the structure claimed to detail not only the exact dimensions of land and sea, but also to distinguish the topographical features of the earth three-dimensionally. According to one piece of Exhibition literature – aimed at schoolboys – the globe allowed for “a year or two of the study of Geography” to be “mastered in an hour.”45 But if such an accurate, innovative and exciting method of representing the earth provided the Great Exhibition with competition, Wyld’s efforts were by no means seen to eclipse the Crystal Palace. For Punch, Wyld’s Globe presented a “fine, suggestive picture,” “a geographical globule, which the mind can take in at one swallow.” The pity was, the journal noted in apparent contradistinction to this assessment, that the structure’s “hideous staircase” rendered it impossible to “see the picture all at once.”46 If this criticism spoke to particular difficulties that beset the world as it was rendered in Leicester Square, it also points up in more general terms the failures of the Globe when compared to the Palace’s revelatory scope. As a map-making exploit, Wyld’s latest work had improved upon the “slender lines on blank paper” that Pratt held to characterize traditional maps. But notwithstanding, many felt that the Crystal Palace marked an entirely new cartographic order, associated as it was with material comprehensiveness, classificatory rigour and visual compass, and held capable of plotting humankind’s domination of the natural world to an unprecedented extent. By comparison, other forms of geographical representation seemed partial and myopic.



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We mean by it the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us. “Picture” here does not mean some imitation, but rather what sounds forth in the colloquial expression, “We get the picture” [literally, we are in the picture] concerning something. This means the matter stands before us exactly as it stands with it for us. Extending this analysis, in a manner that again rehearses the Baconian elision of vision, knowledge and control, Heidegger remarks that “to get the picture” is to discern a global system, and thus “throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it.”47 This section addresses the idea that the Exhibition generated such a systematic world picture, attending as it does so not only to the way this picture took shape, but also to its totalizing and beautiful character. Following Heidegger’s insistence that to get the picture is to become prepared for it, the next section demonstrates the way in which this cartographic capacity was understood to shape humanity’s future interactions with the earth. In the dramatic words of one commentator, the Exhibition presented a view of “the whole world concentrated in a mere point in space.”48 This compressive compass had inspired William Whewell, in his aforementioned lecture. Called upon to discuss the magnitude of the achievement he had witnessed that summer, Whewell asked his audience to imagine the Ulyssean task faced by the man who would chart industrial endeavour as it was exemplified throughout the various nations of the world. It was a venture, he proposed, that would require of this traveller to roam the varied regions of India; watch the artisan in the streets of the towns of China; dive into the mines of Norway and of Mexico; live a life in the workshops of England, France, and Germany; and trace the western tide of industry and art as it spread over the valley of the Mississippi.”49 And yet, in spite of such effort, the knowledge generated would be fundamentally flawed. “How far it must be,” Whewell bemoaned, “from a simultaneous view of the condition of the whole globe as to material



Wyld’s Globe may well have presented a “fine, suggestive picture” then, but it did not realize what Martin Heidegger has defined as modernity’s “world picture”:

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arts” (11). This was a failure, he insisted, that stood in stark contrast to the Crystal Palace’s capacity to induce the comparison, judgement and scrutiny of “treasures produced by the all-bounteous earth, and the indomitable efforts of man, from pole-to-pole, and from east to west” (12). The rewarding nature of this pantoscopic process was developed analogously, echoing The Times’s significant assessment of the display’s “Daguerreotype-likeness,” and reminding us of the formative link between photography and the “Great Map of Mankind” proposed by McClintock: We may compare the result to that which would be produced, if we could suppose some one of the skilful photographers whose subtle apparatus we have had exhibited there, could bring within his field of view the surface of the globe, with all its workshops and markets, and produce simultaneously a permanent picture, in which the whole were seen side by side. (13–14) Newly discovered, photography was already becoming the age’s most significant visual medium and tool, so that the idea of the Palace as a photograph is perhaps not surprising. Particularly so given the fact that British and French displays of photographic equipment and results were popular exhibits at Hyde Park, and were heralded by many Victorians for their scientific veracity. Bearing witness to the representative character of the “mathematical precision” and totalizing scope afforded the technology by The Times and Whewell, Susan Sontag notes that from its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century photography “gave a tremendous boost to the cognitive claims of sight,” greatly enlarging “the realm of the visible.” Bearing out the idea that this palatial field of view could be seen to generate a peculiarly modern Baconian prospect, Sontag states that the “most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise” is “the sense that we can hold the whole world in our hands.”50 We return at this point to Harvey’s suggestion that modern perspectivism was interested to conceive of the world “from the standpoint of the ‘seeing eye’ of the individual,” and my comment that this integral tenet of the Enlightenment project finds its place in Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Indeed, it finds a prominent place. Smith began his work by bemoaning the fact that it was impossible to visualize and thus comprehend the complex processes through which industry was rationalized, commenting that the beneficial impact of extended divisions of labour were especially obscured because “the division is not near so obvious,



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and has accordingly been much less observed.” Famously he overcame this problem, and established his work’s key topic, with recourse to the illustrative trade of the pin-maker, and those simple operations of a workshop that could be “placed under the view of the spectator.”51 The logic, Smith insisted, worked by extension. Seventy years later Richard Cobden affirmed this belief, stating that free trade could be applied “without reserve to every country, to every circumstance, and to every age.” As he did so he appeared to suggest that the world had been placed under his view: Whatever may be the condition of a country, we maintain that free trade is better than restriction. Show me any point on the surface of the globe, whether it be of fertility as unlimited as that of Egypt, or a barren rock like Malta – let it be placed under the tropical sun, or near the polar – I think I can demonstrate that it is the interest of the inhabitants to keep up the most unrestricted communications with their brethren spread over the earth.52 Five years on and William Whewell found himself in the same position. This is not to say that Whewell found himself inclined to follow Cobden and Smith by suggesting that could the world only be viewed holistically its “obvious and simple system of natural liberty” would emerge.53 As I shall discuss in Chapter 3, Whewell was certainly not an overt proponent of market economics. But it is to say that the totalizing simultaneity he invoked when he discerned an international whole comprising individual nations ranged side by side sat comfortably with an understanding of the Palace as a technology that revealed to view an international division of labour. And if Whewell was unwilling to shift from seeing the world with all its various workshops and markets to seeing the world as an integrated workshop and market, this was not the case for many of his contemporaries. In order to discuss how this interdependent order took shape at the Exhibition, I turn briefly first to the topic of food. Wondering how best to think of humanity in a collective sense, and passing over options ranging from man the “speaking animal” to man the “dressing animal,” an article from the Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art, a weekly magazine published for eighteen months from the summer of 1851, settled upon the idea of man the “bartering animal.” “[E]ven in his rudest state,” the article alleged, “the exchange of commodities” was “the work of the reasoning faculty” that distinguished man from the other animals. Trade, it continued, “is beyond



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the comprehension of the wisest monkey; neither the bee, the beaver, the dog, nor the horse, goes to market.”54 But the question that I raised in Chapter 1 remained: what did man exchange once at the market? As I indicated earlier, in answer to this question food furnished a useful substance through which to articulate the limited but compelling story Victorian accounts of free trade told about the world and its inhabitants. Here then, it is significant that another of the Illustrated Exhibitor’s proposed universals, man the “cooking animal,” would provide an article from Punch with a striking illustrative example of the way in which an extended division of labour and increased commercial liberalization would enrich the material life of humankind, profiting from the fact that the world comprised broadly homogenous but nevertheless environmentally and ethnically distinctive peoples. Looking forward in 1850 to the forthcoming display, “The Cookery of All Nations” found Punch insisting that there could be “no objection” to the display in the Palace “of culinary specimens”: “Let France, then, send her countless dishes, Italy her cream, Spain her olla-podrida, Russia her caviare, Turkey her kiebobs, India her curry, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales their stew haggis and rabbit, while English roast beef shall compete with the cookery of the world.”55 It remains true today that positive accounts of globalized multiculturalism are drawn to international cuisines. But this narrative commonly sees national cultures changing as a result of migration and resultant demographic shifts. In keeping with political economy’s understanding of territorialized interdependency, Punch pointed towards a culinary division of labour organized around the flow of goods not peoples. Global communities, the sketch suggested, could be brought symbolically not physically closer together by a collective demonstration of the fact that there existed a universal appetite for the diverse culinary produce which the different nations of the world produced. In fact Punch was to be disappointed in the event. Perishable goods were banned from the Exhibition, much to the dismay of the Swiss, who wished to show off their cheeses. But the journal was prescient in thus setting out in broad terms the structural logic of globalization as it would be popularly understood at the Exhibition. Observers were quick to bring to the fore the peculiar capacities of global communities as they celebrated the way in which the Palace gathered the scattered pieces of the earth’s industrial landscape and demonstrated how they fitted together. Notably, however, and this will be returned to in the next chapter, they were not as quick to identify, with relation to the goods actually exhibited, precisely how this international system was to work.



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Different as are the character, dispositions, and endowments of the Chinese, and the Anglo-Saxon, the Hindoo, and the Hottentot, more so indeed than the diversified productions of the soil they cultivate and inhabit, it needs but mutual good will to render them helpers of each other, by useful labours and arts.56 Likewise the Swedish author and feminist Frederika Bremer. Lamenting that she did not have as much time as she would have liked at the Exhibition, Bremer nevertheless managed to wander “continually from East to West, and from North to South,” moving from North America to China, Sweden to Russia, Turkey to France, and Germany to England, and leaving “all the various objects and contrasts to produce their own effect on my mind.” The apparently random nature of this global tour contrasted with the systematic rationale of the providential order that it revealed. The “world’s fair,” she wrote, was a manifestation of the “talents” entrusted to “man” by God and “given to the world for its commerce”: The nations came from the ends of the world . . . It was gratifying to see them congregated in the Crystal Palace, each one displaying the use to which his talent had been applied in his own place, and in his own way. It was a pleasant sight to see all their productions thus spread out, in this World’s Market.57 Another international visitor to the display, this time fictional, emphasized in a similar way the singular character of the “World’s Market” that Bremer had discerned. The American-born playwright Bayle Bernard was behind the character of Peleg E. Wheeler, a simple but enthusiastic American visitor to London in 1851, whose correspondence appeared in the Illustrated London News throughout that summer. Often frantic with excitement about the “Hull World’s Exhibition,” Major Wheeler did his utmost to keep his Uncle Enoch, Aunt Huldah and Deacon Bigelow up to date with news from the old country. His efforts provided the folks back home with a strange mix of free-market economics and yokel bewilderment. So while one letter found Wheeler complaining that the Palace’s overwhelming nature meant that he had been “unable to digest it,” it



Thus the lace-manufacturing Mayor of Nottingham, William Felkin, was impressed by the way in which ecological distinctions marked particular terrains out for certain industrial roles, and was no less struck by what the Palace’s exhibits told him about the world’s peoples:

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this is the Exhibition’s valley, if we chose to understand it; to prove by direct comparison what each people stand in need of, and so urge ’em to take something in exchange for what they give. Don’t you see, then, at a wink, its great beauty and distinction, that it seems to combine within itself the scheme of a complete industrial system.58 Particularly when it is considered alongside an earlier letter in which Wheeler had claimed that the Palace “looks like Natur in a pictur; not what Natur is, but jess what Natur ought to be,” the notion that the Exhibition furnished such a table calls to mind a passage from Michel Foucault’s analysis of classificatory endeavour, The Order of Things.59 Here, Foucault discusses the classical concept of “the utopia,” a “fantasy of origins” that revolved around the twin idea of viewing the world anew and from a position of objectivity. According to this conceit “the freshness of the world had to provide the ideal unfolding of a table in which everything would be present and in its proper place, with its adjacencies, its peculiar differences, and its immediate equivalences.”60 Likewise, the Palace was held by Wheeler and by others to have provided this ideal unfolding of things, at once clarifying and purifying the world. Casting the Exhibition in such utopian terms, and underscoring that this status was the result of its capacity to structure the individuation and comparison of nations, Roberts Stephenson contended that the Exhibition revealed the error of “those mischievous and absurd restrictions upon manufacturers and commerce which were the offspring of former ignorance and animosity,” marking out in their stead “a simple system of common arrangements for the commercial world.”61 In this fresh, pure light, geography was indeed made easy. From the emphasis upon human similitude of the first chapter, then, to a stress upon the way in which geographical difference could be rationalized in order to make the world work properly. William Wordsworth held man’s “meddling intellect” to mis-shape “the beauteous form of things,” murdering to dissect.62 At the Palace, science’s analytical capacity was invested with life-enhancing rather than life-destroying power. So the earth was dissected in order that the distortive tendencies of protectionist policies were exposed to view, and the world could be re-conceived in the form of one systematic entity. In order



also saw him suggesting that the display served as a “table . . . to show both what marks and what connects” the nations of the world. Having made this clear, Wheeler expanded upon the display’s value:


to underscore the salient characteristics of this system, it is useful at this point to turn to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published eight years after the Exhibition had finished, and also concerned with the idea that a coherent system underlay the profusion and variety of life on earth. Countering Wordsworthian scorn for scientific endeavour, Darwin maintained throughout The Origin of Species that the world was a beautiful affair, offering an aestheticized assessment of the interdependent structural relations that governed organic existence: “How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organization to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected?63 While the Origin did not appear until 1859, Gillian Beer notes as typically Victorian “the sense that everything is connected, though the connections may be obscured,” and remarks that, as a result of the similarly inclined work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Charles Lyell and Robert Chambers, many of the key themes of Darwin’s thesis were in circulation from the 1830s.64 Given the pervasive historical impact of evolutionary theory, coupled with Beer’s emphasis upon its pronounced resonance with the cultural concerns of the Victorian period, one might wish to trace a link between Darwin’s system and the liberal economic order heralded at the Crystal Palace. This is especially so when we bear in mind that, as the naturalist himself made clear, and as Jeff Wallace has more recently spelt out, “it has been possible to relate Darwin quite explicitly to the dominant capitalist ideology of laissez-faire liberalism.”65 To make this link, however, is to play up what Darwin would term a “struggle for life,” particularly as it could be understood with relation to Malthusian scarcity, and as it would come to be understood with regard to Darwinism read socially – and racially – in terms of a Spencerian model that promised only the “survival of the fittest.” If Darwin’s perception of organic communal interdependence prompted him to celebrate the systematic perfection of the world, it did not lead him to gloss over the notion of life as “a great and complex battle,” one in which spatially grounded indigenes were conquered and wiped out by other species.66 To read capitalism through the paradigm of competitive ecology is to see a ruthless, destructive system at work, in which parts of the system are sustained at the expense of others. Moreover, it is to explain systematic relations with regard not to human pre-eminence, nor providential wisdom, but rather a complex array of haphazard environmental factors. “Darwin was much wounded by Herschel’s description of his theory as ‘the law of higgledy-piggledy,’ ”



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Beer points out, “but the phrase exactly expresses the dismay many Victorians felt at the apparently random – and so, according to their lights, trivialised – energy that Darwin perceived in the natural world.”67 I return in Chapter 4 to the idea of the economic realm as a “struggle for life.” In this chapter I note rather that, while in formal terms freetrade globalization proposed an interdependent structure of relations with much in common to that discerned by Darwin, in terms of content it was a systematic picture held to tell a very different story about the world. Grounded in the anthropocentric dictates of political economy, and given religious sanction through a providential understanding of the distribution of global resources, an international division of labour provided the framework within which humankind could pursue in a measured, methodical manner the “great and sacred mission” that the Exhibition was held to announce. Moreover, if it was not contingent or non-religious, neither was life on earth figured as a competition in which some units within a structure progressed at the expense of others. Thus, where for Malthus the question of socio-economic progress prompted a consideration of the way in which an increasing population would result in a shortage of food, Exhibition commentary was inclined rather to foreground an improvement in the quantity, quality and variety of things available for all to eat. “For the world has come together,” the already encountered fictional correspondent of the Illustrated London News Arthur Lamb informed his wife Dorothy, “and we see what a beautiful world it is – how made for the mutual comfort and mutual enjoyment of all men.”68 Echoing statements made by both Bremer and Wheeler, the stress here upon the pleasing character of such universally beneficial interdependence is significant. It points towards an order of beauty distinct from Darwin’s, that can be explicated with relation to Terry Eagleton’s work on bourgeois aesthetic discourse. Drawing a link between an emergent middle class and the lateeighteenth-century field of aesthetics, The Ideology of the Aesthetic is interested in a conceptualization of the aesthetic artefact as an autonomous structure that contains multiplicity. For this conceptualization, Eagleton explains, the work of art is an entity characterized by the “fusion” or “organic interpenetration” of distinct elements, one that realizes the “unity-in-variety” of its self-regulating and self-determining parts. Unlike the “exquisite” character of the system delineated by Darwin, then, the need for distinct constitutive elements to adapt or face destruction is entirely absent from the relationships to which the



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of individuals woven into intimate unity with no detriment to their specificity, of an abstract totality suffused with all the flesh-and-blood reality of the individual being. As Hegel writes of classical art in his Philosophy of Fine Art: “Though no violence is done . . . to any feature of expression, any part of the whole, and every member appears in its independence, and rejoices in its own existence, yet each and all is content at the same time to be only an aspect in the total evolved presentation.”69 It was Eagleton’s reading that prompted me, towards the beginning of Chapter 1, to suggest the Crystal Palace as a cultural laboratory that orchestrated as an end the (beautiful) sum of its richly varied and distinctive parts. There the emphasis was on human diversity at an individual level. Here it is on the nation-state. But just as this aesthetic “dream of reconciliation” held out analogously the promise that capitalism would harness peacefully and progressively the specific capacities of individuals, so too it worked for individual nations. Bremer cast the “World’s Market” she beheld in the Palace as a “pleasant sight”; Wheeler maintained there was “great beauty and distinction” to the systematic cohesion he detected at the display; and Lamb indicated a “beautiful world” was one distinguished by mutual benefit. What these commentators were responding to was free-trade capitalism understood as a territorialized structure of relations that could neither compromise nor damage the units from which it was formed. If in this respect the unity-in-variety of the global economy matched that of the work of art, however, the stasis of the latter was in contrast to the dynamism of the former. Which is to say, where one had “evolved,” the other was evolving. It is to the idea of visualizing, disciplining and thus propelling this evolutionary process, and the idea of progress with which it was bound, that I now turn.

The force of mapping As he conjured up the image of the market’s “invisible hand,” Adam Smith was in fact discussing the capitalist’s preference to invest domestically rather than internationally: “In the home trade his capital is never so long out of his sight as it frequently is in the foreign trade of consumption.”70 While thus far this book has presented the Wealth of



artistic artefact gives form. Thus it is that Eagleton proposes the art work offered the bourgeoisie “a dream of reconciliation”:

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Nations as a secular gospel for globalization, then, it is worth noting that here Smith discussed foreign trade by invoking a fear of untrustworthy foreigners, further commenting that a lack of international legislation rendered it difficult for the merchant to seek redress following incidents of overseas commercial deception. The Great Exhibition could not overcome such problems. But it was seen to promote visually the growth of a unified global market along rational, controlled and secure lines. In so doing it could be held to advance the simultaneously disciplinary and emancipatory imperatives of a properly functioning capitalist system. Although the Crystal Palace was understood as a cartographic endeavour that exerted force, then, it was celebrated because, as it plotted the way the world should work, it freed up nations to fulfil their proper industrial roles. Since I shall be thinking through the idea of the Palace as a technology that directed global progress, Tony Bennett’s influential essay “The Exhibitionary Complex” illuminates the thrust of what follows. Discussing international exhibitions as a “response to the problem of order,” Bennett employs the phrase “exhibitionary complex” as a means of registering what he suggests was the displays’ “ambition toward a specular dominance over a totality.” He indicates that such ambition sought to make the whole world “metonymically available,” rendering it an entity to be known and controlled. Drawing on Foucault’s work on vision, knowledge and power as related to methods of social regulation, Bennett foregrounds the way in which the displays combined “the functions of spectacle and surveillance” in order to regulate modern society, structuring an order of people as well as things.71 Like many Foucauldian analyses of the interconnections between politics and culture (including this one), Bennett’s analysis of exhibition space is open to the charge that it overplays the disciplinary impact of these events. I return to this point in the next chapter. For the moment, however, the idea that the Great Exhibition sought to structure a “specular dominance” over the world is extremely useful, for two main reasons. First, it brings to the fore the combination of representative authority and totalizing ambition with which this chapter is concerned. Second, it emphasizes that this combination structures and sustains the exertion of power. Where the focus of Bennett’s work falls upon the way in which exhibitions encouraged individual citizens to discipline themselves as productive members of the modern nation-state, the focus here is on the fact that Exhibition commentators privileged the role of the Palace in disciplining nation-states as productive members of the modern global economy.



Geography Made Easy


The work of Roberts Stephenson typifies this understanding of the Exhibition. In a move similar to Whewell’s request that his lecture audience try and imagine how a truly global perspective might be achieved, the author of The Great Exhibition invited readers to picture what they might have seen in the six months leading up to the display had “any of the bold plans for navigating the air been successful.” Passing thus over the nations of the world, “on a grand tour of inspection,” Stephenson expected that travellers would have been rewarded with the sight of “the human family, for the first time in history, preparing for one common, peaceful, enlightened, and beneficent transaction.” “[H]ow heartily proud they laboured, as they felt themselves participating in the really glorious work,” he continued.72 But in fact this united labour was nothing compared with what the Exhibition’s own revelatory scope would co-ordinate. The architect and urban developer Michiel Dehaene has defined the “natural plan” as one that “appeals both to the descriptive and the normative sense of the word ‘plan’: plan understood as map, a description of the way things are; and also plan as the projection of how things should be, the prefiguration of a new state of things.”73 Stephenson cast the Palace as just such a plan, acclaiming the display as “a series of displays of national industry, each methodically arranged,” before moving on to emphasize that “many advantages will arise to the intelligent spectator, who will not fail thereby to detect the strong and weak points in the productive power of the various countries represented.” Thus it was that representative veracity gave way to a transformative mandate, and a “simple system” for future interdependency took shape: He [the Exhibition-goer] has also thus placed before his eyes a chart of the course and impulse of trade all over the world; of the developments of which it is capable, and of the direction in which those may be most safely pointed. The limits within which competition can be profitably carried on, not only between localities, but between nations, will here receive a clearer elucidation than they have ever yet had. The latent wealth of the world will be revealed, and commerce taught to satisfy her demands from new sources.74 Stephenson not only mirrored Whewell’s claim that the Exhibition revealed the whole seen side by side, but also spelt out its interdependent implications, and signalled the co-ordinated manner in which modernity would bind together international economic interests. As an extension of this point, it is important to note that while mapping was



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presented as an irresistible force, the power this cartography exercised was derived from the benign and productive coalescence of commercial symmetry and universal self-interest. As the logic of the natural plan would dictate, to represent correctly the new world order was to bring it into being. Franco Moretti has observed that the idealized, self-regulating market constitutes “an organic system of relations capable of holding all its elements together and of giving them a function and a meaning.”75 When Prince Albert declared that the Exhibition provided at once a “living picture” and “a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions,” he did so with the institution of just such an organic system of relations in mind. As had Stephenson, other Exhibition commentators would foreground the way in which the Palace revealed this “starting point,” emphasizing as they did so the easy character of the above move from the descriptive function to the prescriptive impact of the event. The Crystal Palace and its Contents, advertising its successor, the People’s Illustrated Journal of Arts, Manufactures, Practical Science, Literature, and Social Economy, thus averred that the event behind both publications had created that “increased knowledge of our own resources and the resources of our neighbours” necessary in order that “the peculiar advantages of one community may be interchanged for those of others,” and an “enlarged field of commerce” take shape.76 Charles Babbage declared it an “Exposition calculated to promote and increase the free interchange of raw materials and commodities between all nations of the earth.”77 Expressing the belief that the Exhibition would thus generate a thriving world, Albert’s description of the Palace as a “living picture” is pertinent here in part also because it might be understood with relation to the idea that the organic system it was to realize constituted one body, rather than a multitude. So far I have considered an integrated international economy comprised of units thought of as neighbours within a single global village, or relatives from the same extended family. The idea that individual nations should in this way be understood as individual persons remained the dominant conceit deployed by commentators as they figured the way globalization worked. But it was also the case that Exhibition commentators imagined the global economy as one growing organism, nourished by the lifeblood of commerce. For H. W. Burrows, author of The Great Exhibition: A Sermon, the Exhibition’s “leading idea” was to allow each nation to “show what God has done for it . . . both in natural advantages and in the ability



Geography Made Easy


and industry of its children.” That being so, he continued, the display served as an “assertion that all the members of the family of man are useful to each other, constitute one body, and have a common interest in each other’s well-being.”78 The aforementioned Thomas Binney elaborated this somatic metaphor, casting the world as “a body with all its members”: “It has its head and feet, its ear and eye, its mouth and hands; but all in fulfilling their respective functions without disturbance, - each being thus in unity with the rest.”79 The economy-as-body motif thus evoked the twofold notion of mutually beneficial functions and increasingly united evolution, disallowing as it did so the idea that particular communities might survive and prosper outside the global system. As she considers how capitalism was conceived of by nineteenth-century thinkers as a singular “life form,” Catherine Gallagher supports this point, drawing upon the image of “a megabeing whose telos was expanding wealth and whose motive was believed to be the promise of individual happiness.”80 “On the Anticipated Close of the Great Exhibition,” by the travel writer Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, was an interesting if somewhat protracted and dense reflection on the aims and outcomes of the display. Notwithstanding its complications, the poem played up the idea of the Exhibition as a natural plan that served to invigorate a properly disciplined economic organism, illuminating in the process Gallagher’s assessment. Before turning to discuss this work directly, however, it is worth turning first to Alfred Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall.” For if Tennyson’s poem raised doubts about the point and wisdom of progress wrought through globalization, Stuart-Wortley’s poem appears to constitute an attempt to erase them, ironing out as it did so the insane ambivalence of its predecessor. Spurned in love, and aiming to recapture the “wild pulsation” that once marked his existence, the narrator of “Locksley Hall” turns to modernity’s “megabeing,” seeking solace by imagining what the capitalist spirit of the age might achieve. Dipping into the future, “far as human eye could see,” he discerns a vision of a globalized community, bound together by the consensual character and pacific impulse of trade. An end to international conflict is followed by an era distinguished by its upkeep of those commonsensical truths the majority hold to be self-evident: Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.



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In his unbalanced condition, however, this vision dissipates, and its promise of generic progress becomes inadequate to an eye “jaundiced” by individual suffering. Thus alienated and disillusioned, the narrator signals his desire to flee to some Edenic island, escaping those sea-borne harbingers of progress, the trader and the “European flag”: There methinks would be enjoyment more than in this march of mind In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake mankind. This desired retreat to “yonder shining Orient,” fecund with the “heavyfruited tree” and “savage woman” alike, is quickly dismissed, however, as the narrator retakes his position within civilized order: Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range, Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Thro’ the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.82 The idea that modernity’s historical impetus might be characterized in such unabashedly Eurocentric terms comes to prominence in the following chapters. I note here that the triumphalism of this youthful, locomotive flux is in contrast to the alliterative ease of a slumberous international community “lapt in universal law.” The tension thus produced between a state of ideological complacency and one of technological sovereignty speaks to the loaded question the stanzas raise: where is the world ranging, and to what end? Tennyson would conclude In Memoriam by invoking the “one far-off divine event, / To which all creation moves.”83 Inhabiting bourgeois discourse, but refusing to acknowledge the need for more spiritual truths, “Locksley Hall’s” narrator’s declared return to sanity is rendered somewhat hollow, and one man’s self-deluding sensibility can be understood to speak for the self-righteous emptiness of his age’s faith in material progress. Remarking in a letter to Engels that the Great Exhibition inspired only “cosmopolitan-philanthropic-commercial hymns of peace,” Marx brought to the fore the fact that there was a less challenging way of seeing things, and the Palace encouraged it.84 That being so, then Stuart-Wortley’s “On the Anticipated Close of the Great Exhibition”



There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.81

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First proud tone of that grand Harmony, that yet shall wakening burst,— First pure Dawn of coming Day, of new developments the first,— First great act of a concurrent World, joined in brave Thoughts and Deeds, Tryst of all the tongues, tribes, classes, castes,—all hues, and climes, and creeds!85 Stemming from a medieval term for an appointed station, and signifying both a mutually acceptable covenant and a marketplace, the use of the word “tryst” is noteworthy. Its meaning was elaborated as Stuart-Wortley indicated the imminence of a millennium distinguished by what she described as a “proud League” of nations: “One colossal, vast Community, united, calm, and free” (2). In a poem crammed with various metaphors intended to express the nature of this globalized commonwealth, the idea of the market as the heart beat of an international community stands out, vitalizing “each part of the ampler whole”: Then still, armed with vital heat and force, a central heart should beat, And should send the blood with fiery flow, in fearless course and fleet, Fast through every vein to every part, — while with strange might should play, Strong pulsations through the enlarging life, developed day by day. (12) Here the Palace serves at once to mark out stations and free up potential, so that the image of capitalism’s “megabeing” takes healthy, expansive form, with global communities in their appointed, authentic place. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the work from which Bennett’s “The Exhibitionary Complex” drew so much, opens up the striking stanza that follows, where Stuart-Wortley developed this understanding of the global economic organism, with its constituent parts revealed and thus regulated. Concerned with the way in which the modern human body is subjected to control by disciplinary modes of visualization, and bringing



was symptomatic, although hardly straightforward. The poem began by expecting that the influence of the Palace would live past its closure, heralding as it did so the inauguration of the new world order to which Tennyson’s narrator had looked forward:

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to the fore Bentham’s Panopticon, Discipline and Punish explicates observational procedures and apparatuses that induce the effects of power, producing fields of view that group together units in a homogenous way at the same time as ordering them as distinct (and hierarchical) entities.86 In the stanza below Stuart-Wortley seems inspired by the idea that the Exhibition served to configure just such an individuating, systematic field of view. Unlike Foucault, however, she celebrates the results as harmonious and progressive, rather than condemning them as violent and repressive: Maladministrations, then, should seem impossible at last, The o’erlooking eye of a Concentered Power should still o’er all be cast,— That chief Power unto the sagest given, our wide World can select, By co-operative confederacies, with lynx-eyed watchings checked.(12) With the image of the still “o’erlooking eye,” the panoptical impact of the Palace was held to outlive the longevity of the display. As I have indicated, this made perfect sense: by visualizing an international division of labour, the Exhibition established the rational starting point required in order that autonomous nations would work, and continue to work, in accordance with the structural logic of an integrated global economy. Put another way, the Palace had allowed nations to inscribe upon themselves the law of supply and demand. That said, however, the idea of a “chief Power” bestowed upon a sage global elite brought to the fore a mode of disciplinary visualization that troubled this understanding of structural self-determination and selfregulation. I develop the notion that the Palace empowered some to direct the industrial exertions of others in Chapters 3 and 4. At present I am concerned rather with the implication that the Palace was able to exert panoptical force as a result of international agreement born of the universal recognition of mutual interest. “All the world reveals itself, by consent, to all the world,” the Exhibition essayist Excelsior remarked, in an appraisal of the display that also underscored the consensual nature of the global order that it was to set in motion.87 As we have seen, the secular character of this order did not render its forward motion religiously aimless. Consistent with Gallagher’s assessment of capitalism’s telos, Stuart-Wortley’s poem was underpinned by the idea that as this organic “megabeing” generated wealth, so too it promoted universal human happiness. As has been stressed throughout, however, the emphasis in 1851 fell upon the idea that industrial



Geography Made Easy


capitalist progress could be figured teleologically because in its Smithian form it engendered human unity through ongoing material conquest. And so just as Albert would hold the Exhibition to promote a providentially ordained end of history, so too Stuart-Wortley would cast the realization of “One Grand Result, momentous and profound” with relation to the display’s capacity to plot commercially liberal interdependency: Royal March and Progress of the World!—Oh! pause not! On!—still on! Countless triumphs, boundless glories, yet are waiting to be won;— On!—still broad as our broad Earth itself, shall spread the enlightened Plan,— The Administration of the World,—the Universal Reign of Man! And those hundred Lands in close-linked bands, many a tie and not one thrall; Nay!—Each helping all, all succouring each, each sheltered, sheltering all: Neighbouring Lands or distant, all shall be on one proud footing placed,— As with one broad golden girdle clasped: by one Grand Law embraced.88 Building on the new dawn she discerned at the beginning of her poem, Stuart-Wortley thus averred the emergence of a post-historical world, “lapt in universal law.” But pace “Locksley Hall,” and in keeping with the missionary thrust of the Prince’s Mansion House address, this was presented not as a slumberous state of eternal spinning and change, but as an energized, stable and directed quest to conquer nature to man’s use. As did Dickens, Hardy, and Marx and Engels, Tennyson figured the change, rapid pace and power of industrial capitalism as exciting but also unnerving. Set against such ambivalent if not altogether condemnatory understandings of progress, the Great Exhibition was held to mark the rigorous and reassuring exposition and administration of modernity’s momentum. Hardy identified the event with the “geological fault” that separated the old from the new. Exhibition commentary concurred, but what was missing from Hardy’s account is the conviction that the display served to rationalize, co-ordinate and sanctify this watershed moment. The “enlightened Plan” to which the Palace gave forceful form was impeccable, in the sense that it was held to represent accurately the true state of nature. But intertwined with this, and in the more



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etymologically precise sense of the word, in that it would not leave humanity liable to sin.

The day after the Exhibition had opened The Times offered its readers an exultant summary of what the display signified: From the east and the west, from the north and from the south, from the ardour of the tropics and the rigour of the poles, thousands have come to present their offerings at the common shrine – trophies collected in the victories of mind over matter – rich spoils carried away by man in his conquests over nature. The prisoners who follow the triumphal car of the victor are here the elements themselves, brought into subjection to the indomitable sway of the human will. Nothing in nature is so stubborn as or intractable as to resist this power.89 But if the Palace constituted a record of man’s advance, it also plotted the blueprint that would allow his “indomitable” power to be wielded in a more co-ordinated fashion. Declaring that the display would serve “to give a particular direction to the succession of events without, and so to alleviate the wants and increase the pleasures of ourselves and others,” Henry Mayhew concluded that “the Great Exhibition, looked at in its true light, is, we say once more, a huge academy for teaching men the laws of the material universe, by demonstrating the various triumphs of the useful arts over external nature.”90 Not everyone, however, was prepared to cast such progress in wholly positive terms. Witness to the “triumphal processions” staged by twentieth-century fascism, Walter Benjamin urged that the cultural treasures at such events were contemplated by the historical materialist with horror: “They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.91 Foreshadowing this materialist injunction with remarkable prescience, and refusing the widespread conviction that capitalist-inspired progress worked necessarily for the good of all, “The Approaching Festival of All Nations” found the Family Herald reflecting soberly that “The poor do actually increase with our wealth, because it is the poor that make it.” With this in mind, the article warned the Exhibition-goer to guard against the enamoured response the material profusion and splendour of the Crystal Palace was likely to



Bourgeois megalomania


generate: “Beautiful as civilization may be in some of its higher features, it is melancholy to think at what cost it may be purchased.”92 Demonstrating after the same fashion this cautious detachment from civilization’s cultural treasures, Punch too questioned whether alongside the goods exhibited at the Exhibition it might be instructive to display the “starved,” “sweated” and “blown up” bodies of the workers who had made them.93 So where the Family Herald emphasized a tendency to ignore uneven development and a growing gap between rich and poor, Punch noted that to focus upon industrial products was to efface from view the arduous and dangerous labour that created them. As both these publications were well aware, however, to critique in this way the structural logic and material consequences of capitalism was to counter the display’s “good story,” a grand narrative that rejected the view that free trade could do anything other than promote universal wealth and happiness. Seen as a way of alleviating unnecessary toil and distinguished for its capacity to unite its autonomous parts, an integrated, interdependent global economy was associated with ease and beauty instead of hardship and inequality. Pratt defined an “anti-conquest” against “overtly imperial articulations of conquest, conversion, territorial appropriation, and enslavement,” highlighting natural history’s capacity to realize “an utterly benign and abstract appropriation of the planet.”94 In the sense that it was presented as truthful, benign and liberating rather than enslaving, the Palace plotted an “anti-conquest.” But in the sense that it directed a transformative engagement with the earth, exerting the force of mapping in order to reveal a hitherto under-exploited commercial symmetry, it constituted an altogether more concrete appropriation of the world. Casting this millennial imperium as a Pax humana, and drawing attention to an elemental acquiescence that underscored its teleological legitimacy, Stuart-Wortley proposed the “Universal Reign of Man” ushered in by the Great Exhibition left the earth “a Slave unto [man’s] might, - a most, willing, gracious slave.”95 Picking up on the idea of the Exhibition co-ordinating this reign, but also bringing to the fore the fact that globalized interdependency would revolve around the industrial and communicative advances of the past seventy years or so, the Crystal Palace and its Contents described 1851 as “essentially the age of commerce and steam,” one in which “the powers of man are centupled: he is no longer the serf of creation; he is rather the King.” As it expanded upon the pacific, progressive nature of this sovereignty, the journal echoed The Communist Manifesto’s account of the way in which the bourgeois period of history destroyed



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The barons of feudality have made room by their side for the nobility produced by industry. The sword commands no more: it is capital that commands. To the state of strife, of warlike antagonism, succeeds a régime of industrial competition, and of exchanges. Men know themselves and each other better; national characteristics are obliterated; it seems that humanity is invested with a new form; organization is established between states and between continents.96 Thus a post-historical world, empowered by the developments of the Industrial Revolution, and organized in order that all might progress at the expense of none. And at a time when revolutions in Europe, coupled with Chartist agitations in Britain, pushed to the fore political and economic grievances in line with those raised by the Family Herald and Punch, the Exhibition could be heralded as both the moment and the instrument that gave the lie to such concerns. Unsurprisingly, Marx and Engels offered a different take. In 1850 they used their paper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politisch-Ökonomische Revue, to launch an attack on the Exhibition, pouring scorn upon an event “announced by the English bourgeoisie with the most impressive cold-bloodedness at a time when the whole Continent was still dreaming of revolution.”97 The lust for material power and control inspired by the Crystal Palace led Marx, in his aforementioned letter to Engels, to describe the summer of 1851 as a “period of bourgeois megalomania.”98 With just such megalomania in mind, Marx and Engels were also drawn to echo their analysis of 1848: This exhibition is a striking proof of the concentrated power with which modern large-scale industry is everywhere demolishing national barriers and increasingly blurring local peculiarities of production, society and national character among all peoples.99 In line with the thrust of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels saw the Exhibition as encouraging and celebrating a move that saw industrialized nations suck weaker global communities into exploitative patterns of economic dependency. Where the Crystal Palace saw consensual, mutually beneficial global growth, then, Marx and Engels posited an aggressive, irresistible expansionist drive impelled by the demands of



local patterns of production and consumption, creating a world after its own image:


some, not all. But in line with a socialist conception of historical progress, where the Crystal Palace announced the command of capital, Marx and Engels looked forward to its collapse. The Crystal Palace, described as a “pantheon” erected in the “modern Rome” of London, represented the apotheosis of bourgeois power. However, it also signalled the beginning of its end. In contradistinction to accounts of controlled, post-historical progress inspired by the Exhibition, then, the display marked the bourgeoisie’s “greatest festival, at a moment when the collapse of its social order in all its splendour is imminent, a collapse which will demonstrate more forcefully than ever how the forces which it has created have outgrown its control.”100 History, of course, told a very different story. Commenting on the way in which the expansionist drive discussed by Marx and Engels helped prevent rather than precipitate the sociopolitical agitation and revolt in Europe for which they hoped, Hannah Arendt observes that the imperial conquest she associates with the latter half of the nineteenth century marked “the first stage in the political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism.”101 Key to this understanding of events is the fact that capitalist powers sought to resolve the crises of over-accumulation that threatened their economic growth at the mid-nineteenth-century mark by creating and exploiting new overseas markets. David Harvey explains Arendt’s position thus: The production of space, the organization of wholly new territorial divisions of labour, the opening of new and cheaper resource complexes, of new regions as dynamic spaces of capital accumulation, and the penetration of pre-existing social formations . . . provide important ways to absorb capital and labour surpluses.102 Discussing this production of space elsewhere, Harvey notes the impact of the process, that was felt particularly in non-European areas of the world: the world’s spaces were deterritorialized, stripped of their preceding significations, and then reterritorialized according to the convenience of colonial and imperial administration. Not only was the relative space revolutionized through innovations in transport and communications, but what that space contained was also fundamentally re-ordered. The map of domination of the world’s spaces changed out of all recognition between 1850 and 1914.103



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Ironically then, the historical moment that Marx claimed chimed the death knell of capitalism can be understood to mark the point at which industrial capitalist globalization really took hold of the world. Sharpening the irony, the historical event that Marx passed off as pathologically excessive “megalomania,” carrying with it the seeds of its own destruction, served instead to fuel bourgeois desire for spatial control, plotting as a result tremendous economic growth and devastating economic exploitation upon a hitherto unseen global scale. Thinking through the idea that the Great Exhibition made geography easy, and building upon the anthropological fantasy sketched in Chapter 1, this chapter has been interested in general terms in the way in which the display was seen to naturalize space as a capitalist arena, and in particular in the way that, with its revelation of a territorialized division of labour, the Palace was understood to make perfect sense of the way the world worked. A great deal of the next chapter is spent examining the notion that the Exhibition did not in fact serve to reveal the pre-existing, providential industrial and commercial symmetry that so many commentators had claimed to discern, and that was held quite naturally to shape the new world order. But as will become clear, observers did not give up on the idea of the global village, albeit that we will increasingly consider commentary that emphasized that non-European territories in particular required European intervention in order that they might be incorporated within such a community. Attention thus turns in the second half of this book to the way in which the Great Exhibition can be understood with relation to the “map of domination” that emerged in the years following the Crystal Palace.



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3

Ain’t it clear? “[T]his is the Exhibition’s vally, if we chose to understand it; to prove by direct comparison what each people stand in need of, and so urge ’em to take something in exchange for what they give.”1 The previous chapter read the fictional American tourist Peleg E. Wheeler’s correspondence with regard to the idea that the Crystal Palace was indeed seen to generate what Wheeler called “this scheme of a complete industrial system,” orchestrating the industrial produce of the nations of the world in such a manner as to bring to light an international division of labour, and thus plotting a future of progressive, consensual interdependency. But this reading is problematic. In setting out his assessment of the Palace, Wheeler implied that the display’s value might not be understood, drawing attention to the overwhelmingly disorientating impact of the event, and punctuating his correspondence with questions such as “don’t you see” and “ain’t it clear”? These questions trouble the idea that the display made perfect sense of the world. Underscoring this point, Wheeler qualified his appraisal of the Palace’s revelatory character, noting that the “elements” that comprised the system the display was supposed to evince were “at present, scattered over a hundred courts and counters.” Read with regard to hesitancy and confusion, rather than steadfast conviction and control, Wheeler’s correspondence throws into doubt the notion that the Exhibition made geography easy, and opens up the Palace in a manner that the commentary considered thus far would seem to disallow. Drawing upon contemporary accounts of the Crystal Palace, Chapter 2 offered a Foucauldian analysis of the Great Exhibition as a technology that was seen to reduce things to order, institutionalizing a 94



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nexus of liberal commercial relations between the nations of the world. The image of the display as a univocal “household book,” or as a scientifically rigorous photograph of free trade’s new world order, can be understood in relation to the work of Tony Bennett, who builds upon the argument formulated in “The Exhibitionary Complex” by noting elsewhere that international exhibitions “produced a position of power and knowledge in relation to a microcosmic reconstruction of a totalized order of things and peoples.”2 Along similar lines, Timothy Mitchell contends that the events generated an “unprecedented effect of order and certainty,” furnishing a “new machinery for rendering up and laying out the meaning of the world.”3 “Geography Made Easy” brought to the fore commentary that both sustained and contextualized such analyses and, alongside it, Anne McClintock’s broader understanding of a Victorian “science of surface.” It thus provided a detailed examination of the way in which the Exhibition’s geographical fantasy rested upon the organizing principle of an international division of labour. As I pointed out, however, the problem with such a Foucauldian reading of the Palace is that it tends to suggest a topic of analysis that produced knowledge (and power) in a manner that foreclosed inconsistencies or contradictions, refusing the politically disparate and multi-accentual character of the display. Punch’s Free Trader’s moral, cited in Chapter 1, held that the Exhibition illustrated international interdependency, thus proving “to demonstration, that the principles of Free Trade are those of nature and common sense.”4 But if Wheeler’s systematic delineation of the Palace’s value keyed into this conception of globalized morality, his troublesome questions undercut the idea of a palatial field distinguished by structural efficacy and resulting in political consensus. Without wanting to let go Bennett’s understanding of an exhibitionary “ambition towards a specular dominance over a totality,” then, it is important when considering the display not to conflate ambition with achievement.5 Recognizing this distinction, but equally aware of the confident totalizing claims inspired by international expositions, Peter Hoffenberg notes that “Exhibition collections and publications represented imperial and national intellectual and social order but, in doing so, also revealed the tensions and ironies inherent in those systems.” In a judicious assessment of the current state of the field of exhibition studies, Hoffenberg remarks a focus upon representational difficulties rather than discipline, and points up that exhibitions “were moments in which tensions, uncertainties, and dissent, as much as consensus and hegemony, were played out and shaped.”6 A few years prior to





the publication of Hoffenberg’s book, Robert Rydell and Nancy Gwinn asked, “Is it correct to regard fairgoers as sponges, awash in a sea of overlaying and reinforcing ideological meanings, absorbing messages presented to them?”7 If the question was designed to produce a move away from hegemonic conceptions of the exhibitionary complex, Hoffenberg maintains it has been heeded: “We have moved from issues of consensus to those of contest; questions of hybridity, audience participation, and shifting identities inform current exhibition studies.”8 In part reflecting the legitimacy of this shift, Chapter 3 offers a substantive revision of the idea that the Great Exhibition generated a systematic vision of the way the world should work. Set against understandings of the Exhibition that figured the display in terms of representative objectivity, heralding its capacity to produce a manageable entity from a previously chaotic world, a whole host of visitors to the Palace discussed the event as a spectacularly bewildering phenomenon, tending towards disorder and disbelief, and singularly lacking in a big idea. While such reactions were couched in positive as well as negative terms, and while they did not necessarily engage with the notion that a coherent narrative was a desired result of the event, three main factors emerged to compromise the notion that the Exhibition deployed things in a manner that plotted a new world order. First, the wrong things were displayed at the Palace. Second, things were positioned incorrectly within the Palace. Third, and bound up with the two previous points, the Palace itself did not furnish an environment that was conducive to the objective study of the sheer number of things it gathered together. If these reactions bear witness to the astonishingly disorientating impact of the Crystal Palace, they also speak to the abstracted and reductive nature of the global order that was so celebrated by commentary considered in the previous two chapters. As Adam Smith stressed, the global village worked by extension in exactly the same way as the local bartering carried out by the tailor, the shoemaker and the farmer. Chapters 1 and 2 noted how this limited model, with all its attendant understandings of generic and moderate wants, universal propensity to exchange and symmetrical distribution of material resources, built just such a village in the minds of Exhibition commentators. That being so, then the great irony of the Great Exhibition was that the industrial produce it garnered drew attention to these limitations. Far from giving monologic shape to a story of interdependency, the evidence offered up by the display gave the lie to the idea that the display made manifest an international division of labour



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through which differently advantaged but broadly homogenous global communities could come together. Understood in this disorienting context, the “good story” that the Victorians wanted to tell about the world was shown to be inadequate and liable to break down, and Wheeler’s commentary can be understood to dramatize a tension between the display’s grand narrative and the Palace’s content. As I suggested towards the end of the previous chapter, however, there is an important qualification to be drawn here: if the Exhibition generated complications and discrepancies that called into question a Victorian understanding of globalization, it does not necessarily follow that it was seen to undermine the legitimacy of free-trade industrial capitalism, or the fantasy of an interdependent world order with which it was associated. As Hoffenberg notes, recent analyses of international exhibitions have challenged a willingness to link vision, knowledge and power, identifying a tendency to overplay a totalizing imperative that they revise. But to deny that the Exhibition was a univocal event is not to deny that it generated circuits of knowledge and power that could be exerted in order to bolster politically, economically and culturally the “global hegemony of the West.”9 This chapter argues that the Crystal Palace generated a picture of global industry that constituted more of a geographical nightmare than a dream for Victorian champions of utilitarian economic interdependency. But it is also concerned to demonstrate that Exhibition commentary worked to recuperate a globalized fantasy that served Western interests, even as it undercut the idea of the world market as a structure that, in keeping with bourgeois aesthetics, realized quite naturally a “unity-in-variety” of self-regulating and self-determining parts. Underpinning much of the commentary considered in the previous two chapters was the suggestion that representative endeavour allied with free-market economics would generate a new world order; to reveal things as they truly were at the Exhibition was to allow them to fall into place outside the building. Thus understood, the hand of friendship proffered by John Bull at Hyde Park served only to introduce other nations to the economic roles for which their industrial profiles best suited them. What emerges in the second half of this book, however, is the idea that the Palace was instead seen to make clear the need to shape the industrial profiles of various global communities; a form of man-made restructuring that carefully but forcefully intervened in order that free-trade globalization could occur. This idea did not require that commentators give up on the conviction that the Exhibition would get to the truth of the matter, co-ordinating the way the world should





work in a manner that sustained a Smithian account of life on earth. But it did require them to foreground the fact that particular nations would need to employ their economic rationale and exert their industrial power in order that other lands and their peoples might assume their proper, providential position within an international economy. This was a process of overhaul that had at its centre the notion of historical difference between nations. And it was to see John Bull taking on a far more hands-on role in the creation of a new world order.

The poetry of industry In February 1851 The Times carried a letter from Scrutator, a correspondent anxious that the goods on display at the Exhibition would not be distinguished “by the silent but significant comments of £ s. d.”10 The letter referred to the recent decision of the Royal Commission to prevent exhibitors from advertising the price of their exhibits, either wholesale or retail. Scrutator contended that a desire to prevent the public from calculating retail mark-up had seen the “numerous class” of commercial dealers (and especially London shopkeepers) lobbying clamorously and effectively against wholesale prices being advertised. Charles Babbage commented that the decision had been taken in order to prevent the Palace from turning into a bazaar, and referred to the official reason given: “The Exhibition being intended for purposes of display only, and not for those of sale . . . the Commissioners have decided that the prices are not to be affixed to the articles exhibited.”11 Whatever the reason, Babbage and Scrutator were convinced that the decision to downplay cost in this manner was wrong. In defending this argument, both commentators brought to the fore a debate that can be broadly but usefully conceived in terms of commerce versus culture. This conception can be refined with regard to the way in which the ethics of utilitarianism were understood to be compromised by the excesses of exhibitionism.12 Falling squarely in the commercial camp, Babbage contended that the exchange of commodities was “the great and ultimate object of the Exposition.” This being so then why was it, he complained, that the market’s ultimate point of reference was to be ignored: “The price in money is the most important element in every bargain; to omit it, is not less absurd than to represent a tragedy without its hero, or to paint a portrait without a nose.”13 As Babbage recognized, the case against this claim rested upon the notion that, unless unchecked, industrial capitalist market forces would tend towards worthlessness and vulgarity in manufactures. In tension with the free-market ethos that has thus far



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been associated with the display, then, one of the principle aims of the Great Exhibition, championed by Henry Cole in particular, was to act as a form of market intervention in order to curb this tendency. By disregarding the price of exhibits it was hoped that the Exhibition would encourage a focus upon more formal, artistic considerations, raising the standard of British design by revealing the deficiencies of its mechanized ornamentation in comparison with the aesthetic sophistication of continental manufacturers. Significantly, however, and as Babbage made clear, the intention of promoting good design, which might be designated a cultural ambition, could be condemned for interfering with the aim of advancing commerce. Foreshadowing Babbage’s claim that the ultimate objective of the Exhibition was to facilitate exchange and promote the general diffusion of wealth, Scrutator’s letter evinced the way in which this condemnatory critique could take shape. Turning on its head the argument that tasteful continental manufactures would improve the over-elaborate and vulgar excesses of domestic industry, Scrutator feared that the display of foreign goods without price would eclipse what he saw as the modest but practical triumphs of British manufacturing. Explaining his anxiety with reference to the potentially embarrassing juxtaposition of Lyon’s “gorgeously wrought” brocaded silk with simple Manchester calico, he reminded his metropolitan audience that “we excel not so much in highly ornamented and artfully elaborated articles sold at high prices as in objects fabricated in enormous quantities at comparatively low prices by means of machinery.”14 Thus the exclusion of price was understood to compromise the utilitarian spirit of mass production behind the display’s commercial agenda, and Britain was cast as a nation not in aesthetic decline but manufacturing ascendancy. As indicated, however, concerns over the advertisement of price represented only one aspect of a body of writing that threw into doubt the Exhibition’s capacity to encourage and co-ordinate utilitarian commercial intercourse. Scrutator concluded his letter by observing that, notwithstanding issues over pricing, the very nature of exhibitions would interfere with the Crystal Palace’s benefit to the working world: The purpose of the enterprise being to present a vast museum of the products of the world’s industry, the articles composing such a museum ought to be the real products of this industry. There is, however, on all such occasions an almost inevitable tendency to present, not the normal objects of real commerce, but articles merely got up for exhibition – articles so gorgeously decorated and ornamented,





and constructed at such expense, as to render it impossible for them ever to be the objects of practical manufacture. This tendency, if not opposed, may place the Great Exhibition in the same relation to the real industry of the world as the peasants in an opera ballet bear to the real rustics of the village and the field. The Exhibition would be, so to speak, the poetry of industry, rather than industry itself.15 In the nineteenth century, as M. H. Abrams has noted, “poetry as a whole is not ‘true,’ in the way that science is true.”16 If Romanticism did not necessarily drive a wedge between poetry and “Matter of Fact, or Science,” the “contradistinction” that William Wordsworth famously observed between the two pursuits can be understood to feed into the way in which Scrutator chose to express a tension between an explicitly cultural form of (mis)representation and the industrial reality to which it supposedly pertained.17 Because it positioned the Great Exhibition as a palatial environment characterized by artistic license and imaginative freedom, rather than suitable for empirical observation and objective study, Scrutator’s analysis is in stark contrast to the body of commentary considered in the previous chapters, and dramatically undercuts the kind of truth with which the event was associated. But at the same time it sits comfortably with a host of other responses to the display. From acclaim inspired by the Exhibition’s representative rigour, which played up the idea of scientific reality, we turn now to the idea that the poetic tendency Scrutator identified was not sufficiently countered in the manner he demanded. According to this line of thought, the representative capacities of the Exhibition were to be understood in terms of cultural artifice not commercial actuality, rendering the Palace something of an escape from rather than rationalization of the real world. To some degree this poetic tendency was, as Scrutator had feared, associated with the kinds of objects displayed at the Exhibition. The American Horace Greeley, founder of the Liberal Republican Party and editor of the New York Tribune, spoke for many when he noted that the “ludicrous, the dissonant, the incongruous, are not excluded from the Exhibition.”18 Serving as a damning indictment of the Palace’s failure to rationalize industrial activity in the manner envisaged and heralded, Tallis’s History noted that “industry, unguided by the unerring truths of philosophy and the essential demands of utility, is sometimes nothing better than industry ‘run mad.’ ”19 Far from reining in this insane inclination, the Exhibition seemed only to have spurred it on. In part this was the result, as John Davis notes, of a desire to show off craftsmanship that led to “industrial machinery built in the Egyptian



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style, the Emperor of Russia’s patently over ornamented vase by Garrard, decanters that were almost impossible to pick up and furniture that was completely unsuitable to use.”20 Discussing the ridiculous lengths to which manufacturers would go in order to elaborate their designs, the Illustrated London News formulated a distinction between spectacle and application: “We may look at a tissue which nobody could wear; at a carriage in which nobody could ride; at a fire place which no servant could clean if it were ever guilty of a fire; at a musical instrument not fit for one in fifty thousand to play; at endless inventions incapable of the duties imputed to them.”21 Extravagant ornamentalism was thus seen to compromise function at the expense of form, but so too spectators were puzzled by the nonsensical character of the exhibits themselves. Having wondered at a mechanized bed from Jersey that promised to serve at once as alarm clock and washing station, tipping its occupant into a bath of water at the appointed hour, a visitor to Hyde Park could move eastwards down the Palace’s main nave to the Zollverein stand, there to find a family of weapon-wielding, musical instrument-playing stuffed animals. As it attempted to “enumerate a few of the absurdities” on view, Tallis’s History could not resist Count Dunin’s “Man of Steel.” More a grotesque than a gorgeous example of industrial poetry, the figure was comprised of seven thousand pieces of steel, and could grow “from the standard size of an Apollo Belvidere to that of a Goliath.”22 For Tallis it was both singular and puzzling in its nature. Singular maybe, but also curiously representative. Writing on science and the Exhibition, the chemist and photographer Robert Hunt lamented that while the “ingenuity” of displays such as Dunin’s Man could not be doubted, “we fear their utility is questionable. They are among the things which sometimes cause us to marvel at the variety of ways to which human invention is frequently applied without the probability of any satisfactory practical result.”23 Such commentary bore out Scrutator’s concerns over the way in which novelty and not use value would emerge as a central theme of the Exhibition. But as much as the kind of items exhibited, it was also the layout of things in the Palace that prompted utilitarian concern. In an article regarding the Exhibition organizers’ decision to implement a system of national arrangement, The Times expected that the Exhibition-goer would “detect the strong and weak points in the productive powers of the various countries represented.” Elaborating upon the layout of the Palace, however, the piece noted that machinery and raw materials, “the least attractive portions of the display,” would be



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Brilliancy and splendour of colour and form will thus be shown off to the greatest advantage, and the effect will be still further increased by the adoption of a geographical arrangement which places the showy productions of tropical regions nearest to the transept, and removes to the extremities the less gaudy but more useful industry of colder climates.24 Broadly speaking an accurate assessment of the way things took shape at the Exhibition, this account called into question the notion that the aesthetic appeal of the display would lie in its revelation of systematic unity, and upset the idea of the Palace bringing to light those useful, quotidian goods that would constitute the material basis of globalization.25 Echoing and refining the tension Scrutator identified between cultural artifice and commercial reality, a later article from The Times made explicit what the above piece only implied: the marginalization of “less gaudy” exhibits was held to encourage a taxonomy of things that ranked the spectacular above the practical, and the poetical above the real. As the display drew to a close, the article described a quiet, unvisited corner of the Crystal Palace, “possessing no theatrical properties, but full of a material of industrial significance.”26 The stand in question represented Manchester, the world capital of free trade and industrial modernity. The material to which the article referred was manufactured cotton, alongside the steam engine perhaps the most powerful register of a machine-driven globalized order. In the face of what it suggested was overwhelming public disinterest, the piece resignedly concluded that the display had “yielded more admiration to the grand and the beautiful, than to the unostentatious, the practical, and the useful.” If both the character and arrangement of the things displayed contributed to this sense that a poetical or showy impulse interfered with the real industrial worth of the event, then so too did the sensational environment created within the Exhibition. Remarking that the Palace had “quite the effect of fairyland,” Queen Victoria suggested she had returned from a visit “quite dead beat and my head really bewildered by the myriads of beautiful and wonderful things, which now quite dazzle one’s eyes.”27 Thomas Carlyle pronounced the display beautiful nonsense, no more, no less: “To have looked at it as sense, or tried to learn or study anything in such a scene wd have driven



set to the side of the Palace, with manufactures and fine arts taking centre-stage:

me mad.”28 The disorientating impact of the display was in large part caused by the number of exhibits on show, coupled with the sheer scale of the building. In addition, while its glass-and-iron architecture encouraged commentators to think about the Palace as a precise and revelatory piece of visual technology, it was also the case, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch comments, that the building astounded visitors owing to its unprecedented brightness.29 Although not everyone was impressed, the anonymous author of The Glass-Berg was enchanted by the “strange seducing shapes” revealed to him in “a flood of light.”30 The smells and sounds of a building that featured plants, fountains, working machinery and live music, as well as thousands of Exhibition-goers themselves further contributed to the baffling (if beguiling) environmental effect, and further removed the Palace from the Foucauldian notion of an empowering, truth-discerning mode of visibility “freed from all other sensory burdens.”31 Samuel Warren noted: There was music echoing through the transept fabric. Fragrant flowers and graceful shrubs were blooming, and exhaling sweet odours. Fountains were flashing and sparkling in the subdued sunlight . . . objects of every form and colour imaginable, as far as the eye could reach, were dazzlingly intermingled: and there were present sixty thousand sons and daughters of Adam, passing and repassing, ceaselessly: bewildered charmingly.32 For Warren the scene called for those transcendent, interpretive powers that Carlyle insisted belonged to the heroic poet of another time and another place. Invoking Dante, Tasso, Milton and Shakespeare, Warren suggested that it was the “Laureate,” replete with lyre, who might see beyond the charm of the display in order to extract from it some higher meaning.33 In 1848 Charles Kingsley described the nineteenth century as a time of Manchester schools, “when men are telling us that the poetic and enthusiastic have become impossible, and that the only possible state of the world henceforward will be a universal good-humoured hive, of the Franklin-Benthamite religion.”34 No doubt influenced by the kind of commentary that cast the display as a kind of Baconian cathedral to this utilitarian religion, Charles Dickens regretted the Great Exhibition as an example of what he similarly saw as a coldhearted if pragmatic Victorian tendency to ignore humanity’s romantic inclinations: “There is a range of imagination in most of us, which





no amount of steam-engines will satisfy; and which the The-greatexhibition-of-the-works-of-all-industry-of-all-nations, itself, will probably leave unappeased.”35 In tension with the form of arid quest to quantify and regulate the world, however, the Crystal Palace was figured by many visitors as a “fairyland” locus that deflected a Grandgrindian demand for facts, defying analysis and instead exciting the imagination. For Charlotte Brontë, then, it was as if the Exhibition organizers had called upon the services of “Eastern genii” in setting up the display: “It seems as if magic only could have gathered this mass of wealth from all ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it thus, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous powers of effect.”36 Poetic not prosaic, romantic not real, and carnivalesque not quotidian, thus would the Palace become distinguished as a world apart from the economic reason and common sense of the Manchester School. As the Exhibition drew to an end, the French journalist John Lemoinne observed wryly that for “poetic imaginations, there would be a certain charm in the destruction of this magical work, which would only, as it were, have appeared on the stage as a passing scene.”37 Such commentary picked up not only on anxieties regarding the fate of Paxton’s building (designed to be dismantled), but more generally on the feeling that by realizing “the poetry of industry” the Exhibition had proved an enchanting but ephemeral success. Many Victorians felt it inevitable that this gateway to a “fairy” world would be shut. Playing upon this idea, a banner was unfurled from the galleries on the Exhibition’s closing day. Bearing an inscription lifted from The Tempest, it indicated that, like Prospero’s masque, the Palace was a triumph of style over substance, a spirited but baseless vision that, after the manner of all such insubstantial pageants, would fade leaving “not a rack behind.”38

Criticism after poetry As it was set out by Scrutator, and developed by other Exhibition commentary, the idea that the Great Exhibition generated a “poetry of industry” compromised the utilitarian commercial imperatives associated with the event. There was, however, another way of seeing things: World exhibitions are the sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish. “Europe is off to view the merchandise,” says (Hippolyte) Taine in 1855 . . . World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of commodities. They create a framework in which use value recedes into the background. 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young


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Walter Benjamin’s analysis of international expositions as sites devoted to commodity fetishism throws a very different light on this idea of a bewildering and escapist world of fantastic sights, seductive shapes and strange sensations. It demands that the Crystal Palace is seen to have promoted exchange-value in line with what Guy Debord would later term the “spectacle,” an understanding of signification under capitalism premised upon the notion that, as Rachel Bowlby has set out, “modern consumption is a matter not of basic items bought for definite needs, but of visual fascination and remarkable sights of things not found at home.”40 Taking up this suggestive line of analysis, Thomas Richards builds upon Benjamin’s analysis and Debord’s work in order to propose the Great Exhibition as the historical event that gave birth to a spectacular commodity culture. Structuring what he terms a “consumerist phenomenology,” the spectacle at Hyde Park was for Richards a neat synthesis of the aesthetic – “Being inside the Crystal Palace was an almost hallucinatory experience: you felt overpowered by sweetness and light” – and the economic – “the spectator could formulate what were essentially consumer preferences . . . the Crystal Palace turned you into a dilettante, loitering your way through a phantasmagoria of commodities.”41 Thus the Palace became a “semiotic laboratory” (3), representing all goods in a manner that effaced questions over their use-value and promised “that each and everyone of them would one day be democratically available to anyone and everyone” (19). In terms of locating the spectacular emergence and consolidation (if not the beginning) of modern consumerism as a phenomenon bound up with a capitalist mode of representation, Richards’s argument is powerful. But his specific contention that the Exhibition “was devised by a think tank” in order to produce this form of fetishistic consumption is highly questionable (138). Equally, his more general claim that commodity culture took powerful hold within the Palace – “The Great Exhibition of Things made it possible to talk expressively and excessively about commodities” (21) – comes at the expense of attention to the tremendous body of material that explicitly refused the idea that the Palace had succeeded in establishing a space within which it was possible to analyse the operation of the global marketplace. 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young


They open up a phantasmagoria that people enter to be distracted. The entertainment industry makes this easier by elevating the person to the level of the commodity. He surrenders to its manipulations while enjoying his alienation from himself and others.39

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We take it for granted, as the rule, that only things will be exhibited that are supposed to be useful, agreeable, or convenient. The bulk will be made to sell. Things that are of no use, whatever time and trouble they may have cost their makers, should find little place in such an exhibition. It is not to be a cabinet of curiosities, or a museum of wonders, but an exhibition of what each people of the world can do to promote the ease, convenience, and happiness of themselves and others.42 Concerned to detail the limitations of a late-eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century conception of the commodity, one that he proposes would be superseded by the understanding of articles of exchange that the Exhibition generated, Richards correctly notes that for Adam Smith the commodity was “a featureless channel of exchange,” an “essentially neutral,” “colourless” entity that could be exchanged freely according to the laws of supply and demand.43 The above article, which rests upon many of the assumptions underpinning the abstracted economic fantasy explicated in the two previous chapters, reinforces the fact that this Smithian conception of the commodity, as a universal conduit for exchange existing outside of the contingencies of history and culture, retained both its currency and its appeal for mid-nineteenth-century commentators. Surveying the exhibits the following summer, and ignoring the complex questions concerning the production, exchange and consumption of goods that these culturally, socially and geographically diverse goods raised, the Economist concluded gloomily that the Palace was not “a market where the world’s wants can be supplied.”44 Where Richards proposes a Benjaminian sea change that inaugurated the “spectacularization of the commodity,” then, I see a tension between commodity spectacle and globalized fantasy.45 But I also see a move on the part of commentators to resolve this tension, in a manner that privileged Western commodities, discarded non-Western artefacts, and fed into the idea that Victorian economic expansion would shape a market that could satisfy those “world’s wants” highlighted by the Economist. With this tension and its resolution in mind, we can turn once again to William Whewell’s important lecture on the progress of arts and



In April 1850 the Economist foreshadowed Scrutator’s insistence that the articles exhibited at the Exhibition should be “the normal objects of real commerce,” underscoring as it did so the way in which this commercial reality pertained to the wider truths of interdependent globalization:

science as exemplified at the Great Exhibition. As was discussed, the photographic analogy deployed by Whewell in order to invoke the idea of a revelatory, precise and totalizing “field of view” sat comfortably with the popular conception of the Great Exhibition as an enlightened technology for globalization. In fact, however, this image of the display came only after Whewell had cast the event as a “picturesque and affecting” phenomenon.46 If for other commentators this impact induced amazement and a sense of magical ephemerality, Whewell insisted that a “scientific moral” tending towards material empowerment could be extracted via a retrospective mode of analysis (9). Falling back on an interpretive model derived from Greek antiquity, he contended that science came after art, just as criticism came after poetry. Furthering this analogy, Whewell proposed that, since the days of wonderment and enjoyment had passed by, “the time for criticism seems to have arrived” (6). While Whewell was not alone in calling attention to the poetic character of the display, neither was he a solitary voice in thus indicating that enchanting amusement need not efface instructive worth. This general call for critical analysis was not necessarily motivated by any shared or clearly defined political, economic or industrial agenda, and Steve Edwards has argued that Whewell’s particular concern was to carve out a space for intellectual activity on the part of objective experts such as himself. In so doing, however, Edwards makes the point that the Tory philosopher/scientist was “an intellectual opponent of Utilitarianism and Ricardian political economy,” adding that he was “not a simple prophet of technological progress.”47 That being so, we have seen nevertheless that, as he commented on the capacity of the Palace to capture the “surface of the globe,” Whewell’s address fell in line generally with political economy’s holistic and systematic aesthetic. Moreover, an examination of the way in which Whewell’s criticism extracted sense from the industrial poetry he discerned reveals that, when speaking in a global context, Whewell was drawn towards an industrial capitalist order of things wrought through technological accomplishments. Feeding into his claim that the Crystal Palace had photographed the world, Whewell set out that the real value of the Exhibition lay in its capacity to plot a global geography in historical and not just spatial terms: In the useful and ornamental arts nations are always going forwards, from stage to stage. Different nations have reached different stages of this progress, and all their different stages are seen at once, in the




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Whewell then moved to consider the simultaneous picture thus revealed, summarizing the photographic scope of the Palace by again remarking a temporal order to this magical vision: “By annihilating the space which separates different nations, we produce a spectacle in which is also annihilated the time which separates one stage of a nation’s progress from another” (14). Discussing this alleged historical juxtaposition, and the industrial hierarchy it encoded, Whewell insisted that, while the Exhibition had served to show that “man is, by nature and universally, an artificer, an artisan, an artist,” it had also isolated three main stages to human life. First came “rude and savage” populations. Despite their lowly existence, the work of even the “rudest tribes,” dependent as it was upon the most primitive modes of subsistence and production techniques, was distinguished by utility and taste. But the industrial output of these peoples was succeeded by “the works of nations long civilized,” such as Persia and India. Regarding the impressively intricate and ornamental goods of the “gorgeous East,” Whewell concluded that “Oriental magnificence is still a proverbial mode of describing a degree of splendour and artistical richness” that produced admiration, envy and even despair from non-Oriental observers (17). This raised an important and awkward question, which Whewell posed to his audience and extended to the “Western world.” Given this sophisticated level of artistic achievement, did the Exhibition furnish proof to support the idea that human history was distinguished by a third and higher stage, one characteristic of Western societies? Whewell located a positive answer to this question by considering the contrast between a stagnant mode of socio-economic organization dominated by despotic indulgence and concerned with “the tastes of the few” and one driven and invigorated by a profit motive dependent upon “the wants of the many” (18). Technological progress thus became representative of the way in which self-interested enterprise guaranteed industrial advance and the common good: the machine with its millions of fingers works for millions of purchasers, while in remote countries, where magnificence and savagery stand side by side, tens of thousand work for one. There Art labours for the rich alone; here she works for the poor no less. There the



aspect that they have at this moment in the magical glass, which the enchanters of our time have made to rise out of the ground like an exhalation.48

multitude produce only to give splendour and grace to the despot or the warrior whose slaves they are, and whom they enrich; here the man who is powerful in the weapons of peace, capital and machinery, uses them to give comfort and enjoyment to the public, whose servant he is, and thus becomes rich while he enriches others with his goods. (20) If the poetry of the event had encouraged a rather indulgent sense of wonder, such an appraisal served to clarify an industrial capitalist moral. It also acted as a call to extend the mode of production’s scope. Opening up the Palace as “picturesque and affecting” experience, Whewell’s lecture is significant for the way in which its criticism resolved poetic confusion with recourse to historical difference. “What, then, shall we say of ourselves? Wherein lies our superiority?” (18). In posing these questions Whewell invoked the notion of non-Western difference, a “them” against which “we” could be measured. While his discussion of “rude and savage” populations should be read with regard to a clear desire to structure historical superiority, it is of note that it was a turn to the East that prompted Whewell to register this sense of a collective community. Much of the remainder of this chapter is given over to an examination of commentary that bears out Edward Said’s insistence that the terms “East” and “West,” or “Orient” and “Occident,” should be understood in terms of an “imaginative geography,” a Western orchestration of the world that serves to plot difference in ways that structure discrimination and domination.49 China and particularly India will come to the fore in this examination, although, in line with Said’s arguments, what is at stake in the commentary considered are not fixed and stable geographical entities but conceptions of the East that are plastic and transferable, and that served to make manifest the advances and advantages of that similarly plastic entity: the Western world. The form of temporal juxtaposition Whewell introduced to the display thus coordinated the meaningful value of exhibits by means of their socially progressive character, in a manner that privileged a commendable concern to effect the greatest good for the greatest numbers. And in suggesting that non-Western displays cast in relief the socio-economic legitimacy of Western modernity, Whewell followed a strategy commonly adopted by Exhibition commentators. This strategy linked the “poetry of industry” with the display of non-Western goods, and thus proposed that the Palace’s failure to give form to a proper global market was the result of the presence of, and attention to, the anachronistic and romantic spectacles produced by inherently irrational





and non-progressive cultures. As a result, his lecture exposes to view the mindset that served to legitimize the kind of geo-political-economical stewardship the Exhibition was seen to encourage. Considering the invention of progressive tradition, Regenia Gagnier and Martin Delveaux note the Victorian obsession with rewriting world historical time as a means of privileging European bourgeois civilization at the expense of non-European cultures. They remark that this process of temporal re-inscription, with its insistence upon the West as the “bearer of Progress,” served to efface the fact that Europe did not originate a global economy, so much as belatedly join “an already existing world economy and system in which the division of labour was flourishing with commercial and financial linkages through worldwide money markets.”50 The Great Exhibition sustained precisely this form of distortive re-inscription, pushing to the fore the idea of Western European development as a wholly exceptional and internal phenomenon, and downplaying the idea that non-European societies could have contributed in either material or “rational” ways to the emergence of global commerce, as well as the rise of the West. But while the oppositional strategy discussed laid bare an order within an apparent chaos, setting the material achievements of industrial capitalist civilization against primitivism, despotism and decadence, it did not do so in a manner that was necessarily understood to cut “us” off irrevocably from “them.” So just as it entrenched a Eurocentric understanding of international progress, it also served to open up non-Western societies to a supposedly regenerative form of market intervention on which global powers such as Victorian Britain could pride themselves. Here it is noteworthy that, in declaring that the Exhibition organizers had produced a vision that annihilated space and time, Whewell deployed the phrase that Schivelbusch defines as the “topos” with which the Victorians heralded an ever-shrinking world under the conditions of industrial capitalist modernity.51 What follows in this chapter demonstrates the way in which space was produced by time as a means of making sense of the display. But there was a corollary to this that is also signalled, to be developed in the final chapter: commentators seized upon the idea of annihilating space by time as a means of making sense of the world. Whether he intended it or not, Whewell acclaimed the “magic work” performed by the “enchanters of our time” with a clear nod to the still more impressive capacity to overcome through industrial capitalist interdependency the very historical separation the display had revealed. And in so doing he keyed into the popular belief that if those “weapons of peace, capital and machinery” could be wielded for



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the general good within the West then so too their benevolent power could be exerted on the global stage.

Discussing the “vivid sense of superiority and self-righteousness” that informed the way in which Victorians viewed their position on the planet, and linking this outlook with an expansionist zeal they associate with free-trade imperialism, Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher and Alice Denny suggest that a “ladder of progress” characterized British mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of the world: nations and races seemed to stand higher or lower according to the proven capacity of each for freedom and enterprise: the British at the top, followed a few rungs below by the Americans, and other “striving, go-ahead” Anglo-Saxons. The Latin peoples were thought to come next, though far behind. Much lower still stood the vast Oriental communities of Asia and north Africa where progress appeared unfortunately to have been crushed for centuries by military despotisms or smothered under passive religions. Lowest of all stood the “aborigines” whom it was thought had never learned enough social discipline to pass from the family and tribe to the making of a state.52 While this analysis falls very broadly in line with the historical order set out by Whewell, it would be wrong to suggest that an overarching conception of historical progress and a shared understanding of the relative merits of individual nations’ industrial profiles emerged among Exhibition observers. Thus, while for some commentators French manufactures at the Palace were to be condemned along the utilitarian lines already suggested, for others they were to be praised for an industrial aesthetic second to none. However, while there was no such consensus, it was certainly true that the Exhibition was an occasion at which “go-ahead” endeavour was often figured in terms that problematized its association with anything other than pragmatic, fancy-free industrial enterprise, and an attendant high-ranking position on a progressive scale. Moreover, and in line with this agenda, it is fair to say that in the eyes of most metropolitan observers the host nation emerged as pre-eminent. Hence many Victorian commentators sought to dispel the explicit or implicit criticism of their own nation’s industrial achievements by eliding overly aestheticized commitment with social



Stoppage versus progress


inequality and indolence, and setting it against what was presented as a dynamic form of socio-economic inclusivity. It was ironic, sneered the Economist, that while “the democratic French apply their industry to furnish luxuries and gratify the aristocracy . . . the aristocratic English are intent only, by producing articles of necessity, on supplying the wants of the poor.”53 As Robinson, Gallagher and Denny’s assessment would suggest, such an oppositional strategy served to encourage inter-European industrial profiling that distinguished nations broadly along the lines of a north–south or Protestant–Catholic binary. But the significance of such distinctions had a tendency to recede somewhat when considered alongside the much greater historical failures of non-European cultures. Privileging Germanic and not Anglo-Saxon industrial culture, and drawing attention to Celtic not Latin peoples, Samuel Newcombe’s Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition nevertheless offers a good example of the way in which the ladder of progress could be seen to take shape at the Crystal Palace. Following a lesson in human geography from their father, a trip to the Palace saw little Henry and his still smaller sister Rose plot an ethnographic map of Europe on which was contoured the factual, “real” industrial propensities of peoples such as the Germans and the Dutch, and the fanciful predilections of Celts such as the French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italians. Here Henry’s father remarked that the English comprise both these European “races.” But the steam engines and machinery of Lancashire were heralded in such a manner as to leave little doubt that a Germanic energy coursed through the nation’s veins, and that “go-a-ahead” industrial spirit was to this extent bearing fruit over and above an imaginative although indolent Celtic heritage.54 This established, Papa then drew his children’s attention to non-European nations, with Henry and Rose warned that they were not to expect much of the African section, since Africa constituted “the least civilized part of the world.” Warming to this theme, and remarking that the goods of Tunis and Egypt are “similar to those exhibited by other Eastern nations,” father went on to observe that “the history of the goods from the remainder of the globe will not occupy much time” (160). In fact this assessment is proved wrong, as the children’s attention turned not to the brute savagery of African tribes, but to the industrial achievements of other Eastern peoples. Attracted by North African and Asiatic goods, and observing that their inhabitants seem “very fond of gold embroidery,” Henry wondered “whether they are Celts?” (161). Rebutting this suggestion with the insistence that peoples of the East “belong to a different race,” Papa launched into an



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The East is the land of despotism, where power belongs only to the wealthy rulers. So, it is found that in splendid dress, jewellery, and armour, and in all that belongs to the rich, the Eastern nations excel the Europeans; but that in common comforts – in those articles which all classes need – they do not equal the more civilised nations. (161) In this manner Europe was suddenly rendered a far more homogenous entity, set apart from Oriental despotism and distinguished by industrial utilitarianism and civilized commonality. Without collapsing those rungs that separated European nations on a progressive ladder, the differences are superseded by an “instructive lesson” that made manifest what French political economist Michel Chevalier would refer to as “the extreme inequality,” if not “abyss,” which separated “the two civilizations, Western and Eastern.”55 While it is the conception of an “abyss” between these two civilizations with which this chapter is primarily concerned, it is worth emphasizing that the presence of what Whewell called “rude and savage” peoples was nevertheless detected at the Palace. Discussing the term “Prehistoric Man,” which appropriately enough he had coined in 1851, the Victorian archaeologist and anthropologist Daniel Wilson maintained that specimens of humanity almost completely “unaffected by those modifying influences which accompany the development of nations” could still be found upon the earth.56 Commonly associated with the indigenous inhabitants of Africa, North and South America, as well as “Esquimaux” from the northern and southernmost extremities of the inhabited world, the industrial efforts of such prehistoric peoples were identified at the Exhibition. But there was not much to be said about them. Tallis’s History typified the curt response common also to Whewell and Henry’s father when it dismissed “the productions of those who are commonly called Aborignes, or the less civilised races” as “substantially the inferior fruits of human industry,” exemplifying nothing more than “the primitive elements” out of which had sprung the material foundations of more civilized societies.57 As had Whewell, however, commentators indicated that Eastern nations represented a more advanced and interesting stage of human



appraisal of Asiatic industrial culture (with Asia here defined as India, Ceylon, Persia, China, and the islands of the Indian seas) in which he curbed his son’s enthusiasm for Oriental finery by noting the disparity that blighted its mode of production:


life, and thus could not be dismissed in quite the same ready manner. Indeed, for some a decline in the aesthetic standards of Victorian manufacturing would be arrested by a turn to the East more than the continent.58 For others technological problems that blighted Western manufacturing could be resolved by attending to techniques employed by Asian artisans.59 Even so, such positive commentary was typically accompanied by an explicit or implicit historical proviso that was difficult to detach from a condemnatory critique. When Adolphe Blanqui, another liberal French political economist, noted that the Great Exhibition presented “the different industries of nations, but [also] that of centuries,” he did so with relation to the Indian and Chinese displays.60 Discussing the way in which India in particular, but also the Orient more generally, has been discursively positioned as distinct from the West, Ronald Inden designates Oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production as the interlinked concepts that furnished the political, social and economic context within which Western commentators have conceived the East to be in historical contradistinction to the West.61 At the Great Exhibition commentators seized upon this context in order to account for the bedazzling goods sourced from the subcontinent and beyond. Thus, when The Times informed its readers that in the class of manufactured articles “we find the long-established industries of the Indian peninsula asserting their excellence in a manner at once characteristic and extraordinary,” the word “extraordinary” was a qualification to rather than a register of the “excellence” evinced. Clarifying the nature of this qualification, and making clear that subcontinental artisanship was a phenomenon to be understood in historical terms, the paper continued: “There the arts have remained stationary, while modern civilisation has been slowly clambering up the steep ascent of merit in every department of labour. Yet in those things which the natives of India have done well from time immemorial they still remained unsurpassed.”62 Others passed similar judgements. Considering India’s “celebrated cashmere shawls,” one commentator sniffed that they “were designed for eternity in the unchanging East, copied from patterns which are the heirloom of a caste, and woven by fatalists.”63 An anonymous poet attested to the visually astounding qualities of the Indian court, but he or she was quick to note also its developmental lesson: Nor aught arrests my gaze so much as these Most princely vestures, here outspread to view,



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Extending an analysis of subcontinental industry to the productions of Tunis, Egypt and Turkey, The Times remarked that “the eye is carried suddenly from the rudest contrivances to articles of the most costly and splendid description.”65 The juxtaposition of the primitive tools and labour-intensive techniques employed by Eastern peoples and the elaborate goods they produced with them was thus felt to explain historical stagnation and to signal an embedded disparity between despotic indulgence and peasant subsistence. Gold and silver filigree work, impressive diamonds and jewellery, and impossibly luxurious textile goods stood out as pre-eminent among the timeless achievements of the East, but they came at a cost, and it was one borne by populations held under the sway of sybaritic rulers, superstitious beliefs, social restraints and enervating conditions of labour. A stark contrast thus emerged. Privileging the kind of productions that Oriental societies were apparently so sorely lacking, the same Times article commented upon “the entire absence of a utilitarian system of manufactures” from the stands of Eastern nations.66 Shifting to consider the British display, the paper detected a nation whose industry favoured the wants of the many over the desires of the few, and thus tended towards the kind of social order that, as Henry’s father noted, administered to the “common comforts” of humankind. Given the unstable political climate – at home and on the continent – in the run-up to the Exhibition, this understanding of Western civilization bore with it clear political capital. Cashing in on this fact, many Exhibition commentators were drawn to the Crystal Palace itself, more than the exhibits it contained, in order to extol the benefits of modernity. Paxton’s structure was held to give form to the scientific control, design precision and industrial power that distinguished the Exhibition’s host nation, and that would see its entire population thrive. Considering the historical epoch of “useful industry” with which the Palace was bound, and illuminating the link proposed by Benjamin between the railway and the girder, the Economist contended that just as the railways had placed “all travellers on an equality,” so too the mass-production of crystal palaces cheaper and better than any other form of accommodation would mark another step “towards reaching that high but equal level to which the



Luscious with velvet and barbaric gold, From land of swarth Hindoo. How delicate These Dacca muslins, and these silver webs! How primitive these looms! Primeval tribes!64


natural development of society is rapidly leading.”67 Ignoring the fact that right from the outset train travel had been characterized by class divisions, this illustration is symptomatic more generally of a disinclination to acknowledge the structural logic that ensures that capitalism engenders uneven development not equalization. But it also exposes to view the reasoning behind this disinclination: under industrial capitalist enterprise a rational and ever-improving dominion over the material environment was celebrated because it produced economies of scale, nexuses that by their very nature were held to supply the needs and desires of all. And while the Crystal Palace – the “mechanical ingenuity” of which for John Ruskin, commenting on the opening of the extended Crystal Palace at Sydenham, symbolized the worst excesses of a time “haughty with hopes of endless progress and irresistible power”68 – was acclaimed by proponents of a nineteenth-century iron age, it is perhaps not surprising that for other observers it was machines themselves, more than the goods they produced, which best exemplified the advances and advantages of the West in general, and Britain in particular. Drivers of the industrial revolution and proof, as Adam Smith noted, of a society in which the division of labour fostered the continual refinement of production techniques, machines furnished Victorian society with a compelling but equivocal illustration of industrial capitalist civilization. Although he shared with both Smith and Ruskin an awareness that there were limitations and qualifications to the ways in which machines might improve human life, particularly with regard to their stultifying impact upon operatives, John Stuart Mill was in positive mood when he enthused, “The more visible fruits of scientific progress . . . the mechanical improvements, the steam engine, the railroads, carry the feeling of admiration for the modern, and disrespect for ancient times, down even to the wholly uneducated classes.”69 Medievalism and Romanticism in particular had idealized an organic past in such a way as to render this position problematic. But the great advantage of the Great Exhibition’s global scope for advocates of mechanization lay in the fact that it allowed Mill’s historical disrespect to be cast in terms of a contemporaneous international order of things, not with regard to a national heritage. In Machines as the Measure of Men, Michael Adas has documented the way in which ideas concerning “the Europeans’ scientific outlook and capacity for invention” were cast as “basic attributes that set them off from other peoples.”70 The Crystal Palace brought together on a hitherto unseen scale the international evidence through which to



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orchestrate the kind of discriminatory index that Adas highlights. And viewed on this index, a mechanized combination of iron, steel and steam came to the fore as the gauge and symbol of Western progress. Mirroring Whewell’s use of machine-driven fingers as a means of plucking an Occidentalist meaning and moral from the Exhibition, Chevalier would admit the intricate artisanal skills of the Chinese or Hindoo, but would at the same time maintain that the dexterity possessed by these “two types of the East” served to demonstrate that everywhere “except in the domain of Western civilization, man is a slave overpowered by labour.” Calculated purely with regard to rational productivity, in terms that found no room for the embodied Gothic order that Ruskin was celebrating at the same moment in The Stones of Venice (1851–53), this barbaric form of labour represented only irrationality and socio-economic stagnation. Turning by way of contrast to that “group of nations” whose scientific outlook, technological achievements and industrial dynamism had been “exhibited so strikingly in the Exhibition of London,” Chevalier trumpeted, “We have seized Nature herself with an iron-grasp, and with fingers of steel.”71 As with Henry’s Holiday and Whewell’s lecture, again I note a collective “we” that emerged in contradistinction to non-European failings. But, as mentioned, the Exhibition did not disappoint those Victorian commentators disinclined to downplay the achievements of Britain in favour of a Western cohort. While the displays of other bourgeois nations, most notably America, France and the German states, featured impressive examples of machinery, it was the north-west corner of the British display where Mill’s “fruits of scientific progress” showed – and sounded – most powerfully. Inhabited by what appeared to him as a “thousand iron-monsters snorting and clattering,” the Exhibition’s enormous steam-powered Machinery in Motion court prompted Henry Mayhew to remark that there was “nothing so plain, so solid, and yet so eminently handsome – nothing indeed so thoroughly English as that iron type of indomitable energy to be found in the machinery.”72 Tallis’s History seized on the opportunity to contrast this energy with the torpor to be found in the nearby Indian court, which uniquely among contributing nations featured an ethnographic collection of some 300 miniature figures depicting scenes from subcontinental life. Hence “splendid cotton-carding, spinning, and weaving machinery” was juxtaposed with Bengali women cleaning and spinning cotton by hand; James Nasmyth’s ground-shaking steam-hammer pounded alongside a





rice-grinding operation “that must have required the patience of an Indian to perform”; and locomotive engines, “which convey our correspondence with a celerity not dreamed of a few years since,” were pitted against “effigies of the Dawk-runner, or bearer of the government mail-bags; and the Dawk-bundy-burdar, or messenger who carries the post-office parcels.”73 With such contrasts to the fore, The Times declared the Machinery in Motion court was proof positive that Britain’s “genius is mechanism, her master spirit the civil engineer, her tendencies to relieve labour from its drudgeries, and delegate to iron, to steam, and to the other powers of the inanimate world as much as possible of the burden of toil.”74 In line with Adas’s insistence that perceptions of scientific and technological superiority shaped both attitudes towards and interactions with non-European peoples, I shall turn later to asses the way in which the Exhibition was seen to encourage Britain to extend its mechanized dominion. For the moment what remains at stake is the extent to which, for so many champions of this Victorian genius, the ongoing achievements of machine-driven modernity were understood and celebrated in the context of others’ historical failures. Providing perhaps the most sustained and forceful example of this trend, “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” which Household Words published in the summer of 1851, found Charles Dickens and Richard Horne setting off the “Stoppage” of the East against the “Progress” of the West. Attention to Oriental stagnation, however, prompted a move away from the articles displayed at the Exhibition itself. The Chinese Junk, which was moored at Temple Stairs, and the Chinese Gallery at Hyde Park Place, were thus held to represent the materials and mindset of a “people who came to a dead stop, heaven knows how many hundreds of years ago.” These exhibits were contrasted with English industry in the Palace, which was held representative of the “greatest degree of progress” the world had to offer.75 In Dickens’s Hard Times, published three years later, Coketown, with its “machinery and tall chimneys . . . where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness,” gave bleak form to Gradgrind’s utilitarianism and M’Choakumchild’s political economy.76 But while in this national context Dickens chose to represent industrial capitalist mechanization in the desperate terms of restraint, iniquity and squalor, the global context afforded by London in 1851 generated a very different take upon an engineered order of things. So it was that in “The Great Exhibition and the Little One” Dickens and Horne heralded machines for their capacity to produce



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plentiful supplies of the material necessities of life, and to plot England’s “commercial intercourse with the whole world.” They compared them with Chinese stagnation and described them in terms of “their complex powers, their wonderful strength, velocity, and minutely precise manipulations.” With this powerful and socially beneficial impact in mind, the writers proudly exhorted their readers to “go from the silk-weaving and cotton-spinning of us outer barbarians” to the “carved ivory balls of the flowery Empire . . . which have made no advance and been of no earthly use for thousands of years.”77 It was a contrast, the writers declared contentedly, that proved England was “moving in a right direction towards some superior condition of society – politically, morally, intellectually, and religiously.”78 The conclusion might have been drawn by Gradgrind and M’Choakumchild themselves. This section has dealt with the way in which the Exhibition created temporal distinctions in the world. It has focused especially on the way commentators used spectacular evidence of socio-economic stagnation as a means of casting in relief a mechanized vision of utilitarian order, thereby pulling a good story about metropolitan civilization from the apparent chaos of the Palace. In so doing it has attended to commentary that called to mind a particular idea of the East, dismissing Oriental industrial culture and promoting industrial capitalism in terms of material control and social welfare. But it would be wrong to conclude from this analysis that such commentary exercised any definitive form of hold over Exhibition-goers, conditioning their reactions to the display. Drawn towards the exotic spectacle of the East, Little Henry’s Holiday saw its eponymous hero admonished by his pragmatic, socially aware and forward-thinking father. This incident provides a good illustration of the way in which the Exhibition was valued as a locus that gave form to certain scientific truths, industrial strengths and utilitarian values. It is far less satisfactory, however, as a model of the way in which visitors to the Palace were policed according to such standards, and thus prevented from indulging a desire for exotic spectacle and, by extension, inappropriate and unnecessary commodities. What follows attends to the way in which the extraordinary extravagance of the Orient was understood in particular to compromise the Exhibition, inspiring in the Western visitor forms of excessive and irrational behaviour. This analysis is then used in order to elaborate on the aforementioned tension between the Exhibition as globalized fantasy and the Exhibition as commodity spectacle.




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In 1977, the year before Said published his own account of “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’),” Jorge Luis Borges gave a lecture in which he too discussed a Western “consciousness of the Orient – [as] something vast, immobile, magnificent, incomprehensible.”79 The subject of the lecture was the Arabian Nights, the work that for Borges gave textual form to this imagined geography. The East, he declared, was a world not only of stagnant social orders and economic extremes, in which people are “very rich or very poor,” but also one of magic: “We rub a ring, a lamp, and a genie appears.”80 Suggesting the currency of this magical status for the Victorians, the narrator of a Charles Dickens story from 1850 observed the peculiar form of disorientation that accompanied the “setting-in of the bright Arabian Nights”: “Oh, now all things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of treasure.”81 As indicated, the Great Exhibition was understood to expose to view a barbaric world of Oriental extremes, thus revealing the spectacular nature of the temporal distance that separated the East from the West. But if this aspect of the display attracted attention, then still more exciting for visitors to the Palace was the idea that so too had the display opened up the magical world of the Orient. This vision was impossible to comprehend, but fascinating to behold. With the enchanting “consciousness of the Orient” in mind, I return to Charlotte Brontë’s comment that the entire “mass of wealth” that met her eyes within the Palace appeared as the magic creation of Eastern genii. Refuting any suggestion that economics furnished the Exhibition with a monologic grand narrative, not even the free trader John Bright was moved by the international collection to acclaim the value of commercial interdependency. Instead he admired a sight that appeared “beyond the dreams of the Arabian romances.”82 Other commentators concurred, describing the Palace as “an Arabian Night’s structure,” and wondering at a scene “which belongs more to an enchanted land than to this gross material world of ours.”83 Robert Irwin suggests that the Arabian Nights offered a “fantasy vision” of a strange palatial world characterized by fabulous and intriguing wealth.84 Given this context, and with their popularity ever-increasing throughout the nineteenth century, it is perhaps not surprising that commentators reached for the Arabian Nights as a means through which to convey this sense



The magic of the East

of bedazzling abundance. Still less surprising, particularly when one considers some of the display techniques adopted by the East India Company, is the fact that the Indian court was singled out in particular as “the Aladdin’s cave of the Exhibition.”85 Dominating the 30,000 square feet taken up by the subcontinental display was a large and luxurious-looking tent or divan. “The eye is absolutely dazzled by the effulgence of the spectacle,” commented one observer of this staging device, before adding that “the mind instinctively reverts to the wellremembered tales of Eastern imaginative literature – to the descriptions of the marquees of genii, and the pavilions of enthroned monarchs.”86 Likewise the Illustrated Exhibitor noted that the tent was “a bit out of the Arabian Nights,” while Tallis’s History acclaimed “an apartment completely furnished in the style of an Indian palace, in which was realised all that the Arabian Nights, and other romances, have detailed with respect to their gorgeous and costly luxury.”87 This romantic context, however, was dangerously beguiling. William Thackeray’s Becky Sharp – her “vivid imagination” invigorated by the Arabian Nights, greedily and sensuously dreaming of elephant rides, ceremonial visits to the Grand Mogul, and an “infinity of shawls, turbans, and diamond necklaces” that she believed would result from her marriage to Joseph Sedley, the Bengal-based employee of the East India Company – offered perhaps the most striking literary example of the kind of ungovernable material desires with which the tales were associated in a Victorian imaginary.88 It is worth noting too that as the fictional inheritor of the “aristocratic and opulent” ambitions of Becky Sharp, it was no accident that Anthony Trollope’s Lizzie Eustace was left feeling “like some naughty person in the Arabian Nights” as she struggled to keep hold of her Indian diamonds.89 In a manner that spoke to precisely this dangerous impact of the tales upon metropolitan subjects, Exhibition commentary invoked the Arabian Nights in order to register that the Crystal Palace inspired just such irrational yearnings for possessions wholly removed from the quotidian drives of an economy governed by use-value. So while Marx reached to “the mistenveloped regions of the religious world” where “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life” when he defined commodity fetishism, commentators at the display drew upon a Victorian “consciousness of the Orient” in order to register the kind of unreal added-value through which the commodity form might manipulate and dominate the society in which it circulated.90 And while observations such as Brontë’s bear witness to the fact that the Palace





could be held to endow all things with an “uncommon” but magical aspect, it was Oriental goods in particular that exerted a particular hold, promoting the kind of insatiable desire that did so much to upset the measured utilitarianism associated with the Exhibition. Nowhere was this illusionary appeal more apparent than at the Eastern displays of precious stones. “Has anybody explained, or can anybody explain, the strange and universal attraction exercised by Precious Stones?” So began an article from the Crystal Palace, which wondered why diamonds, rubies and sapphires, far more than their monetary equivalents, “seem to draw not only the eyes, but the very hearts of men by a mysterious force.”91 If Tallis’s History could not rationalize this phenomenon, it could at least account for it. In so doing it registered that the objects on display were as much commodities as they were exhibits. Noting India’s “unrivalled” standing in the area, the article observed that the East India Company’s jewellery division “is a dangerous place for the rich,” advising that visitors should walk through with “the consciousness of an empty purse,” so as to avoid “temptation.” “The East is still the country of the Arabian Nights,” it warned, “the region of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.”92 “A Lady’s Glance at the Great Exhibition,” which appeared as a series in the Illustrated London News, concurred with this assessment, remarking that the jewellery and precious stones on show “half enables us to realize in our minds the wildest wonders of an Arabian tale; to believe that the hall of Vathek might not have been wholly imaginary; and that Sinbad’s diamonds may find a local habitation after all.”93 While the article had introduced the section by remarking that Eastern jewels were suited “for the most part to the tastes and predilections of the female sex,” its author was quick to note the emasculating appeal of such wonders. Lining up patiently to admire the diamonds and other stones were the “most learned of savans, the coldest of utilitarians, the political economist, the bishop and the Quaker.” According to this account at least, it would seem neither Gradgrind nor M’Choakumchild would have been immune to the charms of the Orient had they been able to visit the Palace. Oriental jewellery especially then was seen to excite such fetishistic responses, but it was only symptomatic of a more general trend. Tracing the interests of Exhibition-goers three weeks after the display had opened, The Times resignedly concluded that “India and the foreign exhibitors have carried off the lion’s share of the public’s admiration. The tide of spectators sets eastwards with a far stronger current than towards the west.” More than simply registering the attractive character



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of the Palace’s foreign half, this “eastward” flow spoke to the paper’s declaration that displays of coal and iron, and other “such like vulgar elements of national wealth,” stood “no chance” in comparison with Oriental exotica, including “a brocaded elephant-cloth” or a “Tunisian packsaddle.”94 The energetic responses of Exhibition-goers to Eastern goods were inversely proportioned to the luxurious but stagnant character of the objects to which they were so powerfully drawn. Confirming the uncontrolled nature of this Orientalist turn, the Illustrated London News detailed visitors to the Palace moving “Backwards and forwards, from compartment to compartment, and aisle to aisle . . . rushing, as if a sudden thought strikes them, convulsively to the Koh-i-noor; staring their very eyes out in the Indian tent!”95 Such exuberance rendered hollow the same paper’s later claim that a practical emphasis upon the “high idea of human power” would prevent spectators falling “in love with finery” and becoming “charmed with luxury,” discarding such “trivialities as unworthy of man.”96 Beguiled by the magic of the timeless East, even the hard-headed, cold-hearted concerns of political economy and Utilitarianism were dissipated, and the socially progressive economic moral of the Exhibition was lost. Or at least, it was lost in one sense, but it emerged more clearly in another, since to highlight the dangerous temptations of the East, whether these dangers sprang from the results of despotic indulgence or the recollections of Aladdin’s lamp, was to localize the enchanting and disorientating impact of the Palace. Following the close of the Exhibition, an opinionated and angry article in the Crystal Palace and its Contents, much of it lifted from the Illustrated London News, reflected upon the display as a missed opportunity. What should have been a “perfect encyclopaedia” of global industry, a “starting-point for the future,” complained the piece, had become instead a “provoking blank and delusion”: “In short, money-getting being the object, everything was sacrificed to show and to sound; the most gaudy inutilities and commonplaces were thrust into the foreground, and plain usefulness was ordered to the rear.” The tirade is significant because the irrational wonder of “open-mouthed gapers” was connected particularly with Oriental goods, although here the barbarous decadence associated with the East was extended by association to include the extremities of Europe: Koh-i-noor diamonds, jewelled hawks, court jewels from Spain and Russia, and gold and precious stones, the spoil of Eastern dynasties now extinct, were added by the liberality of their respective owners




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Demonstrating the plasticity of Orientalist geography, the passage underscores the way in which the East was invoked in such a manner as to suggest that “it,” far more than the West, disrupted the Exhibition’s moral. It also brings into clearer view the fact that the Crystal Palace hosted a conflict between industrial capitalist progress, as it was understood to promote the fulfilment of moderate and generic needs, and industrial capitalist expansion, as it increasingly excited extraordinary desires in the metropolitan consumer. Capitalism’s extensive character drives it to effect the “internalization of the outside,” write Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire, further adding that “capital touches what is foreign and makes it proper.”98 That being so then the Great Exhibition, with its global scope and popular appeal, was a site that legitimized this internalization. Certainly this argument might be mounted with relation to the display of Eastern, and especially Indian, artefacts at the Palace. Napur Chaudhuri makes just this case when she observes the display of Oriental jewellery at the Exhibition encouraged a marked increase in demand for such items in Victorian Britain. Like Suzanne Daly, who has traced a burgeoning mid-Victorian commodity culture that saw the Kashmir shawl increasingly assimilated into the homes of the Victorian middle classes, Chaudhuri discusses the escalating popularity of subcontinental shawls, fabrics, cloaks, scarves and particularly jewellery among AngloIndian and metropolitan women.99 Notably she suggests that in the latter half of the nineteenth century “India became a household word in Britain.”100 Clearly the display of Eastern goods at the Crystal Palace, coupled with the exotic manner in which they were represented both visually and textually, can be understood to have sharpened Orientalist tastes and desires, contributing to the process of domestication that Chaudhuri and Daly note. And it is useful in this sense to discuss the Crystal Palace as a fetishistic phantasmagoria, opening up via spectacle a commodified world in which previously foreign things became desirable and proper to the metropolitan consumer. But it is equally clear that even as the Exhibition served to reflect and promote this process of economic domestication, it was also an occasion where the conception of the commodity as both neutral and useful was key, and where observers could react against what could be seen as a licentious, enervating and emasculatory form of cultural contamination associated with types of alien product that had no place in the market. It must



to “make up a show,” and to divert the dazzled multitude from the more utilitarian and instructive purposes of the Exhibition.97

be remembered, in other words, that much Exhibition commentary explicitly refuses to offer up the display as a cultural laboratory for capitalism’s “internalization of the outside” in any totalizing sense. To keep this in mind is to remain sensitive to a discursive context that jars somewhat with scholarship, presenting an easy and uncomplicated link between exhibitions and the processes of material expropriation by which European powers seized planetary resources. Moved by the spectacular manner in which the “splendour” of empire was revealed by the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886, Tennyson proposed the display had generated “one imperial whole,” emphasizing a sense of an all-encompassing material sovereignty with the refrain “Britons, hold your own!”101 If this testament substantiates more recent readings of exhibitions as loci that rendered the world, in all its plenitude and variety, available for imperialist seizure, it also downplays the idea that the Crystal Palace generated complications or anxieties with relation to the story that the Exhibition associated with globalization. The next section addresses the display in the Palace of the Kohinoor, the huge Indian diamond, in order to reflect upon Paul Greenhalgh’s assertion that “Like everything else at the Great Exhibition, empire was a commodity.”102 While this is true in one sense, it is misleading in another, and responses to the diamond make this clear.

The jewel in the crown? In October 1851 the Illustrated Exhibitor included an article entitled “India and Indian Contributions to the Industrial Bazaar,” much of which was lifted directly from an earlier piece in The Times. It cast the subcontinent as the spectacular apex of the Exhibition, and as the most prized possession of Britain’s empire: “India, the glorious glowing land, the gorgeous and the beautiful; India, the golden prize contended for by Alexander of old, and acknowledged in our day as the brightest jewel in Victoria’s crown.” Continuing in the same vein, remarking a “strange,” “wonderful,” “conquered” country from the “infancy of time,” the article reflected further upon the significance of this display to its metropolitan audience: We pass from the main avenue into the Indian collection, and examine thoughtfully the products of the Empire in the East. What do they tell us? Those jewels, that rich display of mineral and vegetable produce, those shawls and carpets in which the harmony of colours is so admirably represented; filigree work in silver and gold, brocaded




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For some postcolonial critics and historians, schooled by Said in the way in which the discursive fabrication of the East places the “Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the upper hand,” the suggestive character of such a display might have been understood variously, but the very fact that materials were offered up to the Victorian subject in this manner should be viewed in relation to the cultural construction of imperial power.104 As Louise Purbrick has noted, a Saidian understanding of “flexible positional superiority” can provide a fruitful and productive way into passages such as the one cited, and to approaching a link between exhibitions and imperialism more generally.105 Discussing the same extract, and highlighting the importance of literary text as well as visual spectacle to the Exhibition’s performance of imperial work, Lara Kriegel suggests that the Exhibitor “rhetorically embraced its readers as members of an imperial nation – real and metaphorical consumers of the subcontinent as it was displayed at Hyde Park.”106 Here her analysis builds upon Greenhalgh’s argument that the Exhibition served simultaneously to glorify and domesticate empire: “the necessarily alien nature of empire was to be reduced and the whole melted into the average British consciousness.”107 Extending this assessment, Hoffenberg remarks that the “imperial picture” generated by exhibitions institutionalized difference, “providing explanations and uses for imperial diversity in economic, social, and cultural terms.”108 Significantly, although to varying extents, all three historians note that this holistic reading of the relationship between imperialism and exhibitions comes at the expense of contradictions that refuse such a closed understanding of the events’ impact. Addressing both the display and the texts it inspired, Kriegel cautions that “surprising and unintended narratives” were produced, “narratives that destabilized the relationship between colony and metropole, criticized Britain’s history of rule on the subcontinent, and ultimately questioned the ideals of progress, industry and capitalism that the Exhibition celebrated.”109 This section discusses the display of the Kohinoor in order to explore the idea that its position in the Palace gave Britain the “upper hand” in its dealings with the subcontinent. Moving on from this, however, reactions to the diamond can be understood to confirm but also extend Kriegel’s cautionary note, demanding that care be exercised by contemporary critics



stuffs, curiously executed carvings, rude models of machinery, musical instruments, arms, elephant trappings, naval architecture – how suggestive they all are, and what stories they tell.103

and historians in order that there should be no overemphasis on the Exhibition’s imperial capacity. Two key points emerge from this latter line of investigation. The first underscores and develops the thrust of this book’s overall analysis, which brings to the fore the fact that midnineteenth-century political economy, and its attendant understanding of a new world order, established a productive but limited discursive framework within which to discuss the exhibits on show. Second, and leading on from this point, Exhibition commentators were often aware of the contradictions that the event generated, wondering how far the Exhibition’s ideals were sustained by the materials it garnered, and questioning what these materials said about Victorian Britain’s position in the world. Attention to such commentary complicates scholarship that has been content to privilege the idea of the commodified spectacle of empire as a means of legitimating Britain’s overseas interactions. If India was acknowledged as the “brightest jewel in Victoria’s crown,” then the Kohinoor appeared the single exhibit that best gave form to this position. Presented to Queen Victoria by the East India Company, following its annexation of the Punjab in 1849, the diamond was displayed immediately outside the Indian court, alongside Osler’s huge crystal fountain that stood in the middle of the Palace’s transept. Enormous, reportedly priceless and celebrated with an Indian name that translated as the “Mountain of Light,” the Queen’s diamond was certainly seen to warrant this centre-stage position, although not for the reasons its name might have suggested. Received wisdom had it that the stone had been badly cut, and it was certainly the case that the diamond did not dazzle Exhibition-goers as they might have expected. In an effort to counter the stone’s lack of lustre, the six-foot-high protective cage that housed the diamond featured a system of gas-lights that were intended to illuminate the stone from below. But despite the aid of artificial lighting, the stone remained somewhat dull, with one observer commenting disdainfully that it was in fact “nothing more than an egg-shaped lump of glass.”110 That said, the same writer described the “adoration of the Mountain of Light” in terms of the “worshippers” its “divinity” inspired. While its appearance belied somewhat its name, the Kohinoor’s attractiveness was not seen to reside in its material properties alone. The romance of the stone, not its egg-shaped appearance, came to the fore here. Alongside (and bound up with) its incredible estimated value, which was placed somewhere between £1 and £3 million, what drew spectators to flock around the jewel were the fascinating stories of its Eastern provenance. “Thou hast a mystery about thee, Kohinoor,” exclaimed Samuel Warren,





before asking “Are thou a thing, but as of yesterday – or a million, million ages old?”111 Even staid, factual records of the Exhibition such as the Official Catalogue or Hunt’s Handbook to the Official Catalogues were disposed to leave aside the discipline and economy of their classificatory agendas, attending to “Hindu legend” and “traditionary fable” as much as “historical record.”112 In place of industrial and commercial facts and figures tabled for other minerals, then, were plotted fabulous if sketchy accounts of the dynastic intrigue, power struggles and Oriental mysteries that had resulted in the diamond eventually finding its way into the hands of the British monarch. This final point was at least verifiable. Whatever the distinctions of its past, dubious or otherwise, and whichever way one now looked at it, the tremendously “suggestive” character of the Kohinoor could, as the Exhibitor had suggested, be yoked to a far more empirically valid and seemingly straightforward narrative: placed behind bars in a cage that featured a crown at its head, and offered up for inspection to metropolitan Exhibition-goers, the diamond belonged to Queen Victoria and her subjects. It is in this sovereign sense that John Davis argues the diamond “represented at once incalculable wealth, mystery, monarchical power and the strength of the British Empire.”113 Kriegel too picks up on its illustrative role, suggesting it signified “Britain’s hold over the subcontinent,” domesticating India by “rendering the infinite and gigantic land manageable and available for consumption.”114 Notwithstanding that the focus of his work falls upon Anglo-Indian relations in a colonial context, Bernard Cohn has opened up such assessments for elaboration. Analysing the codification and representation of a supposedly authentic Indian heritage as a means through which to effect the “symboliccultural constitution” of British India, Cohn identifies the ways in which British rule in the subcontinent invented imperial tradition.115 Anticipating as it did the Queen’s inauguration as the Empress of India some quarter of a century later, the display of the Kohinoor as a part of Victoria’s – and by extension the nation’s – identity fits with such a constitutive programme, indicating one of the ways through which metropolitan life fed into the authorization of formal colonial rule. But if in a symbolic sense of imperial spectacle, as well as the actual sense of physical possession, the Kohinoor appeared to render India manageable and available for consumption, in terms of the Exhibition’s overriding concern with global economic interdependency the diamond did not fit the bill. First, it signified imperial coercion not commercial transaction; the stone was only present in the metropolis because the Punjab’s eleven-year-old Maharajah had been forced to hand it over



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when the state was annexed in 1849. Second, and in keeping with previous commentary that linked the popularity of the diamond with the fetishistic disorientation of Exhibition-goers, the Kohinoor considered with relation to economic utilitarianism simply did not make any sense. Bringing to the fore this point, one publication complained that “the block of coal, the pig of iron, or the bar of steel” would not “attract a ten thousandth part of that attraction that will be mitted on the diamond.” It consoled itself with the knowledge that, whatever the reactions the stone inspired, “the glittering gem of Golconda, is a feather in the scale, when weighed in the balance of utility.”116 Perhaps parodying such Gradgrindianism, but only as it underscored its moral imperative, Punch carried a cartoon featuring Exhibition-goers gazing admiringly at the enormous block of coal that stood outside the Palace. Beneath the picture was the caption, “The Black Diamond – The Real Mountain of Light!!”117 For many observers the pity was that so many visitors to the Palace had not seen things this way. With the Exhibition drawing to a close, and debate raging as to whether some form of industrial display was to continue, Tallis’s History remarked that any such undertaking should exclude articles of “mere curiosity and rarity” such as the Kohinoor. The absence of the diamond, claimed the article, might “lessen the mere splendour of the Exhibition, [but it] would not materially detract either from its moral interest or its practical usefulness.”118 A short story entitled “A Penitent Confession,” from August 1851’s edition of Household Words, dramatized the Kohinoor’s lack of “practical usefulness,” at the same time as it offered a critique on the diamond’s dubious imperial provenance. Written again by Dickens’s collaborator Horne, the tale anticipated many of the themes that would inform Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone: A Romance – a text that in its turn was acknowledged by Trollope as an influence for The Eustace Diamonds.119 Collins, a regular contributor to Household Words, wrote that the diamond at the centre of his novel was based in part upon his knowledge of the Kohinoor. He was particularly inspired by the notion that this “sacred” gem of India was “the subject of a prediction, which prophesised certain misfortune to the persons who should divert it from its ancient uses.”120 In the novel the Moonstone comes to England as the result of imperial violence and robbery. Its presence is figured as both incongruous and dangerous: Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond – bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man . . . Who ever heard




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Attempts to cut the diamond, thus destroying its “sacred identity” and rendering it a “marketable commodity” are foiled (85). The English characters in possession of the stone are never fully in control of it; just as the diamond goes beyond their conceptual grasp, so too their physical hold over the jewel is weak. Towards the beginning of the tale one character dismisses the diamond as “carbon . . . mere carbon” (74). The novel turns on the inadequate and inappropriate nature of this reductive description, and culminates in the return of the diamond to its culturally and historically authentic setting: “There, soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow Diamond” (472). Like The Moonstone, “A Penitent Confession” revolved around diamond robbery, attempts at commodification, and cultural incongruity between East and West. Narrated by a character with a “lively imagination,” as well as a “passion for beautiful jewellery and precious stones,” the story tells of the narrator’s visit to the Great Exhibition, and his reaction to the Kohinoor.121 Captivated by the diamond, and its elaborate system of security, the narrator resolves to steal it. A dramatic tension is created and sustained as he devises various strategies to lay claim to the alien object. It reaches a climax when he finally succeeds in stealing the Kohinoor: “Yes! – yes! – it was – it was the Illustrious Stranger himself! – his Imperial Brightness was lying in the dewy palm of my aspen hand!” (440). The fraught nature of the relationship between the incomprehensible Oriental stone and the charmed Western individual is made manifest by the narrator’s realization that his success in gaining possession of the diamond has also landed him in something of a predicament: “I had got the greatest Treasure of the earth – but what on earth was I going to do with it? The more I thought of this, the more difficult, dangerous, and almost impossible did it appear” (441). At this point in the story the charm of the diamond is dissipated. Possessed of the stone, the narrator quickly realizes that its only value to him lies in the act of exchange. Unfortunately he finds that the notoriety of the diamond means that he is unable to sell it on the black-market, and he ends up selling the stone to a Jew for £5. Echoing commentary that asked why the Kohinoor was displayed within the Palace, the question concerning the utility of the diamond raised so strikingly by “A Penitent Confession” worked by extension



the like of it – in the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country that rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution? (46)

to throw into doubt whether Britain’s stewardship of the jewel in its imperial crown was either legitimate or productive. Which is to say, it rang out beyond the narrator’s predicament and begged, what on earth was Britain doing with India? In order to provide a satisfactory answer to this question, proponents of the new globalized order had to turn away from such priceless peculiarities as the diamond. Significantly then, the article with which this section began perfectly illustrated the nature of this turn, and the moral it could be understood to generate. Having pointed excitedly to the “suggestive” nature of subcontinental exhibits, “India and Indian Contributions to the Industrial Bazaar” went on to dismiss this fabulous Eastern context, and the material culture that was understood to go with it. The East India Company, the article instructed, were to ignore such goods, instead to “begin their rule of India as if it were a new country”: “The evidences of barbaric pomp, the state umbrellas, the cloth of gold, and robes decorated with pearls and diamonds, concern not them. These belong to the natives, to the traditions of the past, and to industries that have been bequeathed from age to age as an heirloom.” Despite their romantic resonance, such items were decidedly out of chord with the display’s progressive economic agenda, and the narrative this was supposed to generate about the world. Pouring scorn on the stagnant if spectacular results of Oriental despotism, superstition and slavery, the Illustrated Exhibitor advised its readers on those Indian products to which Britain could rightfully lay claim: Our part of the collection is the raw produce – the mineral, vegetable, and animal treasures undiscovered and unused till our commerce and the wants of our manufacturers sought them out. Resting upon them, we strive to build on substantial and permanent foundations the structure of empire and government in India.122 The next section expands upon the specific historical context of Britain’s economic relationship with India in order to explicate the distinction drawn between those goods that were useful to British imperial rule in the subcontinent and those articles that were authentic only to an anachronistic, culturally detached and soon-to-be erased Eastern setting. But before doing so there are some broader points to be made with relation to the concern of this passage to isolate those “treasures” on which to ground proper and productive Anglo-Indian relations. Here it is important to note that while the article’s acclaim for “permanent” imperial foundations speaks to a drive for territorial aggrandizement





that ran counter to the way in which globalization was commonly presented, at least by its Smithian/Cobdenite proponents, in all other respects the analysis offered by the Illustrated Exhibitor demonstrates precisely the industrial capitalist rationale that the Crystal Palace was widely seen to promote, and with which we are now concerned. This returns me to the concluding remarks made in the previous chapter. As was set out there, what comes to the fore in the second half of this book is an expansionist drive underwritten and impelled by the notion that the global economy could be shaped via de- and reterritorialization in order to forge more productive commercial relationships than might otherwise exist. As Marx among others would recognize, it is in this sense that British dealings with India came to stand as a model for industrialized involvement with other non-European territories, whether these were colonial possessions or not. Discussing a world in which an authoritative and powerful industrial Europe served as “the international source of money and machine capital and consumer goods,” while a subjected and weakened non-Europe provided “market outlets for Europe’s manufactures and raw materials for its factories,” Adas foregrounds the international division of labour through which Western states positioned whole parts of the globe as adjuncts to their own growth.123 If it was not the case that a global economy grew in exactly the ways and directions some of its mid-nineteenth-century proponents might have intended, it is the case that in broad terms this territorial logic held sway. So while much of the commentary considered in this chapter is striking for its reductive and simplistic understanding of the capitalist commodity and the operations of the market, it is also significant for the way it can be read with relation to a reductive and simplistic drive to transform international industry in the years that followed the Great Exhibition. Playing its own significant role in this transformative drive, the Crystal Palace was indeed seen to encourage Britons, in Tennyson’s phrase, to survey the earth and hold their own. But this was cast as a discriminatory activity, one distinguished as a process of due care and attention through which the resources of not just India but the barbaric and backward world in its entirety could be properly mobilized.

Tabula rasa “The conquest of India by the Portuguese, Dutch and English between 1500 and 1800 had imports from India as its object,” observed Friedrich Engels, before adding that “nobody dreamed of exporting anything



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there.”124 As the nineteenth century wore on, however, the dream changed. Developments brought about in general by industrialization, and in particular by the ending in 1813 of the East India Company’s monopoly over commerce between the metropolis and the subcontinent meant that, as William J. Barber notes, “within a remarkably short space of time, the historic role of the two countries in international commerce had been reversed.”125 Suddenly India was no longer primarily an exporter of luxury goods to Britain, but rather a supplier to and market for metropolitan manufacturers. This shift in commercial activity between the two countries was particularly pronounced with relation to the textile industry, as India’s own manufacturing industry suffered dramatically in the face of the cheap, mass-produced goods from Britain that flooded its markets. At the same time there were concerted attempts in Britain, and particularly Manchester, to establish India as a supplier of raw cotton, in order to counter Lancashire’s dependency upon American supplies. While the end of the East India Company’s commercial monopoly opened the subcontinent up for de-industrialization, the Company’s role was adapted in order to counter (and further encourage) the decline of Indian manufacturing by promoting the production of raw materials. The Marquis of Dalhousie, Governor-General of India between 1848 and 1856, was at the forefront of such governmental stewardship. As part of the drive to maximize India’s capacity to produce raw materials, Dalhousie worked to provide the subcontinent with a modern communications infrastructure, including roads, canals and, most dramatically, railways. At the exact historical moment of the Exhibition, then, Britain was embarked upon a twin-pronged programme to de-industrialize India and to open the subcontinent up in line with the demands of British manufacturers. Playing no small role in this programme was John Forbes Royle, a medical doctor and botanist employed by the East India Company, and the man responsible for organizing the Indian court at the Palace. A pioneer of economic botany in the subcontinent, an extract of his 1849 report to the Company, “On the Exhibition of Raw Products and Manufactured Articles from India,” was included at the beginning of the Official Catalogue’s East Indian section. It served as a manifesto for Royle’s conviction that a fuller, more systematic form of knowledge concerning the subcontinent’s material resources was required. Elsewhere Royle would stress that India was not to be considered simply “as a farm from which we draw our raw produce, when we want them, or as a field which we have to cover with our manufactures.”126 However, celebrating the subcontinent as a terrain both “vast in extent and diversified





in surface,” “capable of producing, within its own limits, almost all the useful products of every quarter of the globe,” the report bore with it the clear sense that India had stagnated, and that Britain’s scientific knowhow and industrial power would be instrumental if these resources were ever to be fully realized and properly mobilized.127 The exact nature of the relationship underpinning this form of assessment was particularly evident in another Royle-penned report, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton, published to coincide with the Great Exhibition. Here Royle declared that India’s “illimitable powers of production,” coupled with transportation improvements that would overcome its “enormous distance,” could see the country preventing those existing “irregularities in supply and price” that blighted the cotton market, and were so marked following the poor American harvests of 1846–47.128 This possibility was attractive in economic and moral terms, promising as it did to offset British dependency upon the slave plantations of the American south. But particularly since the Indian cotton that was currently produced was held by many neither clean, long nor strong enough for the machine-spinning technologies of Lancashire, work needed to be done in order that this possibility could become a reality. The botanist looked to merchants, champions of laissez-faire economics, in order to contend that practical measures should not be forsaken as a result of doctrinal dogma: They, better than any other class, know that even commerce, though it never flourishes more than when left free and unshackled, yet in many situations would never have existed if it had not in a measure been forced, by the more civilized taking to those who are less so, the produce of their skill, to exchange for the rude product of some distant land. Of nations possessing a soil and climate fitted for such a production, some require only to be informed of, others to be induced to do, what is obviously for their own benefit.129 Thus could Royle justify his efforts to publicize not just Indian cotton but more generally the subcontinent’s raw resources to the Exhibition’s metropolitan visitors. And thus was market interference reconciled with Smithian economics, in a move that legitimized India’s subjection to a process of industrial capitalist incorporation that saw, as Marx had it, “the transformation of India into a reproductive country” in order that the British millocracy could extract “at



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diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures.”130 This was the context that would mean the Indian court at the Palace included a whole host of raw materials, some familiar, some unfamiliar, and all catalogued and tabulated in page after page of the Official Catalogue. Indicating Royle’s botanic rigour was felt to have been put to successful effect within the Palace, and casting the form of market intervention it allowed for in the positive terms of an imperial conquest, The Times announced just before the Exhibition opened that those visitors to the Palace whose minds were “filled with poetical ideas of the wealth of India . . . of a land teeming with precious metals and precious stones” were in for a shock. It was, the paper suggested, the prosaic character of raw materials that Royle’s efforts had brought to the fore: The East India Company appear to estimate the mineral resources of their empire by a different standard from that which used to be adopted by potentates. . . . On the whole, surveying generally the exhibition of raw produce brought forward on this occasion, one cannot help being struck by its extent and practical value, nor will foreigners fail to derive from it a high idea of the searching and investigating spirit in which the government of our great Indian empire is conducted. They will see that we have ransacked that vast territory, not after the fashion of ordinary conquerors, but with a just appreciation of those hidden sources of labour and springs of commerce that, in the end, are more remunerative than mines of silver and gold.131 As we have seen, the twin suggestions that the East India Company had refrained from the display of such subcontinental splendour or that a visit to the Indian section of the Palace would disappoint the poetically minded Exhibition-goer were questionable to say the least. What is significant, however, is that other commentators echoed the Illustrated Exhibitor and The Times in reminding readers that Britain was overseeing a tremendous shift to the industrial status of India, and that if the Exhibition gave form to the past, it also bore testament to the shape of things to come. In this way the Crystal Palace and its Contents would note that while the Indian tent realized “all that romance has said of Oriental luxury and gorgeous display,” it was also the case that the “less striking” vegetable, animal and mineral products of the subcontinent should not be overlooked, for these were of higher “interest to the future destinies of our





vast Indian empire.”132 Similarly the Illustrated London News suggested that images of India as a “land of elephants, tigers, cobra-di-capellos, shawls and diamonds” got in the way of the fact that the subcontinent was “even now one of the best markets, either to buy raw produce, or to sell British manufactures,” with the paper again noting the profitable “future” for Victorian commerce and manufacturing.133 While it exaggerated the value of Britain’s trade with India as it stood in 1851, the article reflects more generally that commentators could record in high style India’s fantastic past of tigers, diamonds and genies, even as they celebrated the Exhibition’s role in the creation of a subcontinental locus entirely cut off from its romantic history. Countering the idea that the Palace had failed because it did not inspire wholesale disdain for the useless relics and superstitious iconography of this despotic and stagnant past, such commentary can be understood instead to underscore the magnitude of industrial capitalism’s victory. Whatever the subcontinent’s mystical status, Royle’s extensive and codified range of raw materials bore witness to the fact that Britain now knew exactly what on earth it was doing with India. The next chapter turns to address in detail the way in which the form of imperial ransacking noted by The Times was disassociated from the rapacious destruction of “ordinary conquerors,” and cast instead in terms of a regenerative endeavour. For the moment it is important to focus upon the fact that there was no reason why the “searching and investigating spirit” and overhaul of industrial activity held to characterize Britain’s involvement with India should not be applied in some way, shape or form to other failing and backward nations throughout the world, regardless of whether they came under some form of colonial control. To treat India as a “new country” was to render it tabula rasa, effacing from view any history or culture that interfered with the idea that here was a terrain ripe for the production of raw materials and the consumption of metropolitan-produced manufactured goods; that is to say, a terrain ready to be remade in order for it to be integrated into the same economic arena (although not on the same industrialized footing) as Britain and the rest of the modern world. And if such a scientifically rigorous, economically prudent turnaround was possible for India, it was perhaps possible anywhere. The ladder of progress discerned by commentators was utilized as a means of charting historical movement and explaining why it was that particular nations within the Palace had compromised the display’s industrial agenda. But it was also invoked as a call to reorient the way the world worked in order that a rational division of labour could emerge.



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In a chapter from his Glances at Europe, entitled “Political Economy, as Studied at the World’s Exhibition,” Horace Greeley reacted against this drive to conjoin the world by splitting it in two. Following Friedrich List’s critique of the Eurocentric bias of “cosmopolitical economy,” Greeley poured scorn upon those European architects of globalization who maintained America should be treated as any other non-bourgeois power, remaining “content to grow Food and Cotton and send them hither in exchange for Wares and Fabrics,” and thus dancing to the economic tune of Old Europe. The Great Exhibition, he alleged, furnished an occasion at which this hegemonic vision was consolidated, prompting “reams of essays intended to prove that this course of Industry and Trade is directed by Nature, by Providence, by Public Good; and that only narrow and short-sighted selfishness would seek to override it.”134 Articulating precisely this form of economically motivated condescension, which was heightened by the late arrival of many American exhibits, an article from Tallis’s History designated America “the raw material of the whole Exhibition,” before remarking that it was “the demand for food, lying at the root of all more transcendental tastes – which drives the European to America.”135 Half a century later Frank Norris’s Californian novel The Octopus would detail how advanced agricultural and manufacturing enterprise had allowed the industrial upstart to exploit its rich farming potential, positioning it at the centre rather than the margins of the global economy, and leaving Asia and Europe alike looking “to America to be fed.”136 When the American exhibits eventually did arrive at the Crystal Palace, the capacity of the United States to set the international economic agenda was already manifest. Alongside a rich variety of raw materials were displayed the ground-breaking, innovative technologies (such as Hobb’s lock and McCormick’s reaping-machine) that were to secure this success. In addition, the display of Colt’s revolver gave pointed form to the fact that this industrially advancing position could be defended militarily against the imposition of a disadvantageous division of labour. If America could thus deflect hungry European eyes as they scoured the world from China to Peru, though, other countries appeared to offer pickings at least as rich, and far less well defended. Demonstrating the way in which the Palace encouraged a drive to strip away “native” significance, and giving practical demonstration to the “mutual engagement” Mary Louise Pratt identified between natural history’s “planetary consciousness” and economic expansionism, Exhibition commentators turned to the non-European world in terms that highlighted its as yet untapped or improperly utilized natural





resources.137 Illustrative of this tendency was Edward Forbes’s discussion of the mats, bonnets, cloths and vases displayed by Her Majesty Pomare, Queen of the Society Islands. Lecturing on the types of vegetable produce exhibited, Forbes labelled Queen Pomare’s display as the “most interesting” of all the goods exhibited by “half-savage tribes,” including the native Africans of Ashantee, the Arab, the aboriginal Indian of Guiana, the Carib of the West Indian Islands, the North American Indian, the wilder tribes of Asia and the New Zealander.138 But his appraisal matched and extended a line adopted in the Official Catalogue, which had discussed the exhibits simply as raw materials, complete with the scientifically rigorous binomials the taxonomic system of Linnaeus afforded them.139 Thus the botanist attended to the “simple manufactures” of such peoples with an eye only to the materials they comprised, not their industrial functions or cultural significance. Keen to emphasize the commercial utility of his field, Forbes noted that it was “the manufacturer, quick to appropriate new fields for the exercise of his skill and profitable employment of his capital” who would benefit from the investigation of “the sources and capabilities of unused or imperfectly applied products” for which the Exhibition allowed.140 The combination of scientific precision and economic good sense exerted within the Palace thus uncovered the potential of terrains from which to extract raw materials, and in which to sink capital and promote Western manufactures. Confirming the logic and legitimacy of this position, and extending its mandate from the prehistoric peoples identified by Forbes to civilizations that had lost the historical impetus on which had been built former glories, Tallis’s History surveyed the Egyptian court, concluding that “The true calling of Egypt is, unquestionably, that in which nature herself – the sun and the Nile – have the largest share in the production”: It is by her wheat, her cotton, her beans, her barley, her sesame, her linseed, and her flax, that Egypt can increase her wealth with certainty. It is agriculture and commerce, not manufactures, that nature has assigned to Egypt in the territorial division of labour.141 That Egypt was rapidly becoming a principle supplier of raw cotton for Europe’s expanding textile industry authorized and enthused this assessment. “In the nineteenth century,” notes Timothy Mitchell, “no other place in the world was transformed on a greater scale to serve the production of a single commodity.”142 It was no matter that this transformation destroyed the economic history of a country that had formed,



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as Mitchell remarks, one of the hubs of the Ottoman Empire, both as manufacturer and exporter. The world moved on, and the market demanded one looked to the future not the past. Spelling this out, and drawing attention to the important role played by the Exhibition in co-ordinating a rational rather than a romantic mobilization of global resources, Adolphe Blanqui reflected that the purpose of the Exhibition was to reveal to nations and investors alike those socio-economic inadequacies that compromised the autochthonous value of the terrains their peoples inhabited, thereby preventing “capital flowing to industrial Utopiae.” Greeley might have been pleased to learn here that Old Europe was not safe from economic reorientation. “Spain is above all a land rich in natural products,” observed Blanqui, before remarking that “her mines, her marbles, her metals will in the long run tend more to her honour and profit than her woollen and cotton manufactures.” The Turks were similarly encouraged to “devote themselves entirely to the production of raw materials,” with the economist warning of the dangers inherent to “the pursuit of a more than doubtful manufacturing process,” and pointing instead “to the safer grounds of agriculture and raw materials.”143 Reinforcing these remarks, the Illustrated London News commented on the Turkish display that, “The past pertained to the artificial, the ideal, and the restricted; the future, to be worth anything, must pertain more to the actual, the real, the practical, and the expanding.”144 Its subject was in this case specific, but the thrust of the analysis spoke in far broader terms of the way in which commentators dismissed non-Western societies as historically backward, peculiarly and damagingly out of sync with their material environment, while privileging industrial capitalist modernity for its scientific, utilitarian and progressive take on things. As we have seen then, a capitalist spirit was excited by the kind of classificatory confidence and industrial sense with which figures such as Royle were able to reduce things to order. But for many the raw materials laid out for inspection at the Exhibition were only the start of things to come. Surveying the scene within the Palace, The Times concluded of global raw materials that “one cannot help being struck with the number of apparently useful substances of which we know nothing; and, even when the question of utility has been satisfactorily proved, the cheapness and the abundance of the supply remain doubtful.”145 Such commentary undermined claims concerning the comprehensive scope of the Exhibition. But unlike the Kohinoor, which defied the rational analysis and meaningful appropriation of its would-be Western owners, the issues and doubts signalled here were of a utilitarian rather than epistemological strain. Unknown raw produce from unknown regions of 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young




the world served thus to stimulate rather than disorientate metropolitan observers, who remained confident in the West’s scientific paradigms and manufacturing expertise, convinced that nothing here lay beyond the pale. Anticipating many of the other speakers in the series he introduced, William Whewell used his lecture in order to question how much more material wealth from the uncharted territories of the world might be employed within industrialized Europe: Who knows what beautiful materials for the makers of furniture are to be found in the collections of woods from the various forests of the Indian Archipelago, or of Australia, or of Tasmania, or of New Zealand? Who knows what we may hereafter discover to have been collected of fruits and oils, and medicines and dyes; of threads and cordage, as we had here from New Zealand and from China examples of such novelties; of gums and vegetable substances, which may, in some unforseen manner, promote and facilitate the processes of art.146 Whatever gaps existed in the West’s knowledge of the non-European world, what remained certain to this way of seeing things was the fact that in the production terms of the mid-nineteenth century these terrains existed to grow raw materials, notwithstanding what might have gone before. So it was because of soil, not social history, that industrialized nations could offer the opportunity for un- or underdeveloped peoples and their lands to be reborn into the new world order, there to exchange, in Horace Greeley’s terms, food and cotton in return for wares and fabrics. Just as the bourgeoisie had made the country dependent upon the town, so too for The Communist Manifesto it had made “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries . . . dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”147 Understood with regard to the commentary considered here, this is the drive that the Crystal Palace served to naturalize and promote.

The country and the city Philip Langdon’s observation that the panoramic emphasis of the Great Exhibition was intended to situate “each and all in the same secularized landscape of commerce and natural history” emerged in Chapters 1 and 2 as the organizing principle upon which was founded the Exhibition’s anthropological and geographical fantasies.148 As we have seen,



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however, the idea that the Crystal Palace realized this global scope was disputed by Exhibition commentators, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. In the light of such commentary, I have discussed the way in which the Palace problematized a Smithian conception of the global village. Undercutting a landscaped vision of socio-economic homogeneity with a spectacular appraisal of the heterogeneous character of industrial produce as it existed for different people in different places of the world, the international goods on view at Hyde Park furnished a material critique of an abstracted capitalist idealization. What has emerged in this chapter, then, is the fact that commentators read global space in terms of time as a means of identifying those primitive and/or distorted industrial characteristics that prevented an international division of labour from taking shape immediately and obviously within the Palace. So it was that the grand narrative of commercial interdependency to which the Exhibition was expected to give visual form had failed to materialize, at least in the eyes of many. And so it was that particular nations and communities, most prominently non-European ones, were identified as industrial failures relative to an enlightened bourgeois vanguard. However, although this chapter has been concerned with the idea that the Crystal Palace could not properly realize Adam Smith’s understanding of a global village as things stood, its penultimate section makes manifest the way in which commentators modified the paradigm, identifying an economic relationship that saw non-Western countries fulfilling the role of rural neighbours to their urban counterparts in the West. Recuperating an industrial order for the Exhibition, albeit one that needed to be carefully shaped in the world beyond the Palace’s walls, this model was one that married Smithian idealism with a pragmatic appreciation of the way things actually were. Which is to say, it allowed commentators to maintain that while a global village featuring differently advantaged but historically equal neighbours was to be desired, and indeed worked towards, for the moment what was crucial was to ensure that a landscape emerged whereby international resources could be freely traded and properly utilized. With this injunction in mind we can return to “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” a text that juxtaposed “Stoppage” and “Progress,” but not necessarily in order to suggest that the world was irrevocably riven. The article began with Dickens and Horne remarking the existence of a scale on which could be measured the various gradations of the human family, qualifying this assessment by noting that the “odd, barbarous, or eccentric nation . . . may seclude itself from the





rest of the world, resolved not to move on with it.”149 Such a resolution, however, did not carry much authority, and the qualification was heavy with an irony born out of the feeling that an isolationist position was increasingly untenable in the mid-nineteenth century. Analysing global capitalism’s drive to expand, David Harvey foregrounds the imperial search for “barbarians, savages, and inferior peoples who had failed to mix their labour properly with the land.”150 Following other commentators who cast the Crystal Palace as the material realization of a geo-historical index, Dickens and Horne were well aware that the Exhibition was seen to structure just such a search, reifying its discriminatory categories in an objective fashion, and thus offering up vast areas of the globe for industrial capitalist penetration. Drawing attention to this fact, the Edinburgh Review noted that the Palace’s industrial collection had revealed “savages of the most opposite climates have all but one character of improvidence and rapacity.” Such wasted potential was cast as an affront to the civilized world, although one that could be redressed. The Review continued in a manner that echoed The Communist Manifesto’s analysis of a bourgeois attempt to enforce “connections” all over the globe, registering as it did so the link to be drawn between moral outrage and economic opportunism: Voluntary isolation is now regarded as a crime, and the great Powers of the present day are constantly casting about on the world’s chart in search of some land, hitherto jealously guarded against all intrusion. They seem to resent such reserve, as a slight on the co-operative tendencies of the age, and on the comity of nations, and hasten to chastise the pride, which isolation has at once engendered and rendered feeble.151 So it was that a failure to mix labour with land was presented as an invitation to marshal dormant resources, and the conception of a preexisting international division of labour was replaced by a vision that had the feeble and deviant industrial tendencies of savage and barbaric peoples policed and remedied in order that free trade globalization could take hold. This is the geopolitical move that has been traced above, and this constitutes the point at which we have arrived. Bringing things into focus, then, is Raymond Williams’s remark that “one of the last models of ‘city and country’ is the system we now know as imperialism.”152 Thomas Carlyle’s 1839 essay “Chartism” offers a route into the next chapter’s discussion of this imperial imperative. Concerned with the wretched existence of starving labourers in a “once merry England,”



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Carlyle used the piece in order to reflect upon the globally dominant position of his nation, and the possibilities this entailed. It seemed to Carlyle that Prospero, who took “captive the world” through Ariel, was comparable with Britain, a Prospero capable of sending “his Fire-demons panting across all oceans; shooting with the speed of meteors, on cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms; and mak[ing] Iron his missionary, preaching its evangel to the brute Primeval Powers.”153 Unlike Shakespeare’s magician, however, Britain’s powers were underdeveloped. Carlyle was drawn to those peripheral global spaces that offered much needed aid to a hungry metropolis, were only their currently untapped resources to be brought under the sway of Iron law: Canadian Forests stand unfilled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough; on the west and on the east green desert spaces never yet made white with corn; and to the overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our Terrestrial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted by nomads, is still crying, Come and till me, come and reap me! And in an England with wealth, and means for moving, such as no nation ever before had.154 “Chartism” is significant not only because it foreshadows that conception of fecund but wasted non-European space that the Crystal Palace did so much to perpetuate, but also for its emphasis upon the communication technologies through which to penetrate these terrains. I have discussed the idea that machines served to measure men. Following on from this I have also noted the fact that mechanized progress demanded that the advanced West acted as an industrial hub around which the rest of the world revolved. But while machines excited an appetite for primary produce, as well as new sites for manufacturing export and capital investment, they were also vital if the planet was to be properly opened up and efficiently connected. As will become clear, then, the acclaim bestowed by Carlyle upon steamships and railway locomotives was very much reflected by those Exhibition commentators who discussed these industrialized “means of moving.” Here the missionary zeal with which these technologies were figured is important. The notion that a reorientation of the way the world worked would serve to make the planet a better place for all its inhabitants underlay much of what has been discussed and fed into the imperial mindset that it established. Thus Michael Adas’s observation that machines were “key components of the civilizing-mission ideology that both justified Europe’s hegemony and vitally influenced the ways in





which European power was exercised.”155 Focusing on the steam-driven capacity to annihilate space and time, fruitfully positioning backward nations within a modern world order, part of the next chapter highlights railways, as well as steamships and the electric telegraph, in its discussion of the way in which such a civilizing mission took shape at the Exhibition. However, while these machines could be held as bearers of Western progress to savage and barbaric peoples, it is worth noting that this is not what “Chartism” did. Lending vocal agency to the soil rather than those who lived on it, Carlyle had his iron missionaries engaging with and transforming the landscape, not its wasteful inhabitants. By casting the project to possess and mobilize non-European resources in terms of the needs of the penetrators rather than those of the penetrated, “Chartism” cast in relief the metropolitan economic imperatives that drove this project, whatever its peripheral social impact, and however this impact was conceived. As he reminds us of this fact, Carlyle also points us to a literary model with which to explore it further. Wielding magic in order to create a world after his own image, Prospero and his daughter’s life on the island is dependent not only upon the toil of Ariel but also on Caliban, the monstrous indigene who makes their fire, fetches their wood and serves in offices that profit them. Prospero and Miranda claim that their regime, and the linguistic order it entails, has endowed Caliban with genuine meaning, thus making much of him. But this is countered by the witch’s son, who finds himself trapped in an exploitative, accursed and violent relationship with his old territory and its new masters.156 Similarly empowered to shape the planet after their own needs, the Great Exhibition provided the opportunity for commentators to discuss what consequences the capacity of Britain and its bourgeois counterparts to seize control of the world would have upon those isolated, enfeebled and inferior peoples whom they encountered. Bringing to the fore the Britain-as-Prospero analogy deployed by Carlyle, it is to this discussion, and the global relationships it helped establish and sustain, that I now turn.



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Dominance or degeneracy? If the perceived emergence of a new world order can inspire, it can also threaten, even for those considered in the vanguard. “The First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” published in January 1851, saw Fraser’s Magazine celebrating Britain’s standing in the world. But the journal was also drawn to consider “Whether the nation still retains those energies and talents which have raised it to such an unexampled pitch of greatness, or whether it exhibits any marks of that degeneracy which history records as having been, sooner or later, the fate of all great and powerful empires?” While this troubling question was thus related to previous eras, there was also a pressing sense of historical specificity. The article began with reference to the impact and effect of modern times, which were characterized by commercial freedom, “the rapid movement and incessant whirl of material things,” and the overturn of “the old sluggish mediaeval mould.”1 Famously, Marx and Engels cast industrial capitalism’s energy with regard to the dissolution of all “fixed, fast-frozen relations”; the bourgeois epoch was about the “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitations.”2 In asking the question that it did, then, Fraser’s can be understood to have provided a national context within which to consider modernity as, in Marshall Berman’s noteworthy formulation, “an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”3 Raising some of the themes and issues discussed in the book’s introduction, and calling to mind in particular Raymond Williams’s description of the mid-nineteenth-century in 145



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Britain as a “transforming, liberating and threatening time,” I turn in this chapter away from the question of whether liberal, globalized modernity made sense, to that of how Exhibition commentators believed Victorian Britain – and by extension Victorian values – would fare under the conditions which it engendered.4 Nine months later Fraser’s was able to reassure its readers with a view from abroad, answering in the negative those scaremongers who forecast Britain’s decline, and validating the magazine’s own decision to cast aside its conservative inclinations and conclude the aforementioned article by formally announcing its support for free trade. Arriving in London as the Great Exhibition drew to a close, “The French Critic in London” offered a fictional Frenchman’s take on Britain’s impressive and intimidating global standing, although one that focused on the capital city. Sally Ledger points out that the style of the piece echoes the peculiarly fantastical mode that was coming to characterize journalism and fiction in Dickens’s Household Words, launched six months earlier.5 Notably too, the essay anticipated the opening word of Bleak House, rehearsed the opening chapters of Dombey and Son, and elaborated the “world-wide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital” that Mr. Merdle would come to embody in Little Dorrit:6 I have arrived in London! I might end all I have to say, or ever shall have to say, in that one word. London! It is the beginning and the end, and comprises everything. London! the symbol of a dominion that rides round the world with the sun, and commands the commerce of the earth over seas and continents, through the agency of necromancers seated on tall stools, in little dark dens, with pens behind their ears, their thin legs dangling in the air, and their faces, hideous and cadaverous from the effects of the incantations they perform, brooding day and night, over huge books of magic that are stretched out before them.7 While in the ancient world all roads had led to Rome, it now seemed all roads led to London. And while we have encountered the Britainas-Prospero analogy, and will encounter it again, it is significant to note that here a bitter and fearful Frenchman fleshed out the financial underpinnings of a Victorian global sway that other commentators – Carlyle included – would cast in the mechanistic terms of technological sovereignty:



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These are the Ariels that put girdles round the earth in forty seconds – the Prosperos that agitate the waters and still the tempests at will – the potent spirits that call up out of darkness the hidden treasures of the earth, and congregate by the wave of a quill upon one spot, at a given moment, the industry and genius, the muscle and brains, the art and the science, the energy and the wealth, the past and the future, of all the nations of the globe. This is London – a magician’s cell, buried in eternal twilight, where the sorceries are prepared that control the destinies of kings and populations. (497)

Strength, control, retention of a competitive edge, and thus the preservation of hegemony. This was the view of Britain supposedly sent back across the channel by Fraser’s Frenchman. It was a sentiment that British observers, enthused by their nation’s showing at the Crystal Palace, were happy to share, albeit that they were able to depict a Victorian dominion in a far less Gothic manner. Fraser’s had cast financial brains and inventive genius as the undeniable but wholly unappealing guarantors of Victorian power. Searching for an alternative take on things, however, its readers might have remembered that in 1848 Charles Kingsley’s Yeast had appeared serially in the magazine. Published the same year that Dickens completed Dombey and Son, the novel featured another character to give fictional form to a Victorian globalism energized by the nation’s advanced industrial, technological and financial position. “Naturally keen, ready, business-like, daring,” Lord Minchampstead represented the man Dickens’s Dombey hoped to become, having “carved out his own way through life, and opened his oyster–the world, neither with sword nor pen, but with steam and cotton.”8 Three years later the Great Exhibition furnished an opportunity for commentators to suggest Minchampstead’s qualities encapsulated the spirit of his nation and his time, thus bringing to the fore industrial muscle as well as commercial wherewithal in order to figure in optimistic terms where the nation was – and where it was headed. As this healthier, more holistic vision had it, the peculiarly advantageous nature of the nation’s ecology and geography, coupled with the predilection of its inhabitants for liberty, hard work, scientific advance and commercial enterprise, had served as the internal generators of the Industrial Revolution, and had established the conditions that would sustain industrialized global leadership. Thus James Ward,



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We are – with our great national advantages, our unbounded supply of coals and of all the useful metals, the energetic and never-tiring industry of our population, the enterprising spirit of our Anglo-Saxon blood, our peculiar climate which renders bodily and mental activity a condition of healthy existence, and our insular position, so preeminently favourable to commerce – we are, by these and other great national advantages, and for an indefinite term continue to be, the great manufacturing and mercantile nation of the world.9 Such confidence in an ongoing Victorian pre-eminence jarred with the more fluid conception of international relations that free traders such as Cobden could chose to present. But for those who were reluctant to countenance the possibility of shifts in global power, the preservation of Britain’s advanced position invigorated other nations, and so could be justified on moral grounds. According to this logic, the Victorian metropolis was distinguished not only for the cosmopolitan spirit that had seen it inaugurate free trade, but also for those socio-economic features, qualities and virtues that would continue to make the world work better, even as they preserved Britain’s leading position. A lecture on iron-making, from the aforementioned Exhibition series, had iron manufacturer S. H. Blackwell remarking that “wise and beneficent arrangement” that saw “stores of mineral wealth, so needful for the world’s progress,” deposited “in climates temperate as our own, which has produced the strong and vigorous Anglo-Saxon race; to whom work is less a toil than a passion.”10 Likewise a domestic boom in cotton manufacturing was presented in relation to a fortuitous dovetail between national development and global responsibility. Thomas Bazley figured the penetration of international markets with cheap cotton goods in terms of “destined duty” that England was to perform, “her sons having been the honoured representatives of genius and labour.”11 For the Illustrated London News the world had to thank the “mechanical genius” of men such as Watt and Arkwright, alongside the nation’s “mineral treasures,” for Britain’s unrivalled capacity to supply through its cotton industry humankind’s “second great want.”12 Confirming such optimism with a view from abroad, Exhibition visitor Frederika Bremer suggested that, as a result of its industrial might and commercial sense, Britain’s power was “increasing every year in extent and strength.” But Bremer also insisted that



writing as “Philoponos,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851; or, The Wealth of the World in its Workshops:

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with this material sovereignty came the elevating extension of Victorian values, and so she eulogized what she designated “England’s mission” with relation to the pre-destined spread of “her civilisation over the greatest part of the world.” “It is in the sublime benevolence of her national character which so strengthens her human nature,” she commented, before adding, “It is the high degree of culture possessed by England that adapts her to be the cultivator of the world.”13 While it did not give rise to the celebratory mode of writing on Britain’s status as the industrialized workshop of the world that Christine Macleod has dubbed a “heroic genre,” it is in this sense that the Great Exhibition played a critical function in encouraging it.14 But it would be quite wrong to infer from such reactions that commentators were unanimous in welcoming the internationalist and liberal era with which the display had become associated, or thought that Britain was necessarily set to thrive in this new globalized order. Pace the triumphalism of the Exhibition’s grand narrative, and pace the contention that this was a story with Britain guaranteed a leading role, the Exhibition generated emphatic accounts of what the nation stood to lose not gain as cosmopolitan sympathies and free-trade industrial capitalism took hold of the world. As Fraser’s intimated, such accounts brought to the fore very different ideas about Victorian national identity and the results of modernity’s momentum to those we have encountered. Remarking that the “overarching tenor of the Great Exhibition was pacifist internationalism,” and highlighting Albert’s pivotal speech as emblematic of this fact, Auerbach notes also that the Exhibition inspired strands of nationalist thinking that “rejected both the ideals and the reality of industrialization and questioned the very idea of progress put forward by Albert at his Mansion House address.” He goes on to remark that many observers turned away from accounts of Victorian cosmopolitanism, embracing instead “a vision of ‘Englishness’ that was rooted in an idealization of tradition and a rejection of change, an ideal that was shared by both Tory and Radical leaders, as well as the participants in the Oxford Movement, Young England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Gothic Revival.”15 With little time for Henry Cole’s celebration of Britons’ progressive internationalist instincts and heterogeneous racial lineage – comprising the “blood of Saxons, Celts, Germans, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, Hindoos, and probably even Negroes”16 – these accounts of Englishness feared that the increasingly open way in which Britain was conceiving its position in the world would damage both the nation’s global standing and its sense of identity.



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As a result, Exhibition commentators mounted attacks on what they perceived to be the unwelcome foreign influences the Exhibition encouraged. Of a number of publications to have fun with such concerns, Punch stood out. Two articles from 1850 in particular, entitled “The Exhibition Plague” and “Rules for the Prevention of Plague Next Year,” perfectly encapsulated the way in which the confident cosmopolitanism that had prompted Britain to host the Exhibition was seen to expose and endanger Victorian society. The first, featuring a letter from “An Anxious Wife and Mother,” maintained that among other contributions to the forthcoming display could be expected, THE BLACK JAUNDICE, FROM AMERICA; PALSY, FROM RUSSIA; CONVULSION FITS, FROM FRANCE; THE MUMPS, FROM GREECE; THE KING’S EVIL, FROM NAPLES; RICKETS, FROM SPAIN; ST. ANTHONY’S FIRE, FROM PORTUGAL; DROPSY, FROM HOLLAND; AND THE SCARLET FEVER, FROM ROME.17 The second, published some weeks later, saw Punch responding to these fears by offering its readers details of the “stringent precautions” with which a specially instituted Board of Health would seek to control the spread of disease. Included among the proposed sanitary measures were the establishment in the capital of Foreign Baths and Washhouses, the provision of two pounds of yellow soap to every visiting foreigner (to be paid for by a Foreigners’ Charitable Soap Fund), the demand that all foreigners provide a medical certificate of good health, and the distribution of camphor bags to “all suspicious foreigners” twice weekly in Hyde Park. The French would be washed head to foot upon entering London. Germans would be required to provide evidence of fresh clothing before access was granted.18 More than throwing into question the wisdom of opening up the capital city in the summer of 1851, it is notable that the pieces from Punch signalled the way in which positive concepts and tropes associated in particular with free trade – contact, exchange, circulation, fluidity and vitality – could be transposed, inverted and mobilized in ways that refused the idea that relaxing border controls and encouraging freedom of movement was necessarily a good thing. By extension, then, it is clear that fears over permeable borders tapped into the idea



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that as trade regulations were relaxed so too Britain’s industrial rivals would prosper at the nation’s expense. This is not to say that Protectionism was necessarily the root cause of, or the overriding factor in, reactions against cosmopolitan globalism. Alongside perceived problems with industrial and commercial competition, concerns in 1851 ranged from grave fears about Papism, post-1848 revolutionary movements, linguistic purity and miscegenation to trivial and light-hearted issues that included complainants moaning that continental fashions for long hair and wooden shoes were set to sweep through the isles. So anxieties over politics, culture and race, as well as economics, fed into the fact that, as Auerbach notes, “British writers worried that foreigners would cross all sorts of boundaries.”19 It is equally the case, however, that these fears were very much fuelled by a perception that as Britain embraced a commercially liberal new world order so too it turned its back on the important and traditional strengths, commitments and ideals that had made the British empire what it was. To this way of thinking the possibility of national degeneracy raised by Fraser’s was all too real, as the “energies and talents” on which the nation’s success was founded were dissipated and eroded in a climate of misplaced priorities at home and dangerous threats from abroad. What has emerged here, then, is a stark opposition, one that can be usefully, if simplistically, characterized in terms of internationalism versus nationalism.20 The Great Exhibition inspired some observers to suggest that in an increasingly commercially liberal nineteenth century, Victorian steam, cotton and capital rendered the world Britain’s oyster, with the nation’s wealth and health set to improve in line with but also in front of the rest of the world. It prompted others, however, to detect just the metropolitan hubris and complacency, coupled with growing and encroaching foreign powers, that had seen nations and empires fall in the past, and that now seemed set to destroy the socioeconomic prosperity and cultural integrity of a great British/English way of life. Twenty-one years after the Exhibition, Benjamin Disraeli would use the occasion of his famous Crystal Palace address to urge Tories that the time was right to overturn the principles that for so many had been connected with the original building in which he spoke. Detailing Liberalism’s concerted efforts over the past forty years “to effect the disintegration of the Empire of England,” Disraeli announced to his party that such a policy had fallen out of favour, and that a moment was approaching “when England will have to choose between national and cosmopolitan principles.” The choice, like the opposition, was stark; it



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It is whether you will be content to be a comfortable England, modelled and moulded upon continental principles and meeting in due course an inevitable fate, or whether you will be a great country, – an imperial country – a country where your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem of their countrymen, but command the respect of the world.21 This was compelling stuff, but the simplistic opposition obscured the imperial ideology and practices underpinning mid-nineteenth-century Britain’s new world order. At this point I return to the article with which this section began. Disraeli wanted Britain to reject the liberal orthodoxy Fraser’s embraced there. But the way the journal explicated Britain’s capacity to survive and prosper under these conditions usefully problematized the binary Disraeli would insist upon. Having introduced the possibility of national and imperial decline, the article moved very quickly to highlight the recent annexation of Scinde and the Punjab as bearing witness to the “vigour and vitality of England, – another proof that we have not yet arrived at that stationary period of our history that may be regarded as the prelude to national decay. The work of national aggrandizement is going on with ever-increasing spirit.” As well as India, Fraser’s indicated that it was going on in Hong Kong, Aden, Australia and New Zealand. All this acclaim for colonial activity in an article that would conclude with Fraser’s “acceptance of the bold measure of the late Sir Robert Peel as a fait accompli, and devote ourselves to the advocacy of such reforms as that new system shall seem to have rendered necessary.”22 As the last chapter made clear, it was not only the work of such formal “aggrandizement” that could and should be set against the sense that free trade would necessarily put an end to the opportunity for Britain to shape its global expansion in accordance with its own needs. Calling to account the idea that “mid-Victorian ‘indifference’ and late-Victorian ‘enthusiasm’ for empire were directly related to the rise and decline in free-trade beliefs,” John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s influential essay “The Imperialism of Free Trade” begins by considering in terms of formal control the imperial results of such supposed indifference:



fell between what two decades ago had been heralded as a Victorian new world order, but which was now cast as “continental” contamination, and what Disraeli acclaimed as the expansionist drive that would come to be called the New Imperialism:

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Between 1841 and 1851 Great Britain occupied or annexed New Zealand, the Gold Coast, Labuan, Natal, the Punjab, Sind and Hong Kong. In the next twenty years British control was asserted over Berar, Oudh, Lower Burma and Kowloon, over Lagos and the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, over Basutoland, Griqualand and the Transvaal; and new colonies were established in Queensland and British Columbia.23 While the summary confirms and elaborates the assessment of Fraser’s, much of the essay’s thrust warns against the consideration of imperialism only in terms of formal annexation, extending the analysis in order that the informal economic and political measures that characterized British expansion in the Victorian period are brought into focus. Thus Robinson and Gallagher describe the “general strategy” to convert areas of non-Europe “into complimentary satellite economies, which would provide raw materials and food for Great Britain, and also provide widening markets for its manufactures” (9). As they assert that “formal and informal empire are essentially interconnected and to some extent interchangeable” (6), they maintain that it is only by heeding the many-sided manner with which this empowered push to expand via conversion was pursued by the Victorians that imperialism can be properly understood. We return, then, to the previous chapter, and its conclusion that the Great Exhibition served as a site that naturalized and promoted this manifold imperial drive. Where Disraeli followed some mid-nineteenthcentury Exhibition commentators who predicted that a liberal commercial order would result in a loss of empire and identity, this chapter is far more inclined to follow the example of Fraser’s and the arguments of Robinson and Gallagher. In so doing it addresses a pronounced body of Exhibition commentary that was confident that, for the foreseeable future at least, there existed currently underdeveloped global communities whose lands could be profitably penetrated and positioned in order that Victorian dominance in the world might be sustained. Such commentary was bound together by its proposal of a Pax Britannica, an imperial order based upon the organizing principle of a rational division of labour, and underpinned by the notion that it was legitimate for Britain to intervene formally or informally in order to mobilize wasted or underused global resources. This was an imperium that both revolved around and continued to nourish the “energies and talents,” as well as values and tradition, on which the nation could pride itself. But this reassuring imperial vision was not united by a



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shared conceptualization of either the precise nature or outcome of the relationship between Britain and the indigenous inhabitants of the non-European world, which such imperial activity would necessitate. Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object clarifies the central thrust of the argument this chapter makes regarding the expansionist drive the Great Exhibition was seen to legitimize. Interested in the fact that the perception of historical backwardness served to plot imperialism, Fabian argues that, as it emerged in the nineteenth century, Anthropology established a geo-historical scheme that situated all living societies within “a stream of Time – some upstream, some downstream.” Asserting that “geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics,” it is the fact that Anthropology sustained such a chronopolitical vision that leads him to conclude the discipline was implicated in the “intellectual justification” of imperialism.24 Fabian elaborates this point when he contends that by denying “coevalness, or allochronism” to the global communities it explored, the geo-historical scheme around which his discipline revolved created temporally inflected alterity: “The absence of the Other from our Time has been his mode of presence in our discourse – as an object and a victim.”25 Having set out in Chapters 1 and 2 the universal scope of the Great Exhibition’s globalized vision, I showed in Chapter 3 the way in which the Crystal Palace was understood to reveal those savage and barbarian peoples who had failed to mix properly their labour with their land. As indicated at the end of the previous chapter, given the existence of such communities, and given the need to extend the scope of the world economy, the question then became what would become of the primitive Other thus delineated? If we turn to commentary that answered this question, we see that much of what follows brings to the fore the conceptualization of a Victorian Pax driven by the desire to integrate non-European peoples as well as their lands into the new world order. Commentators claimed that such integration would effect the socio-economic, cultural and spiritual uplift of these communities. While this pervasive idea was born out of the good story the Crystal Palace told about globalization, however, not everyone saw the Exhibition upholding such an imperial vision. That this was so was due in large part to uncertainty over how Fabian’s Other might respond given the opportunity to join globalized modernity. But it was prompted also by doubts over whether the opportunity should even be extended. We have seen that the Great Exhibition raised concerns over the anachronistic character of non-European goods. We shall see towards the end of this



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chapter that it raised concerns too over the anachronistic character of non-European peoples.

In October 1851 the Reverend William Forster, Quaker minister and philanthropist, preached a sermon that appeared in pamphlet form with the subtitle England’s Mission to All Nations. Therein Forster described the Crystal Palace as the “embodiment of free trade and universal-peace ideas.” He went on, however, to outline the providential commission under the auspices of which his own nation had hosted the Exhibition, and was now preparing to extend its global role: We told them [all nations] that the interchange of productions and the maintenance of peace were indispensable to the prosperity of each and all. We assured them that henceforth we designed to labour to raise other nations in the scale of social order, not only because it was benevolent, but prudent. It is our work to go on doing this. We have the commission from that Providence, which made of one blood all the nations of the earth, to soothe down national animosities, to draw closer together national bonds, to interpret national interests, to forward national objects, and to make other peoples feel we consider their prosperity ours, and that what will benefit them cannot be injurious to us.26 In figuring the operations of a global economy with regard to a homogenous interdependency, tending towards pacific harmony and mutual enrichment, Forster did no more than to rehearse free trade’s new world order, as it was encountered in Chapters 1 and 2. What Forster so clearly introduces, however, when he discusses in missionary terms England’s privileged position as the hands-on facilitator of this new world order, is a way of thinking prepared to embrace the notion that globalization was a process to be realized via procedures of interventionism and reorientation, especially as visited upon backward peoples by their civilized counterparts. The idea that the Crystal Palace legitimized a global economy organized around the formation of industrialized centres and agricultural hinterlands has been established. Attention now shifts to the fact that the Exhibition served to celebrate Victorian expansion in the non-European world, heralding with missionary zeal a project that as well as securing metropolitan interests would also, in Forster’s words, “raise other nations in the scale of social order.” As a result of this focus,



England’s mission


the conviction that non-European peoples would be both capable of and receptive to the possibility of such a rise comes to the fore. In Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930, Patrick Brantlinger sets outs the Gothic stereotype he numbers as “among the causes – and not just effects – of the global decimation of many indigenous peoples” in the nineteenth century: “Shadowing the romantic stereotype of the Noble Savage is its ghostly twin, the self-exterminating savage.”27 Falling somewhere between these two types is the object of the imperial civilizing mission, neither the idealized Rousseauian innocent nor the irredeemably (and perhaps inherently) removed degenerate, but the savage for whom salvation is possible given suitable forms of interaction with its civilized betters. In this section and the next I emphasize the way in which the metropolis was held by commentators to forge via commerce pacific and progressive connections with these peripheral peoples and their lands, presenting them with a place within the industrialized modernity of the Victorian new world order. Understood in its simplistic sense as that which “is new or contemporary and represents a distinct temporal break from the past,” modernity was offered as something non-Europe could be born into, there to be brought into being and up to speed, pulled out of its historical backwaters and into a globalized mainstream.28 With this integration was to come more than economic prosperity. In line with its Anglocentric character, this imperial interaction was conceived with relation to one-way cultural as well as two-way commercial exchanges. Thus England’s Mission promised to redeem the existence of savage and barbaric peoples, reuniting them in a productive manner with their material environment, but also bestowing cultural form, spiritual point and moral order upon their empty, meaningless and wicked lives. One of the key themes to emerge here is thus the idea of development – associated with modernization and enculturation – and more specifically the idea of the developing world. Doreen Massey helps clarify this focus in For Space, a manifesto in which she presses the need for global space to be conceived of in terms that acknowledge the possibility of “contemporaneous plurality,” of “coexisting heterogeneity,” of the “simultaneity of stories-so-far.” That this is not currently the case, she argues, is the result of a manoeuvre characteristic of modernity, the convening of spatial difference into temporal sequence: Different “places” [have been] interpreted as different stages in a single temporal development. All the stories of unilinear



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progress, modernisation, development, the sequence of modes of production . . . perform this operation. Western Europe is “advanced”, other parts of the world “some way behind”, yet others are “backward” . . . That turning of the world’s geography into the world’s (single) history is implicit in many versions of modernist politics, from liberal progressive to some Marxist.29 As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, the globalized politics of the Crystal Palace helped to embed – within Victorian society and beyond – just that refusal of co-existing spatial heterogeneity with which Massey is concerned. Instead I demonstrated how a vision of historicized spatial heterogeneity characterized by barbarism and wasted resources was contrasted with a correct Victorian/Western way of being in the world. With this in mind, what Massey does not register here is what I have stressed above: modernity’s unilinear temporal sequence could be offered to historically failing communities as an opportunity to live and to flourish properly. Hence the interpretive process Massey mentions was celebrated in a far more active sense by William Foster. I shall turn later to the tension that clearly opens up between the structural logic of capitalist development and the coalescence of peripheral and metropolitan interests towards which such celebrations pointed. For the moment it is important to underscore the fact that we are dealing with the conception of interpretation and intervention that aimed to make global spaces and their inhabitants “backward” in a qualitatively different way to the barbarism and savagery that had preceeded them. Once again Marx and Engel’s famous phrase is pertinent: to this way of thinking the creation of a world after Britain’s image meant making non-Europeans behind “us” in such a way as to make non-Europeans like “us.” A short story from Household Words, “Our Phantom Ship, Central America,” written in the year of the Great Exhibition, furnishes a useful point from which to begin a more detailed analysis of the way Britain’s mission took shape. Featuring a fantastic maritime journey distinguished by a panoptical scope that speedily and assiduously anatomized Central America, the story provided readers of Dickens’s journal with an exciting taster for the type of industrial surveillance and economic rationalization with which both the Exhibition and England’s Mission would become associated. Having detailed the fertile properties and rich abundance of raw materials of a terrain shamefully wasted by its current owners, the piece concluded its tour by remarking that “The present inhabitants of Central America – Spanish, mixed or coloured – know no more of the use that they might make of their unlimited



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resources, than a baby knows what it can buy with half-a-crown.” That being so, it was left to “Anglo-Saxon energy,” the kinetic potential of which would be so ably and noisily evidenced within the Palace later that year, to “stir this sluggish pool into life.” Only via civilized knowledge and technologically driven capitalism could the “wealth lavished by Nature” be realised, and a district of the earth “whose part in the world’s history is destined to be hereafter as large as it is now little” take its rightful (and rural) place within a modern global order.30 As with earlier remarks concerning Carlyle, it must be noted that here integration was figured with relation to territory not inhabitants, a fact that left room for ideas concerning “the ‘doom’ of ‘primitive races’ caused by ‘fatal impact’ with white, Western civilization.”31 That said, however, the infantile imagery deployed in this context spoke to the notion that reterritorialization could place non-Europeans upon a developmental curve. Elaborating this notion, and falling very much in line with the catholic strain of thinking that has characterized so much of the Exhibition commentary we have considered, Peter Mandler asserts that a mid-nineteenth-century Christianized discourse of political economy generated “a fundamental belief in ‘civilisation’ as a universal human potential,” as well as helping explain Britain’s leading historical position in the world: “what glued all of these liberals together was their willingness (even eagerness) to conceive, in various ways, of an English nation or people carrying common characteristics – a predilection for liberty and free-thought, a capacity for self-government, Protestant piety, enterprise, expansion.” The fact that by their very nature such characteristics were transferable sheds light on the commentary considered in Chapter 1, where the historical and geographical specificity of the Great Exhibition was explained with relation to a Victorian cosmopolitanism that should be followed, not just admired. And as Mandler also observes, it shaped too a sense of Victorian duty to its global subjects, however infantilized: If that kingdom and empire contained peoples not yet liberated from their uncivilised clannishness – Celts, Negroes, aborigines – it was the responsibility of the English to maintain their institutional hold on such peoples in order gradually to wean them from their childishness.32 With reference to Mandler’s remarked conception of a Victorian predilection for enterprise and expansion, and with relation to my emphasis here upon the universally redemptive possibilities afforded



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by industrial capitalist intervention, it is important to recognize that this sense of responsibility extended far and wide. As we shall see, again with relation to British India, some form of institutional hold could certainly be held useful in effecting a programme of regeneration. But there were no such institutional preconditions held necessary to effect industrial capitalist penetration and reorientation, only the need to direct the ignorant to make use of the “unlimited resources” that lay at their fingertips. While “Our Phantom Ship” did not make this at all clear, then, for many observers in 1851 what was exciting was the range of nonEuropean peoples it was possible to raise up via Victorian industry and enterprise, and the reoriented division of labour it allowed to take shape. Typical of such was an article from Tallis’s History, which urged that “the highly civilized man” should “subdue his own prejudices” regarding those peoples “who are commonly called Aborigines, or the less civilized races,” to be found across Africa, Central and Southern America, China, India, Turkey and Russia. Reminding readers that even the “most polished nations may in them trace their own perfection backward to its source,” the article declared that such primitive peoples could acquire those “superior qualifications that shall rightfully place them” on the same “level” as their industrialized betters. Here the piece invoked Brantlinger’s Gothic stereotype, but only to refuse “that numerous portions of our race should be doomed by Providence at the approach of their more instructed brethren”: Facts encourage a nobler and a wiser prospect. A capacity for a safer and better condition of life is clearly established by these productions of industry – exercised in every climate, within the burning tropic and at the pole, by Negro and by Esquimaux; by the gloomy American forests, and over the bare steppes of Tartary: by the half-amphibious islander of the Pacific equally as by the kaffir . . . each . . . having his peculiar operation.33 The empirical “facts” to which the article was especially drawn were, perhaps inevitably, the raw materials displayed in the Palace. With each item enhancing their prospects of development because of their use to the Victorian market, Tallis eagerly listed “the dyes, the gums, the drugs, the oils, the seeds, the woods, the woven and textile plants, the leaves, the roots, the skins, the furs, the feathers, the shells” that these primitives would need to cultivate in order to progress. So it was that the civilized creation of an extended economic nexus was



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held to offer a “peculiar operation” in place of supposedly self-sufficient sluggishness.34 Moreover, commentators maintained that the peripheral demand for the manufactured goods of the metropolis promoted such a vitalizing endeavour more than did the need of Victorian factories. Thus, the rational division of labour desired by British industry emerged out of the disciplinary impact of the market, not the disciplinary measures of the British themselves. Which is to say, industrial capitalist intervention and reorientation was effected by means of the carrot not the stick. John Stuart Mill declared that “To civilize a savage, he must be inspired with new wants and desires, even if not of a very elevated kind, provided that their gratification can be a motive to bodily and mental exertion.”35 So it is, notes Regenia Gagnier, that the “economics of British expansion meet the goals of civilizing,” adding that “baubles” were held to transform barbarians.36 Catherine Hall elaborates by remarking that this was a vision that saw the onset of civilization distinguished by the creation of “‘artificial wants’ – luxuries, which encouraged the development of an aesthetic, comforts which went beyond bare necessities.”37 Both these analyses pick up on the idea that Victorian political economists could follow Adam Smith in tracing socio-economic development with relation to a commodity shift from the practical to the luxurious, the useful to the useless. But given the earlier emphasis upon a prevalent conception of the commodity as a utilitarian item, and given the way in which non-European cultures were dismissed as decadent and sybaritic, it is instructive to note that Exhibition commentators trod carefully with relation to the precise nature of this move from savage subsistence to civilized consumption. As with commentary considered previously, most were content to avoid making mention of the specific character of those manufactured goods to which savages were supposed to respond so favourably, preferring instead to invoke the aforementioned notion that British industry produced the kind of generic goods that could still be associated with Smith’s three great wants, and that would elicit a universal demand. For observers who did wish to specify at least the kind of commodities with which this civilizing mission might be associated, clothing, the second of these wants, furnished a useful point of reference. The textile industry not only provided a powerful register of Britain’s status as the workshop of the world, but it also drew upon the trope of the naked savage transformed into that of the clothed gentleman. A fortnight into the Exhibition The Times assured its readers that “there is no sounder



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it is impossible but that, from the natural wants of mankind, and the advancing progress of civilization in so many regions of the earth, a vast and steadily increasing demand for such articles must be the result of their supply. Thus employment will be created, labour remunerated, wealth be increased at home, the comforts and elegancies of social life be diffused abroad, and the patriot and the philanthropist find equal cause of rejoicing.38 The final clause of this sentence is significant. In 1851 Charles Dickens was composing Bleak House, the novel in which he would attack “telescopic philanthropy,” pouring scorn upon Mrs. Jellyby’s Borrioboola scheme to effect “the general cultivation of the coffee berry – and the natives.”39 The enterprise spoke to the not uncommon belief that colonialism could act as a drain upon the nation’s resources, and was too often motivated by misplaced charitable sentiment towards peoples who neither could nor would help themselves. That being so, it was an understanding of Britain’s imperial project emphatically countered in the months before it appeared in print. Dickens’s depiction of a bizarrely conceived and badly managed programme of de- and re-territorialization, carried out by the restricted and hapless endeavours of one bad mother, was strikingly out of key with the systematic, state-supported and profit-growth-oriented manner in which such enterprise was acclaimed at the Palace. In echo of both The Times and William Forster’s definition of England’s Mission, Tallis observed succinctly that the efficacy of Victorian intervention overseas would work only because “our interests as manufacturers and merchants, and consumers” could be made to “coincide happily with our duties as men.”40 While advocates of such integration did not need to play down metropolitan gain, however, they often chose to emphasise peripheral advantages. Notably then, the orchestrated but happy coincidence between the market and the mission bore with it a conviction that reorientated industrialized interdependency would do more than foster material development. “To induce all the world to become customers and consumers, would seem to be the wisdom of our country and age,” alleged lace manufacturer William Felkin, before declaring, after



axiom in political economy than the one so ably advocated by John Mill – that ‘supply creates demand.’ ” It then explained how the diffusion of cheap, mass-produced Victorian hosiery would, in Hall’s phrase, civilize subjects:


the fashion of Tallis, that the true value of “the hidden treasures of the forest and the mine, of earth and seas,” must be made apparent to those barbaric or “half civilized” peoples who presided over them. Here he elaborated, in representative fashion, on the market-driven mechanics of this civilizing process. Keen to acquire Western commodities, the self-interested motives of these communities would then serve disciplinary ends, prompting them not only to “forget their long cherished habits of idleness and plunder,” but also opening them up to “higher influences.” “Commercial intercourse,” Felkin could thus assert, was “the handmaid of Christianity.”41 So it was that non-Europeans were provided with the opportunity to become both industrially useful and culturally complete. As Richard Cobden signalled when he pictured bales of British merchandise bearing the “seeds of intelligence and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened community,” with Smithian functionality came Arnoldian meaning.42 And, despite Dickens’s reservations, the image of the metropolis sowing seeds in this manner chimed well with a vision that saw the growth of raw materials effect the cultivation of productive, proper global citizens. Organic development then, both in material and non-material terms, but only because of careful husbandry. When discussing this imperial mission I am dealing with a peculiar combination of free-market forces and directive rationale. Supply and demand was presented as the natural law underwriting the enterprise, but it was a law that took effect via the civilized and adult supervision of ignorant and infant populations, at least in the first instance. I shall expand later upon the fact that such supervisory activity could be conceived variously, so that the idea of temporary formal or informal interventionism tending towards complete autonomy could give way to the idea of permanent custodianship. With the focus remaining upon the need to institute a regenerative division of labour, I turn now to the notion that non-European products and their cultivators had to be reached and networked, which is to say, locked into precise, exacting and uplifting circuits of production and consumption. Returning here to “Our Phantom Ship, Central America,” I argue that Britain’s energizing capacity was as much dependent upon the way in which it traversed the planet, and thus enabled commercial flow to and from primitive areas of the world, as it was upon its manufacturing sophistication. Certainly it was the case, as we shall see, that as they looked for ways of heralding its civilizing impact, prophets of England’s Mission found the steam-engine easier to work with than hosiery.



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As was mentioned in the previous chapter, William Whewell’s declaration that the Crystal Palace annihilated the space and time separating one nation’s progress from another’s said much about a modern capacity to bridge historical difference, as well as to reveal it. Incredible as the celerity and range of the “Phantom Ship” was, then, its currency was not confined to the literary realm; the ghostly vessel in which readers of Household Words journeyed around Central America found its physical incarnation in the communication technologies through which the great powers of the age encompassed the earth. Although it would be a great mistake to suggest that for a mid-nineteenth-century audience the sailing ship was an anachronistic image, it is true to say that the Victorian imagination was excited by the idea that wind power was no longer the only means with which to traverse the planet.43 In terms of what has preceded in this section, and what will follow, then, it is significant that it was a “combination of railways and steam vessels” that Marx emphasized as he wrote in 1853 of the need for England “to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating –the annihilation of Old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”44 Like Marx, Exhibition commentators discussed Victorian communication technologies with a missionary zeal, universalizing Eurocentric understandings of progress and denying historical agency to supposedly isolated, industrially backward and commercially naïve peoples. Unlike Marx, however, they also denied hegemonic intent, as well as refusing the dialecticism that saw capitalism realizing socialism. Instead, the same technologies that Marx cast in terms of bourgeois exploitation and socialist revolution were acclaimed with relation to the forces by which barbarian communities would be ushered into what Household Words labelled “the world’s history.” And although steamships (perhaps most notably Isambard Kingdon Brunel’s revolutionary ss Great Britain of 1843) and the electric telegraph (which in autumn 1851 would successfully link via submarine cable Britain and France) bore witness to this modern capacity, at the Palace the train stood out. In his introduction to the section labelled “Machines for Direct Use,” the Official Catalogue’s editor Robert Ellis spoke of the gripping appeal of a technology I have already discussed as a phenomenon felt to give form to a new way of being in the world. Of all the exhibits he could have mentioned individually, Ellis found space to single out only one for special praise. Brunel’s “stupendous wide-gauge engine,”



Ariel’s girdle


the Lord of the Isles, conveyed “an overwhelming impression of steam and power,” declared the editor, with a Turneresque flourish.45 Remarking this overwhelming character, Eric Hobsbawm proposes the railway as a “synonym for ultra-modernity in the 1840s, as ‘atomic’ was to be after the Second World War,” pointing out that it established “the notion of a gigantic, nation-wide, complex and exact interlocking routine symbolized by the railway time-table.”46 For Michael Freeman it was not until the late nineteenth century that this assessment of the train’s scope could be extended from the nation to the planet, so that it might be legitimately claimed that the Victorian railway constituted “all the world”: “It was not merely that it loomed large in all the complex machinery of Britain’s empire, but that Victorian iron foundries, steel mills and engineering shops furnished permanent way and rolling stock for railways across all continents.”47 That being so, we should note that the material and ideological foundations for global coverage were already being laid at the mid-point of the century, and the train figured in the Victorian imagination very much as an international as opposed to a national phenomenon. So while the years from 1845 to 1847 witnessed the mania and “daemonic energy” that characterized the most dramatic growth of railway building in Britain, neither the energy nor the capital was domestically restricted, feeding into British railway investment and construction all over the world.48 One commentator in 1850 captured the confidence behind this expansive mindset. Discussing the introduction of railways throughout Europe, North and Central America, and the East and West Indies, he dismissed any qualms his readers might have over this internationalist range with a simple reminder of the logistics of the operation: “We already know that iron lines of rail can be laid, and that steamlocomotives can travel on them.”49 Suddenly, it seemed, nowhere was out of reach. Writing on conceptualizations of the railway journey in the nineteenth century, and elaborating this geographical impact, Wolfgang Schivelbusch draws attention to what he usefully designates “the industrialization of time and space.” In terms that remind us of Hobsbawm’s “complex and exact interlocking routine,” and that can be associated with the “planetary consciousness” Pratt read through scientific discourse, Schivelbusch highlights “geographical space” as the conceit that comes to replace “landscape” under the technological conditions of industrial capitalist modernity: “geographical space is closed, and is therefore in its entire structure transparent. Every place in such a space is determined by its position with relation to the whole and ultimately



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by its relation to the null point of the coordinate system by which this space obtains its order. Geographical space is systematized.”50 It was such a systematic vision of global space that sustained the fantasy of a global village outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, and that broke down in Chapter 3. I return to it now with the proviso that the dramatic reconfiguration of global geography enabled by steam power was crucial to its inception. While Brunel’s Lord of the Isles represented the engineering ambition and skills of a man who would do much to put in place this industrialized international network, it was another train in the Palace that, for our purposes at least, spoke more suggestively to the kind of joined-up thinking the railways stimulated. Ariel’s Girdle was a light locomotive engine displayed in the Palace alongside Brunel’s much larger, more imposing train. Its name was erroneous: it was Puck, the fairy from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who declared his capacity to throw “a girdle round about the earth, / In forty minutes.”51 Nevertheless, the same recalls Carlyle’s claim in “Chartism” that just as Prospero took captive the world through Ariel, so too Britain sent its Fire-demons “on cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms.”52 Although Carlyle did not use the word “girdle,” his invocation of Shakespeare in this engineered context perhaps fed into the mistaken although apparently accepted Victorian belief. Maybe the locomotive was on Dickens’s mind as he wrote Bleak House, for the novel furnishes canonical form to this popular misconception.53 Whatever the case, it is certainly true that the idea of The Tempest’s sprite engirdling the world, under the direction of its master magician, was borne out by a body of commentary that highlighted the railway as the temporal means through which Britain could incorporate global space, extending (as if by magic) modern commerce and civilization to previously secluded and stagnant regions of the globe. At the heart of such commentary was the notion that if free trade and reterritorialization made a Victorian new world order possible, steampowered travel made it both realizable and practical. Addressing the cosmopolitan sentiment and technological progress that had given rise to the Great Exhibition, and underscoring the important position of the railways to nineteenth-century understandings of globalization, the Illustrated London News observed that “the intercourse of nations, caused by the practical annihilation of space and time which we owe to the railway system, has removed a whole world of difficulties.”54 In so removing a world of difficulties, though, the point was that the railway opened up a whole world of opportunities. Steam enthusiast, popular scientist and economist Dionysius Lardner, who had published Railway



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Economy: A Treatise on the New Art of Transport in 1850, was encouraged by his visit to the Crystal Palace to discuss the future role of communication technologies on the global stage, extolling their capacity to institute the modern, the factual and the universal at the expense of the anachronistic, the illusory and the parochial. The girdle thrown around the earth by European powers might have seemed magical, then, but giving the lie to such supernaturalism was the perceived impact of the industrialization of space and time. Linking the train with the electric telegraph and steamship, all of them emblems and bearers of scientific rationality, Lardner instructed readers of The Great Exhibition and London in 1851 that the West had established a far more powerful and tangible control over the earth than anything the tall tales of the East might recount: “Compared with all such realities, the illusions of Oriental romance grow pale; fact stands higher than fiction in the scale of the marvellous; the feats of Aladdin are tame and dull; and the slaves of the lamp yield precedence to the spirits which preside over the battery and the boiler.”55 Other commentators were equally drawn to this perceived impact, and emphatically elaborated its results. Mrs. Napier’s The Lay of the Palace was a poem that singled out the locomotive’s unstoppable drive to dominate the material world, spread the gospel, and eradicate the isolation of those parts of the earth still languishing within the “old time” of pre-modern culture: Hark, to the roaring engine rushing here: Nor hill, nor torrent can impede its way; It scorns all distance in its mighty sway; With fearless hunger, swallowing everything, Devours old time and mocks his ancient wing. Each valley shall be filled, hill be brought low, The trackless desert shall the stranger know, And words of saving truth to utmost islands go! Ye lofty hills, your glittering hoards unfold! And commerce bear away the hidden gold.56 The stress of the last line here was unfortunate, given the concerns of other observers to cast such penetration in terms of reciprocal exchange and universal prosperity. More sensitive than Napier to this idea, and drawing attention to the industrial reorientation with which steam power was associated, The Times suggested to its readers that the Crystal



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How much more may be done with steam? How much more with railways? How much better may we arrange the intercourse of distant provinces and nations? How cheaply may we offer, and how widely may we diffuse, the ennobling pleasures hitherto confined to the wealthy few.57 Thus the ethical conception of an economic sovereignty wrought through the power to annihilate space by time. And perhaps unsurprisingly, given Governor-General Dalhousie’s programme to modernize the subcontinent via transport, commentators were especially drawn to India as a locus with which to think through its results. Running through such commentary was the remarked insistence upon directed development, with the efficiency of the mode of transport here feeding into the efficiency of the mission. In a lecture delivered in conjunction with the Exhibition, free trader and cotton manufacturer Thomas Bazley would eulogize Britain’s “destined duty” to effect via railways and cotton cultivation “commercial prosperity” and the “extension of civilization and Christianity” in India. He spoke here of the subcontinent’s “industrial emancipation,” but, securely engirdled within a Victorian order, this was a freedom to follow a prescribed path that distributed wealth, dissipated ignorance and was understood by metropolitan commentators, in the broadest terms, to leave Indians part of the Victorian world.58 Others commentators followed the same line. Emphasizing the metropolitan benefits of an industrialized bind as it enthused about the subcontinental produce that was to pour into Europe “with a profusion and regularity never yet dreamed of,” Tallis’s History was quick to underline the peripheral advantages of a British capacity to conquer distance: “The steam engine is destined to do more for India than all her other teachers have yet effected. The iron apostle of civilization does not declaim; it does not dispute or vituperate; but it works, and always succeeds.”59 While India proved particularly attractive in this context, Tallis might have added, of course, that neither was this “iron apostle” limited in its scope. Five years after the Exhibition had closed, E. D. Chattaway concluded Railways, Their Capital and Dividends with a brief but effective summary of technologically induced globalization as it had been popularly understood at the Crystal Palace. Linking the “iron road” with the steamship and electric telegraph, Chattaway emphasized Britain’s leading role



Palace would “open men’s eyes as to what may be done and what will be done with the means in our possession”:

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Through the backwoods and vast prairies of America, – across the arid sands of Egyptian deserts, – through the thick jungles of India, – over wildernesses where, before, the foot of man never trod, – in glades his vision never penetrated, and wild secluded spots which have remained undisturbed by mortal presence since the dawn of creation, – is already heard the shrill whistle of the steam engine, proclaiming the triumphs of human progress and the advent of peace. And still railways are extending their iron arms, under the guidance of men whose indomitable energies suffer them to be deterred by no difficulty, daunted by no danger, – men who, in the prosecution of their objects, have constructed works before which the seven wonders of the ancient world fall into insignificance.60 In line with the enthusiasm of the above commentary, so it was Victorian enterprise was supposed to create and sustain a network within which “local prejudices” were dispelled and “comforts and conveniences that formerly only fell to the lot of the privileged few, or were indigenous only to favoured spots,” were “placed within the reach of the humblest.” Perhaps Chattaway had visited the Palace earlier in the decade, perhaps not. Either way, the image he chose to convey the global unity that resulted from these endeavours was familiar. Railways, he averred, were “gradually drawing together in amity the whole family of man, encircling the world with their Ariel-like girdle.”61 Chapter 2 cited Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley’s observation that international free trade would create “many a tie and not one thrall,” with interdependency seeing all “on one proud footing placed,— / As with one broad golden girdle clasped: by one Grand Law embraced.”62 Against a perceived backdrop of socio-economic inadequacies that allowed such industrial cooperation only subsequent to intervention, this section has proposed instead an iron girdle as the deus ex machina through which to realize globalized interdependency. Conquering space and time, leaving nothing beyond modernity’s pale, railways and related communication technologies furnished a dramatically empowering context within which backward non-Europe – its inhabitants’ bodies and minds as well as its non-human resources – could be re-imagined in terms of contact, penetrability and growth, as against distance, inscrutability and stagnation. But with the concerns raised by Massey



in creating these “highways of civilisation.” Thus inspired to wish the locomotive “God speed,” he pictured railways penetrating previously unknown or underexploited parts of the world:

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in mind, further attention must be paid to the fact that, even as it was heralded as a phenomenon that annihilated space and time, Victorian modernity proposed a starting point characterized by differently advantaged because differently advanced global communities. While some of the above commentary blurs the distinction, then, the rapidity of the technology that was held so crucial to non-European integration should not be conflated with the rapidity or the results of the socio-economic rise it might be expected to effect. Neither should we accept the suggestion that the “Grand Law” Ariel’s Girdle enforced was universally welcomed.

The proof of the pudding First published in 1857, Tom Brown’s School Days begins with a chapter entitled “The Brown Family.” Here Thomas Hughes’s narrator reflected upon that exemplary body of peoples, the Browns, whose sturdy values and gallant actions had laid the foundations for the “greatness” of the British nation, both at home and abroad. Having for centuries subdued “the earth in most English counties,” “in their quiet, dogged, homespun way,” such yeoman had also left their mark “in American forests and Australian uplands.”63 Hard-working and equally “hard-knocking,” these “homespun” peoples are cast as a “great army of Browns, who are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets.” The narrator attests their “general diffusion” “to be the chief cause of that empire’s stability” (21). Later he elaborates on this connection between their domestic agrarian enterprise and the nation’s overseas conquests. The Brown family lived off a country-side “teeming” with those “Saxon names and memories” belonging to and inspired by the battles that had seen Alfred overthrow the Danish yoke, thereby making “England a Christian land” (29). Used to “treading on heroes,” working that “sacred ground for Englishmen” under which their ancestors’ bones lay whitening, it was small wonder that the Browns were capable of winning glory and maintaining order in the world beyond their counties (25). All is not quite right, however, and the security of this familial imperial order seems threatened from distinctive developments within the mother country. “Oh young England! young England!” exclaims Hughes’s 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



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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. (21–3) Voicing as he does the opposition sketched out in this chapter’s introduction, the narrator’s bemoaning the failings of young England is unsurprising.64 His resigned acceptance of a new geo-political order identifies the same global philosophy that led Exhibition commentators to demand “observation with extensive view,” asserting the universality of humankind and positioning the Victorians as exceptionally cosmopolitan rather than peculiarly national. Hughes presented a limited notion of Englishness set against this order, one derived specifically from a Saxon heritage and one that found socio-economic and cultural form in terms of a particularly nationalist way of life. That this organic sense of national identity is seen to feed an aggressive drive towards settler colonization would only appear to underscore its remove from a catholic drive towards a world distinguished by economic freedom, pacific relations and cultural homogeneity. Again then, we see the way in which the Great Exhibition could be mobilized in order to warn that with the loss of a traditional way of life, with all its memories of the emergence of a strong and martial people, cosmopolitan England seemed in danger of losing both its empire and identity. Since it revolved around a British metropolis strengthened by the particular character of its relations with non-European satellite economies, and since it was marked by the dissemination rather than watering down of Victorian values, Britain’s industrialized expansion as set out by commentary considered in the previous two sections clearly troubles the link Hughes drew between his “racing railroad times” and his nation’s imperial collapse. That said, however, the Anglocentric order of things that emerged so clearly was nevertheless presented as an imperium underpinned by those universalist, emancipatory beliefs against which Old England could be made to stand. When Tallis raised the prospect of aboriginal peoples being elevated to the same level as their civilized brethren, then, it invoked after the fashion of others a pacific form



“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 internationalist flux of the new age is juxtaposed with “my time,” presented as a regionally rooted and culturally secure rural age:

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of overseas intervention and interaction that was welcomed by those it incorporated, and that seemed geared towards the development of a world characterized by autonomous states, historical harmony and dynamic growth. It would be wrong though to suggest that the Great Exhibition inspired consensus in this regard; there were other ways of conceiving Britain’s industrialized expansion, both in terms of the way in which it would take hold of the world and in terms of the consequences it would effect. The two pieces of Exhibition commentary to which I now turn – one a short story from Household Words, the other a short sketch from Punch – threw into doubt the belief that the industrialized order encapsulated by Ariel’s Girdle was necessarily distinguished by peace or progress. What comes into focus as a result is the notion not only that the hard-knocking talents of the Browns would be needed in order to implement this Anglocentric order, but also that they would be further required to police its operation in order that it sustained metropolitan advantage. At this point it is worth remembering that while Prospero was keen to cast his rule as an embrace, both Ariel and Caliban felt it as entrapment and exploitation. “A Christmas Pudding,” a short story by Charles Knight that appeared in Household Words immediately before Christmas 1850, cast an interesting light upon Britain’s role in the globalizing process around which so much of the forthcoming Exhibition would revolve.65 It featured a strange encounter between its protagonist, Mr. Oldknow, and the seasonal pudding his wife reveals to him as it cooks upon the kitchen stove. Left alone to smoke a cigar, Oldknow is drawn to contemplate the wider significance of the “rich, semi-liquefied mass, speckled throughout with plums and currants” that sits before him. As he “mused and mused over the mercantile history of the various substances of which that pudding was composed,” the kitchen undergoes a fantastic change, expanding to expose a great mirror within “which landscapes of every clime were reflected” as “vivid pictures.”66 This expansive visual compass serves to establish a magical geography, and the international ingredients of the pudding appear before Oldknow as a succession of genies, each one of which represents a combination of product, terrain and people. The Genius of the Raisin is the first of the anthropomorphized ingredients to appear within the mirror. Dressed “with the fresh vine-wreath of a Greek Bacchante on the head, and the Cashmere shawl of an Arabian Sultana round the waist,” the Raisin immediately subjects Oldknow, whom he describes as the “son of a vineless land,” to a tirade of abuse



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Your ships throng my Andalusian ports . . . and they bear to your cold and cloudy land the richest gifts of our sunny south. Why come ye, every year more and more, with your linens and your woollens, your glass and your pottery, to exchange with our native fruit? Why strip ye the gardens which the Faithful planted, of the grapes which ought to be reserved for the unfermented wine which the Prophet delighted to drink? (301) Faced with such Islamic hostility, and keen to emphasize the socioeconomic stagnation that it serves to encourage, Oldknow announces that “Man only worthily labours when he labours for exchange with other labour.” That being so, then it is English commodities, the result of technological advances and sophisticated industrial practices, that serve as a particularly powerful stimulus to labour and consumption: “Immortal child of the Arab,” replied the son of the vineless land, “your nation gave us the best element of commerce when you gave us your numerals. Your learning and your poetry, your science and your industry, no longer fructify in heaven-favoured Andalusia. The sun which ripens your grapes and your oranges makes the people lazy and the priests rapacious. We come to your ports with the products of our looms and our furnaces, and we induce a taste for comforts that will become a habit. When our glass and our porcelain shall find its way into your peasant’s hut, then will your olives be better tended and your grapes more carefully dried.” (301) Oldknow then seizes the opportunity to expand upon England’s wider global role as industrialized workshop and economic driver. With the pudding thus emerging as “the emblem of our commercial eminence,” he spells out the way in which by giving “commercial value” to “the raisins of Malaga and the currants of Zante – the oranges of Algarve, the cinnamon of Ceylon, and the nutmegs of the Moluccas,” the pudding has “called them into existence as effectually as the native cultivator” (301). The encounter with the Raisin over, next to appear is the Genius of the Currant, a figure who is far more in tune with Oldknow’s way of thinking. The Currant indicates that Zante and Cephalonia enter



for depriving the regions he represents of significant local productions, and forcing upon their peoples unwanted manufactures:

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willingly into a trade relationship with England, and appreciate the global produce that such a connection realises: “Welcome are ye with your sugar and your coffee, your rice and your cheese. Welcome are ye with your gold.” Elaborating Oldknow’s reading of the pudding with relation to England’s pre-eminent role in the mobilization of global resources and the rationalization of international industry, the Currant rehearses the environmental logic of the international division of labour it has come to associate with the possibilities afforded by Victorian enterprise: “It is better to grow currants in the soil which they delight in, and buy our wheat, than plough up our little vines for bread-producing crop.” “Bravo, my little free trader,” exclaims Oldknow, delighted by this recognition of an autochthonous pattern to global economic relations (302). Other spirits that appear, however, do not articulate such a rational, liberal philosophy. But the resulting dialogue between Oldknow and the figures allows the metropolitan patriarch, confident in his economic rationale, to suggest that the proper place for such products is in the pudding. Having voiced protectionist dogma, the Genius of Bread and the Genius of Nutmeg are sternly reprimanded, with the latter giving up its “contest against nature” and coming to accept “that the end of commerce is . . . to diffuse all the productions of nature and art, among all the inhabitants of the globe.” “You have taught me a lesson,” it informs Oldknow, praising as it does so the Victorians for taking a lead in “diffusing comfort and equal laws, opening roads, encouraging industry, destroying forced labour” (302). Lesson learnt, and as it is becoming increasingly clear that the pudding stands as the metaphorical vehicle through which to conceive the benefits of globalization, Oldknow’s fantastical encounter ends with the appearance of “a brisk power-loom weaver” who steps forth, “with pudding cloth in hand”: “‘The water boils,’ said he; ‘the ingredients are mixed. Be it mine to bind them together!’ ” (303). Representing in general England’s industrial assiduity and technological progress, and in particular the artisans of Birmingham and Manchester to whom (alongside the seamen of London and Liverpool) Oldknow required the Raisin to give thanks, the power-loom weaver is the figure to underscore Britain’s instrumental role as a manufacturing and commercial hub around which a global economy can take shape. This pre-eminent (and profitable) position established, Oldknow proclaimed the lesson that could be drawn from the culinary enterprise: “We, in our united interests, well bound together, produce Christmas pudding.” Underlining this moral, the relationship of the pudding to the world is made clear: “Suddenly the



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great-pudding bowl swelled into an enormous globe, black with plums, and odorous with steaming sauce” (303). If it anticipated the fact that an international division of labour would come to serve for so many as the organizing principle through which to comprehend the Great Exhibition, and if it worked against the suggestion that a liberal world order would diminish Britain’s standing, “A Christmas Pudding” also undercut the imperial fantasy that allowed for Victorian industrial capitalist expansion to be figured as a wholly consensual, pacific process. The Genius of the Currant stood for a fecund terrain and a rational people, a part of the earth ready and willing to accept the agricultural economic identity with which Britain would provide it. Set resolutely against this fantasy figure, however, is the Genius of the Raisin. Having extolled the virtues of free trade as an entirely natural, inherently dynamic and mutually beneficial system, Oldknow triumphed, “Child of the Arab civiliser, be grateful.” He is not, however, rewarded with the compliance he might expect: “Mr. Oldknow looked for an approving answer; but the Genius of the Raisin had fled” (301). Maintaining a religious relationship with its material environment, and thus unwilling to cede to the position that Oldknow’s account of freetrade economics holds out, the Raisin served dialogically to counter those Exhibition commentators who maintained that the international products on display at the Palace gave metonymic voice to globalization’s supposedly univocal narrative. While the Currant represented an imperial fantasy, then, the Raisin represented an imperial problem, bringing home to the metropolis the fact that different peoples of the world were not necessarily given to understand their place on the planet with recourse to the Victorians’ globalized logic. But there were still raisins in Oldknow’s pudding. The story had concluded with its protagonist moved to sing a song from his youth, a time when “England was threatened with invasion”: Britain, to peaceful arts inclined, Where commerce opens all her stores, In social bands shall league mankind, And join the sea-divided shores. (304) Refusing the eirenic character of this Pax Britannica, the fate of the Raisin appeared to suggest that the defensive martial spirit that had warded off a Napoleonic threat had now turned outwards, in order that British economic interests might be safeguarded, whatever form of intervention and subsequent stewardship this required. Bound by the pudding



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cloth, and boiled in the pudding bowl, the Raisin can in this sense be understood to signify the coercion and violence that characterized British expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, in spite of everything commentators such as Oldknow claimed about the Victorian new world order. Significantly, however, proponents of this order did not necessarily need to fight shy of the need for such coercion and violence. In line with the ideas underpinning commentary discussed in the previous two sections, Richard Cobden cast commerce as “the grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world.”67 But the conviction that intervention via the commodity alone (albeit an intervention facilitated by modernity’s miraculous capacity to conquer space and time) would conjure such a global community was in tension with the view that backward peoples of the world would find this Victorian panacea a bitter pill to swallow. Hence in the previous chapter I noted that John Forbes Royle contended, in relation to India, that the spread of commerce depended upon it being “in some measure” forced upon certain areas of the world by their “more civilized” counterparts.68 Refuted by Cobden, but championed in the mid-nineteenth century by Lord Palmerston in particular, the belief that such induction required forces other than those exerted “naturally” by the market was justified on the grounds that only then would occur the integration of these peoples and their lands within the civilizing, modernizing folds of the “World’s History.” So it was that even John Stuart Mill, in “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” would argue “barbarians have no rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government, are the universal rules of morality between man and man.”69 Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one’s position) morality was easily moulded to the demands of a dynamic economy. Thus one nineteenthcentury commentator could call attention to the “moral power of the 24 pounder.”70 In 1850 an interesting, complex article from Punch, entitled “Business and the Bayonet,” worried at the idea that British economic imperatives were secured in a climate where gunboat diplomacy could be couched as a regenerative imperial mission. As with “The Christmas Pudding,” in so doing it can be understood to expose to view the gap that could open up between the rhetoric and the reality of that interventionist mandate that the Great Exhibition was seen to encourage. The article



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began by siding with Cobden, denying that “it was justifiable to make war, in order to increase commerce – to push business at the point of a bayonet.” As it did so it undermined the Palmerstonian pragmatism that Martin Lynn argues “clearly struck a chord with large sections of the British public” in the mid-nineteenth century: “Commerce, it is true, has followed war; nevertheless, we would not have an account opened even with Japan with howitzers. Bayonets work an ugly kind of treble entry; nor would we have that Manchester dream fulfilled, that vision that shows every Chinaman in a night-cap of cotton is to be realized by the percussion caps of English infantry.”71 Playing with the misguided (although compelling) nature of such economic logic, Punch wondered whether the potent combination of “seventy-fours, soldiers and marines” that worked to secure metropolitan interests abroad might be mobilized on the domestic front in preparation for the forthcoming Exhibition: What is lawful for our armies to do in order to force trade, it may, for the benefits of our imports and exports, be allowable to individual firms and shop-keepers. For instance, London next summer will be thronged with foreigners – many of them possibly as wilfully obtuse to the excellencies of our manufactures, as are the Japanese to our very thickest Whitney Blankets, and our best-finished skates. The article then focused attention suddenly on Britain’s Jewish community: Why, then, should not MESSRS. NOSES – for the civilising benefits of trade – be permitted to have a company of their own, in uniforms of their own shade and pattern, a corps of the Israelovsky’s, . . . who, without a word, should lay hold upon any foreigner, and carrying him to their Mart, command him to get rid at once of his cash and his barbarian ignorance? Why should they not compel him to be measured, and there pay down the money for the half-dozen suits of clothes, considered barely decent – the savage – for his necessities? If such anti-Semitism was driven by the conceptualization of Jews as especially ruthless actors within economic life, the sketch indicates that it was a relationship rather than an opposition between Jewish culture and the economic underpinnings and imperatives of the Victorian state that was of interest. Mill would later contend that when



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Britain routed aggressive barbarians, it did so to “command liberty of trade” and protect equality of opportunity: “whatever it demands for itself it demands for all mankind.”72 Nine years earlier, Punch offered an appraisal that destabilized and reversed this logic, casting Britain as the aggressor and suggesting that whatever the metropolis demanded for mankind, it demanded first and foremost for itself. Set against Hughes’s account of “young England’s” internationalism, then, “The Christmas Pudding” and “Business and the Bayonet” should be read not only in terms of the way they countered pacifist idealizations of free-trade expansion, but also with regard to the manner in which they refused that line of thought that held Victorian cosmopolitanism would undermine the nation’s sovereign position in the world. And there is, moreover, an important corollary and an extension to this second point: both texts can be understood to trouble the conviction that, whether coercive or not, British expansion into the non-European world promoted the kind of development there that was so often promised. It is worth re-emphasizing that a Victorian commitment to global free trade should not simply be dismissed as a cynical attempt to secure geopolitical hegemony. Whether cast in Cobdenite terms as an essentially peaceful process, or whether modified by figures such as Palmerston or Mill in order to allow for the necessary coercion of particular communities into modernity, there was a genuine belief that industrial capitalist expansion along liberal lines would engender universal development, and the idea that humanity in all its forms could progress must be set against far bleaker contemporary fates believed to lie in store for savage peoples. However, as was indicated at the end of the previous section, while in communicative terms “Ariel’s Girdle” brought with it an industrial order that was held to annihilate space and time, in socio-economic terms it was understood to operate around the clear historical differences that existed between the parts it comprised. Herein lay a critical tension. Throwing grave doubts upon the capacity of non-Europeans in particular to progress without some form of metropolitan intervention, commentators such as Tallis could stress this intervention tended towards historical harmony. But this emphasis sat uncomfortably with the way in which the city–country model of economic interaction between Victorian metropolis and non-European peripheries was seen to work so well as a way of securing British interests. Cast in this light, celebrations of Britain’s missionary role in the creation of a perfectly free and equitable modern world came into conflict with the idea of an imperial process that served not only to create but also to maintain a world after the image of the Victorian metropolis.



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Here some recent analyses of global capitalism are significant. Rebuking those who pretend otherwise, Peter Osborne demands we recognize “the dialectics of homogenization and differentiation constitutive of the temporality of ‘modernity’, and the way in which these are tied up, inextricably, with its spatial relations.” He continues: “Capitalism universalizes history. Yet, as Vilar points out, ‘it has not unified it.’ ”73 To ignore the fact that the structural logic of the system does not work to unify is, as Samir Amin points out, to ignore the gap that exists between a “really existing capitalism” and the “imaginary market,” an oversight that suits some more than others.74 Attacking the notion that commercial liberalization serves to establish a level playing field, and directing attention towards the operations of the state on the global stage, David Harvey emphasizes that “the equality condition usually presumed in perfectly functioning markets” is violated because the “wealth and well-being of particular territories are augmented at the expense of others”: Uneven geographical conditions do not merely arise out of the uneven patterning of natural resource endowments and locational advantages, but, even more importantly, are produced by the uneven ways in which wealth and power themselves become highly concentrated in certain places by virtue of asymmetrical exchange relations. It is here that the political dimension re-enters the picture. One of the state’s key tasks is to try to preserve that pattern of asymmetries in exchange over space that works to its own advantage.75 With discriminatory processes such as these in mind, Doreen Massey stresses the dangers of conceiving capitalism with relation to a unilinear historical index tending towards equalization: this turning of space into time, and of seeing poorer countries as in some way “backward” (whatever euphemisms for backward are used), ignores the fact that this inequality is being produced now. It’s not a question of catching up. And that not only makes it less likely that a majority of “others” can catch up because inequality is being produced now, but also cunningly ignores our own present day implication in that process.76 Counter to the idea that industrial capitalist modernity would lead (rapidly) towards a flattened and free world of opportunities and mutual prosperity, then, is what Immanuel Wallerstein



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dubs spatio-temporal “hierarchization.” For Wallerstein, this is a world disfigured by unequal exchange, uneven development and the “greater polarization between core and peripheral zones of the world economy.”77 It is not my intention to suggest that the writers of “A Christmas Pudding” and “Business and the Bayonet” anticipated these contemporary critiques of free-trade globalization. But it is true that as they dramatized interactions between the imperial metropolis and the nonEuropean world, so too these texts compromised Stuart-Wortley’s insistence that Britain’s “Grand Law” would see all placed upon “one proud footing.” Fleshing out in the manner that they did the restrictive, discriminatory, “hard-knocking” geo-political arenas in which abstracted idealizations of market economics found material form, the above sketches problematized political economy’s “good story” about stadial development. Understood thus, the silence of the Raisin and the violence of the “seventy fours, soldiers and marines” might be seen to register the fact that Britain’s Pax sought to fix in place as opposed to freeing up those global communities it engirdled. As the nineteenth century came to an end, William Morris would write that the World Market had come into being as a result of “force and fraud,” with bourgeois powers demanding “helpless, hapless people . . . sell themselves into the slavery of hopeless toil so that they might have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of ‘civilisation.’ ”78 Forty years earlier the above two tales furnished foundations upon which such an evaluation could rest. However, the idea that these examples of Exhibition commentary shed light upon the discriminatory structural logic of industrial capitalist expansion needs to be contextualized in relation to the discriminatory cultural logic that circulated at the time these texts were written. So while these sketches illustrate the fact that the inadequacies, weaknesses and irrationality of particular backward peoples were understood to justify coercive and violent imperial expansion, more needs to be said on the idea that these same shortcomings were seen also to hold back the progress of these peoples within the modern world in which they now found themselves situated. Put another way, the argument that “A Christmas Pudding” and “Business and the Bayonet” critiqued the intentions and results of Britain’s imperial mission should not be detached from the widespread Victorian conviction that it was the restrictive character of race rather than the oppressive operations of industrial capitalism that tended to work against historical equalization.



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There was a catch to universalism. It did not make its way as a freefloating ideology but as one propagated by those who held economic and political power in the world system of historical capitalism. Universalism was offered to the world as a gift of the powerful to the weak. Timeo Danaos at dona ferentes!79 This gift harboured racism, by which Wallerstein means those “allegations that genetic and/or long-lasting ‘cultural’ traits of various groups” that served to encourage the hierarchization of global peoples and enforced “highly unequal distributions of reward” (78). Thus, he continues, the emergence of a regionally stratified planet brings with it the fact that “large segments of the world’s population have been defined as under classes, as inferior beings, and therefore deserving ultimately of whatever fate comes their way” (122). So we might say that racism constitutes a mode of thinking through which modernity’s spatio-temporal dialectic could be inscribed onto the bodies and minds of those global communities it incorporated. With the damaging consequences of such an inscription in mind, although without insisting racism is in some monolithic, transhistorical sense always and only the result of capitalism, I turn in the final section of this chapter to consider the idea that Exhibition commentary raised concerns over the capacities of non-European peoples to develop within the global order.80 Discussing Mill’s “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” Noam Chomsky suggests that it “is hard to think of a more distinguished and truly honourable intellectual – or a more disgraceful example of apologetics for terrible crimes.”81 Disgraceful perhaps, but even here Mill remained committed to a progressive universalism that insisted that global integration of backward peoples via imperial intervention tended towards a level world of autonomous nations. To think about race allowed that this insistence could be tempered, if not altogether ignored. So race could be deployed to far more pernicious effect than straightforward historical difference. This was the point Mill made elsewhere, when he asserted that, of all the vulgar modes of social and moral thought, “the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural



Bringing us back to free trade’s anthropological fantasy in order to introduce the socio-cultural to the economic picture wherein Harvey traced the political, Wallerstein raises an important proviso to the universalist imperative with which nineteenth-century globalization has been associated:

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differences.”82 Where previously I have considered commentary that framed British efforts to raise other nations in the social order with relation to a model of “catch up,” my attention now shifts to the suggestion that barbarian and savage communities would struggle to progress either at the same rate or to the same extent as their civilized counterparts had done. And if the Great Exhibition thus generated the kind of thinking about non-Europeans that positioned them as a type of under class within the global economy, there is no doubt too that it inspired the kind of fear and loathing that excused their systematic extermination. I turn also then to commentary that figured such peoples as existing beyond industrial capitalism’s pale, “something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth.”83

Mission impossible Speaking to concerns that appeared to trouble the homogenizing drive associated with globalization, Charles Dickens wrote in “The Niger Expedition” that if it was hard to change “the customs even of civilised and educated men, and impress them with new ideas,” then “to do this by ignorant and savage races, is a work that, like the progressive changes of the globe itself, requires a stretch of years that dazzles in the looking at.” The thrust of the piece, which appeared in 1848, was an attack upon abolitionist Charles Buxton’s failed attempt to promote in Niger precisely that potent combination of free commerce, Christianity and civilization with which England’s Mission was associated at the Crystal Palace. Notably, then, Dickens poured scorn upon the “heated visions” of those philanthropists who called for the “railroad Christianisation of Africa and the abolition of the Slave-Trade.” So it was that the perceived dovetail between Britain’s technological (locomotive) capacity to annihilate space and time and Britain’s capacity to elevate quickly and efficiently savage hearts and minds via commercial integration was dismissed, brought up short by the way in which Dickens invoked global geography with relation to racialized geological time. “The Niger Expedition” offered a far slower paced, less emphatic account of human improvement to the one proposed by advocates of modernity’s iron apostles of civilization: “Gently and imperceptibly the widening circle of enlightenment must stretch and stretch, from man to man, from people on to people, until there is a girdle round the earth.”84 All peoples seemed capable of development then, but the process was deliberately disassociated from the supposedly civilizing temporality of Ariel’s Girdle. If this undermined the much-heralded



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power of industrial capitalist expansion to bring up to speed all those peoples it encountered, however, the slow radiation of the “widening circle of enlightenment” certainly did not diminish the primary powers of those communication technologies at the forefront of this expansive drive, nor the sovereign global compass that they afforded Britain. When Dickens referred in “The Niger Expedition” to the underexploited cotton, indigo, ivory, gums, camwood and palm oil to be found in Africa, then, he called to mind Carlyle’s earlier claim that nine-tenths of the Terrestrial Planet exhorted of his countrymen, “Come and till me, come and reap me!”85 While this exhortation met with a positive response, industrial capitalist expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century proved far more successful at mobilizing non-European resources than it did at enriching non-European peoples. Contra the manner in which the Victorian Pax Britannica was articulated at the Crystal Palace, and however laudable the intentions of its proponents, the years following 1851 did not bear fruit for the vast majority of those peoples whom Exhibition commentators identified as historically backward. They witnessed instead an incredible growth in the gap in per capita income between Western powers and Africa, Asia and large parts of South America.86 They also witnessed the genocide of non-European peoples by industrialized and industrializing nations. That being so, it is significant to note that while it promoted so markedly England’s Mission to raise up those global communities that were positioned as passengers rather than drivers of economic growth, at one and the same time the Crystal Palace inspired representations of non-European peoples that threw into doubt the Mission’s developmental efficacy. Examining such representations, I suggest that a tension opened up at the Great Exhibition between the display’s stated universalist scope and the perception of a historicized divide between the developed and undeveloped world. In so doing I return to the antithesis between savagery and civilization remarked by George Stocking, where savagery or barbarism stands for those peoples not yet or no longer “able to subject themselves to the discipline of labor and delayed gratification, indulgent of their instinctive passions.”87 Central to the argument that follows, then, is an interest in the idea that as the Victorians proposed a global order held to level out historical difference, creating a modern world distinguished by universal autonomy, possibility and progress, so too they were thinking about human life on earth in ways that worked against this paradigm. In line with the arguments of Stocking, as well as other scholars working on Victorian Anthropology and Ethnology, the thrust



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of this section is to read the antithesis it highlights not simply in terms of an understanding of relative historical difference derived from political economy’s stadial model, but also with regard to the development of racial discourse in the nineteenth century. As such, it is necessary first to clarify the way in which I want to think about race as a typological mode of analysis, before turning to the Exhibition itself. One hundred years after the Great Exhibition, Hannah Arendt would note in Imperialism, the second part of The Origins of Totalitarianism, that “Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race thinking had ever existed in the civilised world.”88 This suggestion, which sits comfortably alongside Fabian’s argument concerning Anthropology’s link with imperial expansion, has been important to the way in which much postcolonial scholarship over the past thirty or so years has discussed the relationship between culture and empire. Race has thus emerged as an important concept for scholars interested, as Said puts it in Orientalism, to explore discursive fields of knowledge and power that have promoted “the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).”89 Certainly it is true that from around the 1840s the idea of race, as a scientifically verifiable maker of cultural and/or biological difference, was increasingly brought to the fore in Britain and continental Europe by various disciplines and through various media as a category that could explain why some global communities were superior to others, as well as why this state of affairs might be set to continue. However, as Christine Bolt reminds us, race was a critical but highly contested category in the Victorian period, riven in particular by the dividing line in the mid-nineteenth century between monogenetic and polygenetic conceptualizations of racial difference: During the middle years of the nineteenth century, “race” like “civilization,” became one of the great catchwords of those Victorians who concerned themselves with events outside Britain . . . But, as the president of the Royal Anthropological Society, James Hunt, complained in 1863, “hardly two persons use such an important word as ‘race’ in the same sense.”90 It is important then, to remain mindful of the fact that if it was deployed widely so too race was deployed variously in the nineteenth century. All the more so in the light of recent and variously inflected moves to suggest in general that postcolonial scholarship misrepresents and exaggerates the character and impact of British imperial culture,



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and in particular that it has placed an undue emphasis upon the conceptualization of racial difference as an ideological condition for imperialism. Cora Kaplan avoids such reductivism, and provides a cogent summary of the way in which she understands racial thinking as it developed in Britain in the nineteenth century. Emphasizing that ideas about the relative progress of global communities were crucial to the historical index within which this mode of thought operated, Kaplan notes the way in which race disturbed the idea of generic human progress: [T]heories of racial hierarchy before and after Darwin used the metaphor of human development from infant to adult to discriminate between racial types and also between the stages of civilisation that native peoples were assumed to have reached. Non-Europeans (and sometimes women) were often thought to be fixed in a perpetual childhood – monumental in the sense that it remained undeveloped. Even when non-European cultures or non-white peoples were thought to be able to achieve “civilised” status through education and acculturation, they were imagined as developing within a different, and slower, temporality, their “catching up” with Europeans often measured vaguely in centuries rather than decades or generations. The idea that racial types were fixed, but also capable of improvement, were therefore formally in conflict, and fiercely debated by ethnologists and social and political thinkers. Popular opinion often entertained the two ideas at once.91 Thus Kaplan wants to distinguish between different, conflictual modes of racial thinking. But she also stresses the way in which racial discourse, broadly conceived, structured understandings of enculturated and/or embodied human inferiority, signalling that non-European peoples lacked the historical impetus upon which Western communities were felt able to capitalize. When she suggests that popular opinion could entertain “the two ideas at once,” she underlines too that it is an attention to the dissemination and interplay of different racial theories, as much as the influence of particular understandings of race, that should inform our study of Victorian culture on this subject. With Kaplan’s analysis to the fore, I want to propose the Crystal Palace as a site that, to develop what she says about racial discourse and popular opinion, entertained the idea of race. Helping clarify this proposal is a letter that appeared in The Times, some three weeks before the paper would herald the Exhibition as an event motivated “to consider



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all mankind as one people.” Addressed from a Mr. Issac Ironside, and included under the heading “A Curious Contribution to the Great Exhibition of 1851,” the letter expressed concern that the British public was not generally acquainted “with the discovery of a race of men, in the interior of Africa, having tails.” Citing the French explorer who had discovered these peoples, Ironside furnished readers with a description of one such: His skin was black-bronzed and shining, and soft to the touch like velvet . . . His face was repulsively ugly; his mouth was enormous, his lips thick, his teeth strong, sharp and very white; his nose broad and flat, his ears long and deformed, his forehead low and very receding, his hair not very woolly or thick, but nevertheless curly . . . His tail was more than three inches long, and almost as flexible as that of a monkey.92 These bestial peoples, it was written, “ate with delight raw flesh, as bloody as possible,” and “they loved human flesh above all things.” “[I]ntroducing these facts” in order to urge the French Government to exhibit in 1851 “a male and female Ghilane,” and invoking Lord Monboddo’s famous claims concerning the human status of Orangutans and the existence of men with tails, Ironside anticipated the display of such specimens “would produce a sensation not to be produced by anything else. Lord Monboddo’s theories would be discussed by the learned of all countries.” Others seemed to share his enthusiasm. T. H. Lacy’s play Novelty Fair; or, Hints For 1851 expected Exhibition-goers to be directed “To the men with tails from Central Africa,” while in “Foreign Families of Distinction in London,” Punch hinted at the arrival in the capital of “specimens of the newly-discovered race in the interior of Africa who are said to have tails, just like monkeys.”93 By the mid-nineteenth century Londoners and visitors to the city were increasingly used to witnessing such savage spectacles. Discussing an increased Victorian demand for the display of live specimens of supposedly primitive peoples from all over the world, Richard Altick contends in The Shows of London that a shifting emphasis from the exhibition of individual freaks to the exhibition of generic types in the Victorian metropolis should be understood not only with relation to the rise of ethnological interest in human difference, but also to what was becoming “a more and more openly and aggressively displayed aspect of the English character, its complacent assumption of racial supremacy.”94 Given this context, it is significant to note that Ironside’s request went



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unheeded at an official level; there was no display of live humanity at the Palace. So, as Altick himself notes, it would be entirely wrong to argue that the Great Exhibition was an event intended to promote the kind of aggressive racism he outlines. But equally we must hold onto the fact that if race was an overdetermined concept at the time of the display, so too it was immanent, promoting and sustaining forms of developmental discrimination that permeated different areas of Victorian society and culture. When I suggest the Palace entertained race, then, the point I am making is that Ironside’s letter, and the fact it was taken up by Exhibition commentary, can be understood more broadly with relation to the way in which the Palace acted not only to raise questions about the origins and propensities of different races, but did so in a climate where racial variation was seen to provide an opportunity for popular “sensation.” While monkey men from Central Africa were not on view at the Exhibition, an examination of commentary that wondered what might occur were such savage peoples to visit London sheds light upon the contention that the display served at once to accommodate and play with the idea of racial inferiority. As established, the Exhibition did not in fact attract the variety and numbers of foreigners that had been anticipated. Still less the nonEuropeans. Refusing the prevailing logic that held that the metropolis would be flooded by overseas visitors for the duration of the Exhibition, the Family Herald was particularly scathing in the run-up to the display towards those commentators who predicted guests from beyond Europe. Of some three hundred million Chinese and some one hundred million “Hindoos,” then, the journal expected only “Some half-dozen pair of cat’s eyes” and “Some dozen or two of leather-skinned Pagans, at the most.” Continuing in a similar vein, it questioned how many Russian serfs would arrive, doubted that “Africa will send any of her niggers,” and wondered whether the emperor of Dahomy would release for the trip “any of his amazons, or his slaves?”95 The pessimism of the piece, however, was in stark contrast to the excitement generated elsewhere. We have seen that Henry Mayhew’s prediction that the display would be visited by “the sight-seers who make up nine-tenths of the human family” proved false. But George Cruikshank’s accompanying illustration, featuring a mass of peoples swarming from all points of the globe to the Palace that rested on top of the earth, and inscribed “All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition of 1851,” spoke to a pronounced Victorian desire to see the sites that such an exotic influx of visitors in particular would provide. Drawing upon this desire, Mayhew’s 1851 detailed enthusiastically the preparations of the



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Exhibition’s more “colourful” guests, including the Hottentot Venus, a Yemassee with his cheeks painted blue “with the rouge of the backwoods,” a Cingalese polished “up like a boot,” a Truefit of New Zealand dressed in the “full buzz wig” and a Maripoosan who had japanned his teeth “with the best Brunswick Black Odonto.” Mayhew looked forward especially to the fare these visitors might consume upon arrival. Alexis Soyer’s “restaurant of all nations,” he declared, would be serving foods ranging from “pickled whelks to nightingales’ tongues – from the rats à la Tartare of the Chinese” to the “turkey and truffles” of the Parisian gourmand – from the “long sixes, au naturel” of the Russian to the “Stewed Missionary of the Marquesas,” or the “cold roast Bishop” of the New Zealander.96 The establishment to which Mayhew referred here was a venture that the great Victorian celebrity chef Alexis Soyer had undertaken in collaboration with the young writer and artist George Augustus Sala. Having turned down the request of the Exhibition’s organizers to submit a proposal to provide refreshments at the display, the Frenchman instead took over Gore House, conveniently situated just opposite the Crystal Palace. Soyer opened there the 1500-seater restaurant he named Soyer’s International Exhibition, The Gastronomic Symposium of All Nations. As the grandiose title suggested, this was a venue intended to rival the Great Exhibition, not just furnish a respite from it. But it was also the case that just as the scheme expected to profit from visitors to the Palace, so too it was conceived very much with the event’s globalized agenda in mind.97 Drawing heavily upon the internationalist rhetoric and sentiment with which the display was linked, as well as playing up the international character of the cuisine for which the chef was renowned, the catalogue Soyer produced in order to promote the Symposium promised a gastronomy that would “triumph over geographical limits,” gathering together “from all quarters of the globe, civilized or uncivilized . . . universal humanity.” “Cosmopolitan customers,” it continued, “should demand cosmopolitan cooking.”98 Thus elaborating the Illustrated Exhibitor’s claim that man was a “cooking animal,” so it would seem that the Symposium was indeed to bear witness to the culinary division of labour for which Punch had called in “The Cookery of All Nations,” underscoring as it did so the beneficial consequences of commercial liberalization and a globalized world order. However, celebratory accounts of globalization were called into question when Soyer turned from cooking to an analysis of consumption, particularly the consumption practices and preferences of the



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“colourful” races of the world. In a list echoed by Mayhew, the catalogue promised that visitors to the Symposium might well find themselves dining opposite Cossacks eating train oil or Chinese eating stewed dog. Where Mayhew expected cannibalism, though, the Catalogue recanted, drawing back from the idea of New Zealanders on the premises: “no, not New Zealanders, for who could form any idea of the horror and dismay that would be caused by some ebony-skinned and boomeranged chieftain demanding ‘baked young woman’ for two, and a ‘cold boiled missionary’ to follow?”99 Especially given food’s prominent position as Adam Smith’s first great want of humankind, and the way in which it was mobilized as an illustrative motif by champions of global interdependency, such an emphasis upon the strange and dangerous eating habits of savage and barbarian peoples worked strikingly against the idea that they could be safely and productively integrated into the new world order. Notably then, other Exhibition commentators were also drawn to represent the peculiar appetites of these primitive communities in similarly divisive ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Punch was at the forefront of those observers keen to play up the curious and somewhat frightening culinary consequences of a non-European presence at the Palace. In “Refreshments at the Great Exhibition of 1851,” the journal rubbished the official arrangements for the provision of food at the display. “As we are expecting visitors from all nations,” it stated, “we may look for a sprinkling of Red Men, to whom it would be a mockery to offer bread and butter, gingerbeer, or even SOYER’S Nectar.” The procurement of a set of diversely proportioned kangaroos, “to suit the appetites, more or less moderate, of the Indian epicure,” was the journal’s somewhat ambitious solution for the feeding of Native American guests.100 “London Dining Rooms” featured Chinese characters ordering bird’s nest, rat pie and dog. “The Haycocks in 1851” depicted a family’s trip to the Palace ruined by a series of misbehaving foreigners, a disastrous adventure that reached its peak with a tribe of American Indians who, tired of eating dog, prepared to scalp a kitchen boy.101 Thomas Onwhyn’s Mr. and Mrs. John Brown’s Visit to London to See the Great Exposition of All Nations staged another fictional account of a family trip to the Palace. Here it was the Brown’s son who found himself in danger. One illustration depicted a group of open-mouthed Negroes exhibiting “their ivories to Little Johnny.” Another rendered this savage menace in still clearer terms, as a hungry and knife-wielding triumvirate from the Cannibal Islands, encountered in a London restaurant, offered a price for the Brown’s unfortunate Johnny.102



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“Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up.”103 What proved to be the “fact of blackness” for Frantz Fanon was, according to certain accounts at the Crystal Palace, the black savage’s modus vivendi. Cannibalism thus posed an especially potent threat in general to reassuring ideas about humanity’s shared bodily instincts and cultural drives, and in particular to Homo economicus, the anthropological fantasy of the Exhibition’s grand narrative. But as depictions of non-European hordes so entirely out of place in Britain’s capital suggested, if the cannibal figure was at the furthest point of remove from the inhabitants of civilized modernity, its alienation could nevertheless be registered upon an index packed with other savage specimens. A fresco painted by Sala upon the walls of Soyer’s Symposium underscored just this point, making manifest its damaging implications for those advocates of free trade who suggested that human difference was not near so important as human similitude. Positioned between what Soyer described as “an incongruous medley of grotesque and monstrous-headed figures,” among which were Esquimaux, American Indians and other savage forms, there could be found on the fresco representatives of white, civilized society.104 And alongside prominent personages including Charles Dickens, the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon, the Manchester School was featured, in the shape of Richard Cobden and John Bright.105 In an image that resonates powerfully with the focus of this section, thus the conviction that it was both wise and felicitous to consider all mankind as one people came under threat, as the very people who urged “observation with extensive view” were confronted by the troublesome consequences of such a global scope. “Visions in the Crystal,” the article from Punch discussed in Chapter 1, put forward the Exhibition as an occasion at which John Bull could promote his commercial rationalism and prove his liberal humanism, instructing the world at large in the “only genuine mode of fraternising.” Significantly then, this sketch concluded with a number of French chefs “introducing the art of civilized cookery among the Caribs, and other tribes of savages; and Mr. Bull also was – not unsuccessfully – displaying to the same aboriginals the superiority of roast beef over broiled prisoner, and of plum-pudding over boiled missionary.”106 Disrupting the idea that such civilized cooking would elicit a positive response, the above-cited commentary utilized savage hunger in order to suggest precisely the opposite dynamic: primitive bodies and minds were at once trapped and overwhelmed by urges and instincts that were difficult if not impossible to reconcile with civilized life, and that worked against the idea that such a conversion as Mr. Punch



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foresaw could be successfully effected. What emerged instead, then, was a vision of human life that can be understood with relation to a racial trope Anne McClintock has associated specifically with the Great Exhibition. “In 1851,” McClintock writes, “the topoi of progress and the Family of Man, panoptical time and anachronistic space found their architectural embodiment in the World’s Exhibition at the Crystal Palace.”107 Explicating “panoptical time” with relation to the encountered idea that the Palace structured a single image of global history (37), she defines “anachronistic space” in terms that call to mind Dickens’s image of racialized geological time as a conceit with which to problematize the idea of a homogenous human family: According to this trope, colonized people – like women and the working class in the metropolis – do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency – the living embodiment of the archaic “primitive.” (30) Playing as they did with the ridiculous incongruity to be forged by situating Fabian’s absent Other within the contemporaneous Time of the Victorian Self, thereby dramatizing the consequences of the living embodiments of anterior time visiting modernity, it is the idea of “anachronistic space” that energized representations of non-European visits to London in 1851. In one sense “energized” is the wrong word here, for at once drawing upon and feeding into Victorian racial discourse, what such commentary can be held to have conveyed was a lack of historical impetus. In contrast, however, it speaks to the fact that such a lack was illustrated, more often than not, in the “colourful” (and hungry) shape of a particularly animated sense of irrationality. In any case, by giving various and vivid form to the primitive appetites of the indigenous populations of the non-civilized world, these representations made manifest the logic of Dickens’s argument in “The Niger Question,” undermining as they did so the logic of England’s Mission: it was ridiculous to imagine that industrial capitalist expansion would railroad the “savage and ignorant races” of the world into civilized modernity, swiftly rendering them proper and productive global citizens. Thus the Crystal Palace brought home to the metropolis the fact that while the industrial capitalist process of de- and re-territorialization allowed that non-European raw materials could be easily and speedily



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integrated into the world economy, it would prove impossible to do the same with non-European communities. In concluding this section I want to propose two different but interlinked ways in which to interpret the argument that asserts that, by representing non-Europeans as anachronistic space, the Great Exhibition situated them at a remove from “history proper.” The first line of analysis is interested in the idea that the Victorian new world order did not in fact effect the socio-economic “catch-up” with which globalization was so often associated. It returns us to the contention that racism is modernity’s spatio-temporal dialectic given human form by emphasizing the discriminatory manner in which the Pax Britannica was seen by some Exhibition commentators to take hold of savage and barbarian peoples. Here it is instructive to remember Wallerstein’s argument that, under conditions of historical capitalism, racism operates to allege those inherent or long-lasting traits that sanction sustained asymmetrical development, violent exploitation and the more general sense that the suffering of racially inferior peoples within the global system is an inevitable consequence of their integration therein. That being so, then, it is important to stress the way in which the representations of non-Europeans considered in this section called to mind the need for “hard-knocking” domination, and suggested enculturated and/or biologized features of primitive life that disallowed such peoples from making progress at the same kind of speed or in the same kind of manner as peoples from the West. While Kaplan made clear that it is not necessary to understand these depictions with relation to the idea that such anachronistic beings were inherently disadvantaged, it is undoubtedly possible. So if race could be seen to slow the developmental character of the parent–child, city–country relationship, then so too it could be seen to arrest development, justifying a static custodial tie, even if that tie was transfigured as a master-slave bond. It was certainly a view of the black savage as “atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency” that prompted Carlyle, some two years before the Exhibition, to exhort that if the West Indian “Quashee” would not assist willingly the Saxon British in mobilizing his islands’ resources, then Providence decreed that he would “get himself made a slave again,” as the needs of the white man compelled him to take up the “beneficient whip.”108 Although Carlyle took up an extreme position here with regard to the inferior status of particular communities, it is worth noting that it was the end point of a racialized spectrum that indicated that, while some peoples could not inhabit history proper, they could nevertheless be integrated at some level into the world system, whether this led to



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their development or not. Wallerstein clarifies his insistence that racism informs the drive towards such integrated relations when he states that it must be sectioned off from xenophobia: “Xenophobia was literally fear of the ‘stranger’. Racism within historical capitalism had nothing to do with ‘strangers.’ ”109 Taking on board this distinction, but concerned at its limitations, I think it is vital to this study to see racism – understood as inclusive – and xenophobia – understood as exclusive – as two sides of a discriminatory coin; both modes were interwoven within Victorian racial discourse, and both fed into the mindsets and measures that blighted nineteenth-century imperialism. Hence the second concluding line of analysis I wish to pursue. Describing Europe as “absolutely the end of History,” and Asia as the beginning, Hegel famously declared of the African that “A people who refuse the rendezvous of History . . . that people is finished; you can put it in the Museum.”110 Unlike the international exhibitions that would follow it, and the other shows of London that surrounded it, the Crystal Palace did not display live human specimens. So, as I have suggested, if Patrick Brantlinger is right to argue that “pre-Darwinian race scientists – Prichard, Smith, Knox, Morton, Nott and Glidden, and others – insisted that the dark races were everywhere in retreat from the onslaught of white civilization and that many, perhaps all, of those races were doomed to extinction,” then it is notable that the Exhibition refused such a Hegelian curatorial policy.111 But that is not to say that the idea of the self-exterminating savage was missing from the Exhibition. Even as it argued that, as a result of indigenous resources and a capacity to labour primitive peoples were not “doomed by Providence at the approach of their more instructed brethren,” the aforementioned article from Tallis’s History noted that such an understanding of the inevitable human costs of industrial capitalist expansion was a “melancholy feeling too prevalent among us.”112 With this prevalent feeling in mind, I turn away from the idea that the Exhibition can be considered with relation to a racist process that structured global inequality along the lines of colour as well as cultural difference. I turn instead to the idea that the display can be understood with regard to a xenophobic process that tended towards the exclusion and eradication of those peoples felt to embody anachronistic space. In so doing I shift first from the representation of non-Europeans within the Victorian metropolis to the way in which commentators conceived of Victorians in non-European peripheries. As Thomas Hughes would attest when he championed the hardworking Browns leaving their mark in “American forests and Australian



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uplands,” and John Ruskin would later underscore when he urged that Britain “must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; – seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set foot on,” settler colonization found ideological justification in the developed capacity of the British to mobilize the resources of those territories in which they found themselves.113 While such an overtly aggrandizing imperial spirit is often associated with the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was far from absent in 1851. Considering the “preponderance of raw produce” displayed by non-European territories at the Palace, thus it was that The Times elaborated the idea of “infant societies still struggling forward to a larger industrial development” with relation to the well-rehearsed image of Victorians mixing properly and productively their labour with their new-found land: The philosophic mind will be attracted by the advantages which the rising communities that have swarmed from our shores to settle in distant scenes possess – how science and education help them to investigate the natural resources of the new regions which they occupy – how, having tilled the virgin soils of Australia or Canada with the agricultural knowledge of the mother country, they at length send home the fruits of their labour to be absorbed by our markets.114 Following a similar line, the Crystal Palace and its Contents suggested that had the Great Exhibition been held one hundred years earlier then Canada’s display would have consisted of “a wigwam, some wooden or horn spoons, rough earthern pots, a few embroidered moccasins, a few tomahawks, and a dozen or so scalps . . . but nothing indicative of the natural resources of this vast and almost virgin territory.” Things were different now, however, since “European industry has planted the spade there, and some of the fruits are now before us.” Again then, what was celebrated were “the industrial beginnings of a junior branch of the great civilizing family of the universe.”115 So we are returned to the idea of non-European territories as tabula rasa, profitably integrated as infant but dynamic units within a global division of labour. Except that now this determined drive forward appeared to be conducted in the absence of those “aboriginal” peoples other commentary had insisted could be found a place within the new world order. As McClintock notes, the trope of anachronistic space must in this sense be understood with relation to the “myth of the empty land,” and the acceptance



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that the mobilization of such terrains was necessarily effected via the exclusion of those indigenous populations that had so badly failed them.116 Thus excluded from the depiction of non-Europe’s entry into global history, it is not entirely true to say that the original inhabitants of these lands took form at the Great Exhibition only via their industrial produce or textual representation. Displayed prominently in the American court were two model Native American figures belonging to George Catlin, the American painter, ethnologist and exhibitor of Indians (in model and live form) throughout America and Western Europe in the 1840s and 1850s. The appearance of these figures in the Palace is significant not least because two years later, when he came to reflect upon the likely fate of primitive races in the modern world, it was his remembrance of the live display of Catlin’s Indians in London’s Egyptian Hall that prompted Charles Dickens in “The Noble Savage” to label all such peoples, from “bushmen” to Zulus, “cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.” That being so, Dickens could not comprehend why his fellow countrymen might regret the disappearance of such a specimen “in the course of this world’s development, from such and such lands where his absence is a blessed relief and an indispensable preparation for the sowing of the very first seeds of any influence that can exalt humanity.”117 Dickens insisted towards the end of the essay that there was no more justification for being cruel to this “miserable object” than there was for being cruel to William Shakespeare or Issac Newton, a point Grace Moore brings to the fore when she argues that this was not a straightforward demand for the “obliteration” of such peoples.118 Nevertheless, the thrust of the piece was encapsulated in the first paragraph, with its emphatic declaration, “I call a savage something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth.”119 Set against Dickens’s contention in “The Niger Expedition” that “savage and ignorant races” should be left alone in order to develop of their own accord, then, “The Noble Savage” made explicit what the above representations only implied: distinguished as it was by the capacity to develop resources and exalt humanity, the West’s drive into non-Europe was also characterized by the loss of those races unable to respond to the progressive, civilizing climate in which they now found themselves. As they reacted to the display of Catlin’s Indians in the Palace, Exhibition commentators were similarly inclined to doubt that a place



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could be found for such peoples within a globalized world. Drawing its readers’ attention to what it described as “a very repulsive-looking Indian chief, and his squaw, tricked out with furs, feathers, and paint in the most approved fashion of the back woods,” The Times remarked that the “red man seems ill at ease” surrounded by “so much civilization,” before adding that he had “the obvious intention to scalp somebody as soon as he gets a favoured opportunity for doing so.”120 In a section devoted to the display of “Guns, Weapons, &c., of All Nations,” Hunt’s Handbook was likewise drawn to link savagery with an aggressive impulse, positioning the “rude figure of the Red Indian” with relation to the New Zealander, the African and the Australian, and contending that “with his bow and arrows and paint and tattooing, [he] may be considered as representing man in his savage state whenever or wherever he has been found.”121 Given that Catlin’s figures were displayed next to India rubber, increasingly recognized as an important and useful resource, there was an unfortunate but hard-hitting contrast to be drawn between valuable raw materials and violent indigenous peoples: some races belonged in the world’s market, others in the world’s museum. This at least was the Hegelian reading of things reached by John Lemoinne, cited by Dr. Lardner in his compendium of Exhibition commentary: There is something cruel and ostentatious in the exhibition of these poor Red-skins. It is nothing but a trophy. They are the slaves chained to the car of the conqueror; they are the shadows of the old races that the victorious and implacable civilisation of the West crushes in its progress.122 So it was that manifest destiny came to be cast with relation to racial extermination. And so it was that Dickens’s interpretation of the selfexterminating savage as a phenomenon that could be disassociated from obliterative imperial violence was exposed as inadequate. Held representative of all such primitive communities, and understood in particular relation to racial images the Palace entertained elsewhere, Catlin’s Indians stood as the anachronistic shadows against which the civilized process of opening up global resources would have to contest. We have moved, then, from a vision of imperial intervention that deployed competition as a means of cultivating people as well as products to one that identified competition in terms of racial struggle, and the likely need to weed out aboriginals in



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Just as the land must be cleared of trees and rocks in order to farm it, so too the terrain must be cleared of the native inhabitants. Just as the frontier people must gird themselves against the severe winters, so too they must arm themselves against indigenous populations.123 In this transfigured version of Prince Albert’s mission, where the conquest of nature was carried out by white races against dark, a metropolitan audience could at least rest secure in the knowledge that the odds of such a struggle were stacked firmly in its favour. Seventy-five years before the Great Exhibition began, the Wealth of Nations had thrown into doubt the inclusive and harmonious order the event would come to foreground when Smith noted that improvements to firearms were “favourable both to the permanency and extension of civilisation”: “In modern times the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilised.”124 Inviting its readers to compare the archaic weaponry of Indians, Africans, South Americans and New Zealanders with the advanced guns and artillery of the civilized West, the aforementioned article from Hunt’s Handbook gave little room for doubt that such an armed extension of civilization would be highly effective. Tellingly, given the fact that it was so prominent in promoting the Christianized, cosmopolitan brand of political economy around which the Crystal Palace’s globalized fantasy would revolve, I turn finally to the Economist, and an article entitled “Some Moral Aspects of the Great Exhibition,” in order to reveal the callous way in which such genocidal brutality could be justified. As befitted the article’s title, much of the piece was given over to an idealized conception of the Victorian new world order, so that the increasingly wide-ranging character of global commerce was linked to an ever-improving international division of labour, and celebrated with regard to social equalization and the enhanced welfare of the human family. But as it reflected upon the widening scope of this process, the article introduced a hard-hitting qualification to its triumphant account of comparative advantage and competitive exchange. Foreshadowing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where imperialism’s civilizing mission is brought up short by Kurtz’s cry of “Exterminate all the brutes,”125 the piece turned suddenly to consider the consequences for those people it believed to have refused their rendez-vous with



order that the work of cultivation – and with it “history proper” – could begin:

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history: “When we have savages for our neighbours as in Caffreland, we seem to have no other alternative than to keep them at bay or to exterminate them. They have nothing to give us in exchange for our commodities, and we can get nothing from them.”126 Thus the Great Exhibition’s inclusive globalized fantasy was dissipated, its “moral aspects” falling foul of market forces. In Conrad’s novella Marlow would conclude that the “conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”127 That being so, it seems that on this occasion the Economist had looked a little too hard into the Crystal Palace.



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The year 2001 was the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Great Exhibition. Alongside the popular commemorations of the event – somewhat muted perhaps following the disappointing experience of Britain’s Millennium Dome – a series of academic conferences and symposia was held throughout the summer, across international venues. Buzard, Childers and Gillooly note that it was these events that did so much to stress the need for the kind of revisionist work that would supersede “dominant Victorian accounts” of modernity, as well as the display that had been taken to signify it. Such work, they hold, sits comfortably with an important imperative driving scholarship elsewhere: “In a variety of fields, scholars today are arguing for a view of multiple modernities, qualified Enlightenments, and ‘discrepant cosmopolitanisms.’ ”1 Outside the academy, however, disastrous events would unfold later that year which would inspire a very different form of engagement with the Victorian era, and in particular what it was the Victorians could tell us about the twenty-first-century world. This postscript sheds light on the nature of one such engagement in order to reflect on the dangers of not moving beyond the globalized fantasy that took shape at the Great Exhibition. Just as this book began with a dream of the advantages to be gained as the world was increasingly opened up to trade, so too it closes with another vision that was energized by the benefits of globalized commerce. This time, however, the visionary figure is real and from the twenty-first century; his vision featured the United States not Britain at the centre of the world; and he was considerably more interested than was Paul Dombey in the idea of universal peace and progress, as 198



Postscript: America, Anglobalization and the Great Exhibition

Postscript: America, Anglobalization and the Great Exhibition 199

America’s greatest opportunity is to create a balance of world power that favors human freedom. We will use our position of unparalleled strength and influence to build an atmosphere of international order and openess in which progress and liberty can flourish in many nations. A peaceful world of growing freedom serves American longterm interests, reflects enduring American ideals and unites America’s allies . . . As we preserve the peace, America also has the opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom and progress to nations that lack them . . . Free trade and free markets have proved their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty – so the United States is working with the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity . . . The United States welcomes its responsibility to lead in this great mission.2 Thus spoke George W. Bush, delivering “Securing Freedom’s Triumph” on 11 September 2002, the first anniversary of the hostilities of 9/11. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the politics and rhetoric that characterized this response, and the position of America in the world, there were parallels to be drawn between the way the Bush administration situated America post-9/11 and Victorian Britain’s global standing, particularly as regards the free-trade imperialism of the nineteenth century. Of the many commentators to draw such comparisons, the historian Niall Ferguson is keen in Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire to stress that “from the second half of the nineteenth century to the Great Depression, the British Empire shared many of the same aspirations” as America under Bush.3 While Ferguson is explicit that the Americans should not “somehow adopt the Victorians as role models,” for theirs was “very far from an ideal liberal empire” (25), he is equally concerned to state that “ideally endowed” as they are – in economic, military and political terms – to run such a “liberal empire” (2), the “Americans have more to learn than they are prepared to admit from their more selfconfident British predecessors” (25). What is required in the troubled world post-9/11, Ferguson maintains, is for the United States to give into “imperial temptation” and take up the mantle it has inherited from Victorian Britain (3). The thrust of Ferguson’s argument in Colossus is informed by the work he published a year or so earlier. In his introduction to Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Ferguson is drawn to Richard Cobden’s



well as the responsibilities that its superpower status bestowed upon his own nation:


aforementioned “England, Ireland and America,” with its celebration of a British-led inauguration of an era of global free trade. While he is attracted by Cobden’s benign vision of Britain’s Pax, Ferguson is nevertheless clear about its shortcomings. He uses Empire in order to maintain that, although theoretically “globalization may be possible in an international system of multilateral cooperation, spontaneously arising as Cobden envisaged,” in practice it more often than not demands promotion and imposition, politics as well as economics.4 Thus Ferguson points to the directive, often coercive way in which Britain, first and foremost among nineteenth-century imperialist nations, gave shape to a global economy. Whether via state-sponsored colonial annexation or other informal methods of pressure, Ferguson emphasizes that it was forceful expansion and gunboat diplomacy over and above a consensus born of mutual interest that propelled nineteenth-century globalization throughout the non-Western world. Crucially, however, the case is made that this imperial process, which he terms “Anglobalization,” can be regarded, in his own rhetoric, as a “Good Thing” (xxiv, xxi). Justifying this contention, Ferguson argues that while Cobden’s vision was not realized as he wished, nevertheless Britain was hugely successful in placing the world on the “path to modernity,” even if this path was bloody at times: “no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world” (xxviii, xxii). On the balance sheet Ferguson deploys in order to understand the history he considers these are ambitions and achievements that must be set against British imperial rapacity, injustices and failures. They can equally be contrasted with the less benevolent, more parochial imperial ambitions of other European powers. Thus it is that “the legacy of Empire is not just ‘racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance,’ ” but an Anglobalized world in which, alongside interrelated flows of cultural and institutional phenomena including liberal democracy, the rule of law, Christianity, team sports and the English language, capitalism has triumphed “as the optimal system of economic organization” (xxvii). With such acclaim to the fore, it is somewhat surprising to find that Ferguson’s analysis pays only cursory attention to the Great Exhibition. The present study has demonstrated that 1851 marked perhaps the single most important year in the metropolitan history of Anglobalization. In so doing it has made clear that Ferguson is absolutely right not only to suggest that the idea of free trade globalization took a strong hold



200

in nineteenth-century British politics and culture, but also to emphasize that this idea bore with it a firm and genuine commitment to universal peace and progress. At the same time, we have examined Exhibition commentary that provides a cultural context to support and elaborate Ferguson’s equally correct assertion that as the idea of globalization was put into practice by Britain so too Cobden’s contention that globalized integration would and should occur spontaneously all too often fell by the wayside, replaced by a Palmerstonian pragmatism that accepted the fact that Britain’s Pax was of necessity forcefully realized. What sanctioned this Victorian acceptance – often celebration – of an imperial mandate, and what feeds into Ferguson’s subsequent claim that Anglobalization must be distinguished from misguided imperial ambition and methods, are the universally valid liberal tenets and accompanying institutional and cultural practices with which it is associated. But Globalization and the Great Exhibition has insisted that things are not as straightforward as such logic would dictate. By examining the way in which the Crystal Palace gave form to Anglobalization, this book has painted a complex picture concerning Victorian ideas about the way in which free trade was to take hold of the world. If it is a picture that challenged the kinds of celebrations the Exhibition inspired, it is also one which complicates the kind of distinction Ferguson would draw between the “good” and “bad” aspects of imperialism. Thus we have seen that imperial processes of de- and re-territorialization, aimed at creating a non-European world after the image of an industrialized metropolis, were premised upon the perceived failure of non-European populations to mix properly their labour with their land, so that the global order that emerged at the Palace was one which revolved around ideas of development and underdevelopment, advanced and backward communities, peoples fit to control their own economic destinies and those less able or unable to do so. Like the Victorian commentators who preceded him, Ferguson places faith in the capacity of the free market to enhance global welfare and encourage global development that renders legitimate an interventionist mandate, given such global circumstances. When after some 370 pages he finally acknowledges “the lopsided nature of economic globalization – the fact that capital flows mainly within the developed world,” he explains it as a result of economic mismanagement that ran counter to successful British efforts during the nineteenth century to forge a perfectly free and equal system that best served the interests of all.5 Set against such a position, I have argued that capitalism structures uneven development, and it thus does not tend towards the level playing field with which its





proponents associate it. It has therefore been my contention that the Great Exhibition helped not only encode but also sustain unequal and discriminatory power relations. The globalized fantasy – which I call the Victorian new world order and Ferguson calls Anglobalization – at the heart of the Exhibition was certainly not motivated to promote racism, exploitation and violence. Yet it is equally certain that it cannot be disassociated from the fact that racism, exploitation and violence characterized the “modern world” that emerged in the years following the close of the Crystal Palace. As Buzard, Childers and Gillooly quite rightly observe in their introduction, “many unsynthesizable narratives, implications, tendencies, prospects, and problems . . . flowed into and out of Paxton’s glorified greenhouse, down to our times.”6 In tension with this reading, and the political imperatives that it raises, Ferguson’s analysis brings to the fore the extent to which the Exhibition’s grand narrative continues to retain its currency in the contemporary world, underscoring as it does so that this story continues to retain its capacity to be invoked for imperial ends. That Colossus sees Ferguson drawing upon Empire in order to suggest America strives towards an “ideal” rendition of Anglobalization’s “liberal empire” rehearses the Eurocentric conceptions of history, agency and cultural value that underpinned the Victorian new world order – even as it relocates the champion of this millennial dream across the Atlantic. Whether or not one places trust in a global superpower to create the kind of flattened, free world of opportunities that Ferguson associates with liberal modernity, to authorize the imperial imposition of such a dream is to shut down opportunity for necessary dialogue, negotiation and difference. To deny this opportunity, Paul Smith notes, is to allow that divergence or conflict “comes to be seen as rooted in individual and/or tribal pathology rather than as a consequence of material histories or of political struggle.”7 While he has been painted in the present study as the intellectual architect of free-trade globalization, Adam Smith was aware of the dangers inherent in such an inflexible, coercive position. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith warned against the “imaginary beauty” of the “ideal system,” noting especially that the “man of system” is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is so often enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests or to the strong prejudices that may oppose it.8 10.1057/9780230594319 - Globalization and the Great Exhibition, Paul Young


202

Smith went on to counsel that the most likely candidate to fall foul of this “highest degree of arrogance” is the sovereign leader.9 Here there is pointed contemporary significance, for those historians and politicians alike who find themselves enamoured with an ideal plan of global government. Whatever else the world needs at the moment, then, it is not historical accounts of “self-confident,” Anglobalizing Victorians that would legitimize and enthuse further a twenty-first-century geo-political position that rests secure in George W. Bush’s post-9/11 slogan, “You’re either with us or against us.”




Notes

1. Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Peter Fairclough, intr. Raymond Williams (1846–48; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 87–8; further page references appear in parentheses. 2. Raymond Williams, “Introduction,” in Dickens, Dombey and Son, pp. 11–24 (11–12). 3. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 14. 4. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (17 March 1851), p. 8. 5. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), p. 8. 6. John Barrell, “Visualising the Division of Labour: William Pyne’s Microcosm,” The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (London: Macmillan Press, 1992), pp. 89–118 (89). 7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989; Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 27. 8. Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North (London: Verso, 1997), p. 9. 9. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale Univesity Press, 1999); John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton, 1999). A third recent history, Hermione Hobhouse’s The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition (London: Athlone, 2002), provides a detailed analysis of the display’s organization and legacy. 10. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 1. 11. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, pp. 2–3. 12. Davis, Great Exhibition, p. x. 13. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 1; Davis, Great Exhibition, p. xi. 14. Henceforth I use the generic term “Exhibition commentary” in order to refer to these various texts. 15. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 221–47 (224–5). 16. Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 120. 17. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 225. 18. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 224. 19. Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 104. 20. P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 2001), p. 664. 21. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, p. 663. 22. Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam, “Reading Three,” in Kelly Boyd and Rohan McWilliam (eds), The Victorian Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 83–4 (83); P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism 204




23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

205

and British Expansion Overseas I: The Old Colonial System, 1650–1850,” Economic History Review 39 (1986), pp. 501–25 (501). André Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. xv. See also J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford, 1993), and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), for differently accented challenges to received wisdom concerning “the Rise of the West.” For a consideration of debates over the genesis of an integrated world system see Janet Abu-Lughod, “Discontinuities and Persistence: One World System or a Succession of Systems?” in André Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills (eds), The World System: Five Hundred or Five Thousand? (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 278–91. See John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6 (1953), pp. 1–15. See also Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism 1750–1850 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), for an account of the way in which political economy contributed to conceptions of imperial activity “at whose core was the dream that England would be the Workshop of the World, the center of a cosmopolitan international economy that would constitute the basis of a Pax Britannica” (pp. 12–13). Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 114. Smith, Millennial Dreams, p. 10. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2002), p. 16; further page references appear in parentheses. Louise Purbrick, “Introduction,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbrick (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 1–25 (1). This is a point made by James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers and Eileen Gillooly, “Introduction,” in James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers and Eileen Gillooly (eds), Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), pp. 1–19 (6). Yvonne ffrench, The Great Exhibition: 1851 (London: Harvill, 1950); Christopher Hobhouse, 1851 and the Crystal Palace: Being an Account of the Great Exhibition and its Contents; of Sir Joseph Paxton; and of the Erection, the Subsequent History and the Destruction of his Masterpiece (London: Murray, 1937); Nikolaus Pevsner, High Victorian Design: A Study of the Exhibits of 1851 (London: Architectural, 1951). Pevsner, High Victorian Design, p. 114. Tom Corfe, The Great Exhibition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex” (1988), in Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry B. Ortner (eds), Culture/Power/History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 123–54; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: A History of the Expositions Universelles, the Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,



Notes, pp. 9–12

Notes, pp. 12–18

42.

1988); Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 289–318. Davis, Great Exhibition, p. xv. Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (1990; London: Verso, 1991). Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, “Introduction,” pp. 7, 6, 2. Although I was able to benefit from the introduction to this valuable collection, its publication was too close to the completion of my own manuscript for this study to profit from the essays it comprises. Likewise, the equally useful Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, ed. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) appeared after my own manuscript had been completed. Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, p. xvii; Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, “Introduction,” pp. 2–3. Purbrick, “Introduction,” p. 21. Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, “Introduction,” p. 3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 53; further page references appear in parentheses. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Space: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 8. Peter Gurney, “An Appropriated Space: The Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace and the Working Class,” in Purbrick (ed.), Great Exhibition, pp. 114–45; Brian Maidment, “Entrepreneurship and the Artisans: John Cassell, the Great Exhibition and the Periodical Idea,” in Purbrick (ed.), Great Exhibition, pp. 79–113. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 13–14.

1


33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

1. Among the Exhibition’s organizers were included the Royal Commission, the twenty-four statesmen appointed in January 1850 and headed by Prince Albert. See Auerbach, Great Exhibition; Davis, Great Exhibition; and Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition (London: Athlone, 2002): all provide detailed historical accounts of the planning, organization and execution of the Exhibition. 2. Quoted in Elizabeth Bonyham and Anthony Burton, The Great Exhibitor: The Life and Work of Henry Cole (London: V & A, 2003), p. 116. 3. “There is Much Speculation Afloat,” The Times (3 January 1851), p. 4. 4. Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank, 1851: Or, the Adventures of Mr. And Mrs. Sandboys and Family, Who Came Up to London to ‘Enjoy Themselves’, and to See the Great Exhibition (London: Bogue, 1851), p. 1. 5. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term was coined in 1834. By 1849 it was being used in a derogatory sense, and in 1860 Thackeray observed that it was “Humour and grotesqueness” which gave “sight-seer the most singular



206

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

207

zest and pleasure.” If Mayhew’s usage was provocative it was also apt, for many observers at least. This point is expanded on in Chapter 3. “The Great Exhibition and its Results,” The Crystal Palace and its Contents: Being an Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. 1851 (London: Clark, 1852), pp. 63–4 (63), (25 October 1851); Illustrated London News (11 October 1851). “Great Exhibition,” Crystal Palace and its Contents, p. 63. Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” Mythologies, selec. and trans. Annette Lavers (1957; London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 100–2 (100). Barthes, “Great Family,” p. 100. Voltaire, “Letter VI. On the Presbyterians” (1733), Letters Concerning the English Nation, intr. Charles Whibley (New York: Franklin, 1974), pp. 32–5 (34). Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992), p. 55; further page references appear in parentheses. “London During the Great Exhibition,” Illustrated London News 18 (17 May 1851), pp. 423–4 (423). Smith’s Scottish identity was often ignored by Victorian commentators keen to appropriate him as a British figure. On occasion Smith was even afforded the honorary status of an Englishman. It is worth noting here, in more general terms, that I have used Britain/British rather than England/English as my default marker of the Exhibition’s host nation. This (difficult) decision was made in part because of the organization of the exhibits in the Crystal Palace (see Chapter 2), and in part in order to reflect the fact that nonEnglish parts of the union played an important role in Victorian Britain’s global expansion. It is certainly not intended to rehearse uncritically the fact that historically “‘British’ is the name imposed by the English on the nonEnglish” (Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race [London: Routledge, 1995], p. 3). Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, Vol. 1 (London: Parker, 1857), p. 194; further page references appear in parentheses. G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 27. Richard Teichgraeber, “Adam Smith and Tradition: The Wealth of Nations before Malthus,” in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750-1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 85–104 (90). Charles Hindley, “On Proposing Free Trade all Over the World” (1830), Free Trade: Speech of Charles Hindley (London: Ridgeway, 1841), p. 14. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, “Introduction: Approaching Enlightenment Exoticism,” in Exoticism in the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester. Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 1–23 (1–2). George Poulett Scrope, Principles of Political Economy Deduced from the Natural Laws of Social Welfare, and Applied to the Present State of Britain (London: Longman, 1833), p. xiii. While the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, it took until 1849, the same year that saw the Navigation Act passed, for them to be completely abolished. Of significance to this study is the fact that 1846 was figured as such a decisive moment, and that in 1851 Britain was seen as the only



Notes, pp. 18–24

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Notes, pp. 25–32 genuinely free-trading nation in the world. For a brief summary of mid-nineteenth-century policy in Europe and America regarding free trade, see James Foreman-Peck, A History of the World Economy: International Relations since 1850 (Totowa: Barnes, 1983), pp. 55–61. J. R. McCulloch, The Principles of Political Economy: With Some Inquiries Respecting their Application, and a Sketch of the Rise and the Progress of the Science, 4th edn (1825; Edinburgh: Black, 1849), p. 169. Manchester Guardian (9 May 1846), p. 3. “We Should Be Curious to See the Answers Returned,” The Times (16 November 1849), p. 4. “The Prince Consort Can Claim the Credit,” The Times (23 February 1850), p. 4. See Davis, Great Exhibition, p. 34. “The Prince Consort Can Claim the Credit,” The Times (23 February 1850), p. 4. “The Morals of the Great Exhibition,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 233; Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 2. “The Morals of the Great Exhibition,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 233. “The Exhibition of Industry – A Hint,” Punch 18 (1850), p. 141. “Visions in Crystal,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 188. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 547. Brooke was mistaken in attributing his “Observation with extensive view” quotation to Johnson’s The Rambler. It is the opening couplet of Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749) that reads “Let Observation with Extensive View / Survey Mankind, from China to Peru.” See Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 263–73 (264). Henry Cole, “Introduction,” Official and Descriptive Illustrated Catalogue, Vol. 1 (3 vols; London: Spicer, 1851), pp. 1–35 (1). The catalogue will be referred to hereafter as the Official Catalogue. Daniel Defoe, “The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr” (1702; [London], 1708), in Eighteenth Century Collections Online, (accessed 7 October 2007), pp. 1–31 (13). Henry Cole, “On the International Results of the Great Exhibition,” in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition: Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, Vol. 2 (2 vols; London: Bogue, 1852–53), pp. 419–51 (420). Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, Andrew S. Skinner and William B. Todd, Vol. 1 (1776; 2 vols; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 456. George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free, 1987), p. 3. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 32. Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 19. Searle, Morality and the Market, pp. 32–3. Karl Marx, “Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy” (1857), in Marxists.org Internet Archive, (accessed 25 June 2007).



208

209

41. Karl Marx, Capital I (1867), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Philosophy, ed. and intr. T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, trans. T. B. Bottomore (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 117. 42. Terry Eagleton, The English Novel (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 40. 43. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, pp. 178, 181. 44. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957; London: Pimlico, 2000), pp. 63, 87. 45. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness (London: Chapman, 1851), p. 300; further page references appear in parentheses. 46. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, p. 37. 47. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, p. 25. 48. Stephen Copley, “Introduction: Reading the Wealth of Nations,” in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 1–22 (13). 49. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, p. 25. 50. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, pp. 456–7. 51. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 31. 52. Quoted in McCulloch, Political Economy, p. 41. 53. Friedrich List, Outlines of American Political Economy, in a Series of Letters Addressed by Frederick List to Charles J. Ingersoll (Philadelphia: Parker, 1827), p. 7. 54. Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (1841; New York: Kelley, 1966), pp. 123, 127. 55. List, National System, p. 126. 56. Fukuyama, End of History, p. 45. 57. “Light for All Nations,” Family Herald 9 (17 May 1851), pp. 44–5 (44). 58. Benjamin Lee Whorf, “Science and Linguistics,” Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John Bissell Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1956), p. 214. 59. Whorf, “Science and Linguistics,” p. 208. 60. Mr Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition of National Industry to be Held in London on the 1st of April 1851 (London: Takemin, 1851), not paginated. 61. Francis Bacon, “The Praise of Knowledge” (1592), Bacon’s Essays: With Annotations, ed. Richard Whatley (London: Longmans, 1882), pp. 608–11 (608). 62. Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 1. 63. See Auerbach, Great Exhibition, pp. 42–52; and Davis, Great Exhibition, pp. 53–93, for an account of the controversies, political manoeuvring and contingencies that characterized the processes of deciding on a site and a building for the Exhibition. 64. “The Wonders of 1851,” Household Words 1 (20 July 1850), pp. 388–92 (390). 65. On the importance of glass see Miller’s Novels Behind Glass. See also Isobel Armstrong, “Charlotte Brontë’s City of Glass,” The Hilda Hulme Memorial Lecture, 2 December 1992 (London: University of London, 1993), pp. 5–35, and especially her Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). The latter had not appeared in print by the time this book was completed, but it promises to be a



Notes, pp. 33–41

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

Notes, pp. 41–4 seminal piece of scholarship. On the significance of iron, and particularly the girder, as a material of modernity, see Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and others; ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 32–49 (33). Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, p. 49. Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851: or, Views of the Industry, the Science, and the Government of England (London: Murray, 1851), p. 63. Owen Jones, “An Attempt to Define the Principles Which Should Regulate the Employment of Colour in the Decorative Arts,” Lectures on the Results, Vol. 2 (1853), pp. 253–300 (268). This lecture set out many of the themes and theories that Jones would develop in his Grammar of Ornament (1856). “A Guide to the Great Exhibition of Industry,” Illustrated London News 18 (3 May 1851), pp. 359–72 (364). British colonial contributions to the Exhibition were taken from the East Indies, Indian Archipelago, Jersey, Guernsey, Ceylon, Ionian Islands, Malta, Cape of Good Hope, Natal, West Coast of Africa, Canada, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, St. Helena, Mauritius, the Seychelles, St. Domingo, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitt’s, Barbados, Antigua, British Guiana, the Bahamas, Trinidad, the Bermudas, South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand, New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land, Labuan and Borneo. The thirty-four foreign states were Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bremen, Chile, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany (the states of the Zollervein), Greece, Hamburg, Hanover, Holland, Lubeck, Mexico, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, New Granada, Oldenburg, Persia, Peru, Portugal, Rome, Russia, Sardinia, Schleswig-Holstein, Society Islands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunis, Turkey, Tuscany and the United States of America. The Chinese government refused to contribute to the display, but a China court was established by borrowing items from Oriental collections around the United Kingdom. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (15 April 1851), p. 5; The Palace of Industry: A Brief History of its Origin and Progress (London: Oliver, 1851), p. 5. “The Exhibition and its Management,” Crystal Palace and its Contents (1 November 1851), pp. 74–5 (74). Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, Vol. 1 (3 vols; London: Tallis, [1851]), p. 207. The Palace of Glass and the Gathering of the People: A Book for the Exhibition (London: Jones, [1851]), p. 118. William Cave Thomas, Suggestions For a Crystal College or New Palace of Glass For Combining the Intellectual Talent of All Nations (London: Dickinson, 1851), p. 29. “Let M.P.’s Talk as They Please,” The Times (16 May 1851), p. 4. Douglas Jerrold, “Christmas Thoughts of the Crystal Palace,” Illustrated London News 19 (20 December 1851), pp. 738–9 (738). “The Great Exhibition,” Illustrated London News 19 (6 September 1851), pp. 289–90 (290). “You Must Translate; ’Tis Fit We Understand,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 126.



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80. Robert Hunt, “The Science of the Exhibition,” in The Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue: The Industry of All Nations, 1851 (London: Virtue, [1851]), pp. i–xvi (iv). 81. “The End of the Exhibition,” Economist 9 (18 October 1851), pp. 1146–7 (1147). 82. Thomas Binney, The Royal Exchange and the Palace of Industry: or, The Possible Future of Europe and the World (London: Jones, 1851), p. 27. 83. Binney, Royal Exchange, pp. 96–7. 84. Fukuyama, End of History, p. xv. 85. Fukuyama, End of History, pp. 72–3, 55. 86. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., ed. Robert H. Ross (1850; New York: Norton, 1973), pp. 3, 34, 90. 87. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Ark, 1983), p. 47. 88. Belshazzar’s Feast: In its Application to the Great Exhibition (London: Houlston, 1851), p. 5. 89. Belshazzar’s Feast, pp. 9–11. 90. A Spiritual Watchman of the Church of England, The Theology and Morality of the Great Exhibition (London: Painter, 1851), pp. 6, 8. 91. P. Macfarlane, The Crystal Palace: Viewed in Some of its Moral and Religious Aspects (Lanarck: Budge, 1851), p. 12. 92. Macfarlane, Crystal Palace, pp. 13–14. 93. Macfarlane, Crystal Palace, pp. 16–17. 94. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904–05; London: Unwin, 1968), p. 154. 95. Macfarlane, Crystal Palace, p. 26. 96. “Industrial Exhibition of 1851,” The Times (22 February 1850), p. 8. 97. J. C. Whish, The Great Exhibition Prize Essay (London: Longman, 1851), pp. 22–3, 43–4, 8. 98. Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge, 1971), pp. 9–16. 99. “The Exhibition of All Nations,” The Times (22 March 1850), p. 5. 100. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, p. 4. 101. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, p. 4. 102. Albert, Prince Consort of Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, “At the Banquet Given By The Right Hon. The Lord Mayor, Thomas Farncombe, To Her Majesty’s Ministers, Foreign Ambassodors, Royal Comissioners of the Exhibition of 1851, and the Mayors of One Hundred and Eighty Towns, at the Mansion House. [21 March 1850],” The Principal Speeches and Addresses of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort: With an Introduction, Giving Some Outlines of His Character (London: Murray, 1862), pp. 109–14 (112). 103. William St. Clair, The Great Exhibition: A Poem (London: Partridge, 1850), p. 4. 104. Henry Birch, The “Great Exhibition” Spiritualized (London: Snow, 1851), pp. 57–8; further page references appear in parentheses. 105. Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basil, 1973), pp. 33–54 (38–9); further page references appear in parentheses.



Notes, pp. 44–54

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Notes, pp. 55–64

106. Davis, Great Exhibition, p. 177. 107. Samuel Warren, The Lily and the Bee: An Apologue of the Crystal Palace (London: Blackwood, 1851), p. 6.

Geography Made Easy

1. Daniel Defoe, “Mr. Review Plumps for Free Trade” (1706), The Best of Defoe’s Review: An Anthology, ed. William L. Payne (New York: Columbia, 1970), pp. 123–7 (124). 2. Daniel Defoe, “Of Divinity in Trade” (1713), Best of Defoe’s Review, pp. 107–11 (107). 3. Eagleton, English Novel, p. 26. 4. Henry Smith Evans, The Crystal Palace Game: Voyage Round the World: An Entertaining Excursion in Search of Knowledge, Whereby Geography is Made Easy (London: Davis: [1855]). 5. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (13 October 1851), p. 5. 6. Harvey, Conditions of Postmodernity, p. 249. 7. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. ix, 105; further page references appear in parentheses. 8. Harvey, Conditions of Postmodernity, p. 264. 9. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 98. 10. Thomas Hardy, “The Fiddler of the Reels” (1893), Life’s Little Ironies and a Changed Man, ed. F. B. Pinion (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 123–38 (123, 129). 11. Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams, pp. 10–11. 12. Harvey, Conditions of Postmodernity, pp. 245–6. 13. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 30, 38–9. 14. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 31. 15. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 34. 16. McClintock, Imperial Leather, pp. 34, 57. 17. Philip Langdon, “Great Exhibitions: Representations of the Crystal Palace in Mayhew, Dickens, and Dostoevsky,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20 (1997), pp. 27–59 (29). 18. Louise Purbrick, “The Political Economy of Imperialism: Re-visiting the Great Exhibition of 1851 (or Re-reading Its Official Record,” unpublished essay. 19. Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, p. 101. 20. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalisation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 6. 21. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. xi. 22. “Proposed Building for the Great Exhibition of 1851,” Illustrated London News 16 (22 June 1850), pp. 445–6. 23. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, pp. 22–3.



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24. Lyon Playfair, Memoirs and Correspondence of Lyon Playfair, by Weymss Reid (New York: Harper, 1899), p. 116. 25. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, p. 22. 26. William Whewell, “On the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science,” Lectures on the Results, Vol. 1 (1852), pp. 1–34 (22–3). 27. Speaking of the events of 1789, Burke had concluded that “Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies” (Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (1790; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 92). 28. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (10 March 1851), p. 8. 29. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 94. 30. “Among Other Delicate Questions,” The Times (9 November 1850), p. 4. 31. Davis, Great Exhibition, p. 164. Davis provides a good analysis of the jury system and its decision-making processes. See “juries,” “juries reports” and “medals” under his index. 32. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, p. 4. 33. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, pp. 23–4. 34. “Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition,” Edinburgh Review 94 (October 1851), pp. 557–98 (581). 35. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (10 March 1851), p. 8. 36. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (17 March 1851), p. 8. 37. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (15 April 1851), p. 5. 38. Henry Stevens, An Account of the Proceedings at the Dinner Given by Mr. George Peabody to the Americans Connected With the Great Exhibition, at the London Coffee House, Ludgate Hill, on the 27th October, 1851 (London: Pickering, 1851), p. 25. 39. Manchester Guardian (28 October 1846), p. 3. 40. Defoe, “Mr. Review,” p. 123. 41. McCulloch, Political Economy, pp. 142–3. 42. Sabine Clemm notes the authorship of this piece in “‘Amidst the Heterogeneous Masses’: Charles Dickens’ Household Words and the Great Exhibition of 1851,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27 (2005), pp. 207–30. 43. “The Wonders of 1851,” Household Words 1 (20 July 1850), pp. 388–92 (391). 44. “A Wyld Goose Chase Over the Globe,” Punch 17 (1849), p. 189. 45. The Crystal Palace: A Little Book for Little Boys, for 1851 (London: Nisbet, 1851), p. 41. 46. “A Journey Round the Globe,” Punch 21 (1851), pp. 4–5. 47. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and intr. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), pp. 115–54 (129). 48. Athenaeum 1227 (3 May 1851), p. 478, quoted in Miller, Novels behind Glass, p. 55. 49. Whewell, “On the General Bearing,” pp. 10–11; further page references appear in parentheses. 50. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, 1977), pp. 115, 3. 51. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, p. 14.



Notes, pp. 64–74

Notes, pp. 74–83

52. Manchester Guardian (9 September 1846), p. 6. 53. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, p. 687. 54. “Money as an Agent of Civilisation,” Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art 1 (26 June 1852) (London: Cassell, 1852), pp. 410–11 (410). 55. “The Cookery of All Nations,” Punch 18 (1850), p. 100. 56. William Felkin, The Exhibition in 1851, of the Products and Industry of All Nations: Its Probable Influence Upon Labour and Commerce (London: Hall, [1851]), p. 29. 57. Frederika Bremer, England in 1851: or, Sketches of a Tour in England, trans. L. A. H. (Boulogne: Merridew, 1853), pp. 50, 51–2. 58. Bayle Bernard, “Letters from London,” Illustrated London News 19 (23 August 1851), p. 255. 59. Bayle Bernard, “Letters from London,” Illustrated London News 18 (31 May 1851), p. 497. 60. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; London: Routledge, 1997), p. 262. 61. Stephenson, Great Exhibition, pp. 13–14. 62. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned: An Evening Scene on the Same Subject” (1798), William Wordsworth: The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 356–7 (357). 63. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection: or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, ed. J. W. Burrow (1859; London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 114–15. 64. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, pp. 47, 14. 65. Jeff Wallace, “Introduction: Difficulty and Defamiliarisation – Language and Process in The Origin of Species,” in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 1–46 (11). On Darwin and Malthus see Anthony Flew, “Introduction,” in An Essay on the Principle of Population and a Summary View of the Principle of Population, by Thomas Malthus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 7–56 (48–51). 66. For an outline of this geographically informed Darwinian battle see Wallace, “Introduction: Difficulty and Defamiliarisation,” pp. 10–13. 67. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 9. 68. Douglas Jerrold, “Christmas Thoughts of the Crystal Palace,” Illustrated London News 19 (20 December 1851), pp. 738–9 (738). 69. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 15, 25. 70. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, p. 454. 71. Bennett, “Exhibitionary Complex,” pp. 129, 128. 72. Stephenson, Great Exhibition, 64. 73. Michiel Dehaene, “Urban Lessons for the Modern Planner: Patrick Abercrombie and the Study of Urban Development,” Town Planning Review 75.1 (2004), pp. 1–30 (21). 74. Stephenson, Great Exhibition, p. 40. 75. Franco Moretti, “The Long Goodbye: Ulysses and the End of Liberal Capitalism,” Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (1983; London: Verso, 2005), pp. 182–208 (183).



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76. “Prospectus,” Crystal Palace and its Contents (20 March 1852), p. 400. 77. Babbage, Exposition of 1851, p. 42. 78. H. W. Burrows, The Great Exhibition: A Sermon (London: Skeffington, 1851), pp. 6–7. 79. Binney, Royal Exchange, p. 121. 80. Catherine Gallagher, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 50. 81. Alfred Tennyson, “Locksley Hall” (1842), The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 688–99 (695–6). 82. Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” pp. 697–8. 83. Tennyson, In Memoriam, p. 90. 84. Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, 24 January 1852, in Marxists.org Internet Archive, (accessed 25 June 2007). 85. Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, “On the Anticipated Close of the Great Exhibition” (1851), in English Poetry, Second Edition, (accessed 16 May 2007), p. 1; further page references appear in parentheses. 86. See in particular Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 170–1 and 183–4. 87. Excelsior, The Dial of the World (London: Ward, 1851), p. 8. 88. Stuart-Wortley, “Anticipated Close,” pp. 10, 37. 89. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (2 May 1851), p. 6. 90. Mayhew and Cruikshank, 1851, pp. 157–8. 91. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), Illuminations, ed. and intr. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1970; London: Collins, 1973), p. 258. 92. “The Approaching Festival of Nations,” Family Herald 9 (3 May 1851), pp. 12–13 (13). 93. “Specimens from Mr. Punch’s Industrial Exhibition of 1850,” Punch 18 (1850), p. 145. 94. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 38–9. 95. Emmeline Stuart-Wortley, The Great Exhibition: Honour to Labour, A Lay of 1851 (London: [1851]), p. 5. 96. “Coal, Peat,” Crystal Palace and its Contents (20 December 1851), pp. 190–1 (191). 97. Marx and Engels, “Review: May–October 1850,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politisch-Ökonomische Revue (1 November 1850), in Marxists.org Internet Archive, (accessed 8 January 2008). 98. Marx to Engels, 24 January 1852. 99. Marx and Engels, “Review.” 100. Marx and Engels, “Review.” 101. Hannah Arendt, Imperialism (1951; New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 18. 102. Harvey, New Imperialism, p. 116. 103. Harvey, Conditions of Postmodernity, p. 264.



Notes, pp. 83–92

3

Notes, pp. 94–102


1. Bayle Bernard, “Letters from London,” Illustrated London News 19 (23 August 1851), p. 255. 2. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 97. 3. Mitchell, “Orientalism,” p. 290. 4. “The Morals of the Great Exhibition,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 233. 5. Bennett, “Exhibitionary Complex,” p. 129. 6. Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, pp. 14, xvii. 7. Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E. Gwinn, “Introduction,” in Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, ed. Rydell and Gwinn (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994), pp. 1–12 (4). 8. Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, p. xvii. 9. Mitchell, “Orientalism,” p. 290. 10. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (13 February 1851), p. 5. 11. Babbage, Exposition of 1851, p. 82. 12. Chapter 4 of Auerbach, Great Exhibition (especially pp. 91–2), draws attention to this opposition, as well as providing a useful survey of the disparate industrial and aesthetic aims and anxieties that fed into the display. 13. Babbage, Exposition of 1851, p. 81. 14. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (13 February 1851), p. 5. 15. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (13 February 1851), p. 5. 16. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 299. 17. William Wordsworth, “Poetry and Poetic Diction [Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800],” in English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century, ed. Edmund Jones (1916; London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 1–32 (10). 18. Horace Greeley, Glances at Europe: In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France and Italy, Switzerland, etc. During the Summer of 1851. Including notices of the Great Exhibition, World’s Fair, (New York: Dewitt, 1851), p. 19. 19. Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, p. 115. 20. Davis, Great Exhibition, p. 159. 21. “Exhibition Notes – No. 1,” Illustrated London News 18 (14 June 1851), pp. 570–1 (571). 22. Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, pp. 115–16. 23. Hunt, “Science of the Exhibition,” p. xii. 24. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (3 February 1851), p. 5. 25. In general, raw materials were placed along the south of the Palace, manufactured goods in the centre, and machinery in the north (where the steam power-source for the building was located). For obvious structural reasons lighter goods were situated in the galleries. There is some evidence to suggest that the Commission’s decision to allow foreign countries to organize their stands as they saw fit meant that the foreign or eastern half of the Palace was at once more disordered and spectacular than the British or western side of the building (see Richards, Commodity Culture, p. 25; Davis, Great Exhibition, p. 108). However, as Auerbach observes, whether implemented in foreign or domestic sections, the neat classification scheme devised for



216

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

217

the Exhibition became “rather vague and muddled” as it took material form on the floor of the Palace (Great Exhibition, p. 94). “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (20 September 1851), p. 5. Quoted in C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and Its Fruits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 45. Thomas Carlyle, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welch Carlyle, Vol. 26, ed. Claude de L. Ryals and Kenneth J. Fielding (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 81, 86. Wolfgang Schivelbush, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 46. The Glass-Berg: A Poem (London: Saunders, 1851), p. 10. Foucault, Order of Things, p. 133. Warren, Lily and the Bee, p. 9. Warren, Lily and the Bee, pp. 50–1. Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem (1848; London: Macmillan, 1878), p. 262. Quoted in Altick, Shows of London, p. 387. Having visited the display Dickens was not disposed to change his mind, indicating that, if the scope of the display was expansive, it was not inspirational: “I don’t say ‘there’s nothing in it’ – there’s too much. I have only been twice. So many things bewildered me. I have a natural horror of sights, and the fusion of so many sights in one has not decreased it.” He expected that “boredom and lassitude” would be the reaction of the public. Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1850–1852, Vol. 6, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 428, 449. Clement Shorter, The Brontë’s: Life and Letters, Vol. 2 (London: Hodder, 1908), p. 216. John Lemoinne, “Letters of M. John Lemoinne,” in Dionysius Lardner, The Great Exhibition and London in 1851: Reviewed by Dr. Lardner (London: Longman, 1852), pp. 573–92 (577). “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (13 October 1851), p. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and others; ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 32–49 (36–7). Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 1. Richards, Commodity Culture, pp. 33, 31, 35; further references appear in parentheses. “The Exhibition of 1851,” Economist 8 (13 April 1850), pp. 395–6 (396). Richards, Commodity Culture, p. 66. “Characteristics of National Industry,” Economist 9 (28 June 1851), pp. 701–3 (702). Richards, Commodity Culture, p. 67. Whewell, “On the General Bearing,” p. 5; further page references appear in parentheses.



Notes, pp. 102–7

Notes, pp. 107–16

47. Steve Edwards, “The Accumulation of Knowledge or, William Whewell’s Eye,” in Purbrick, Great Exhibition, pp. 26–52 (37, 39). 48. Whewell, “On the General Bearing,” p. 13; further page references in parentheses. 49. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 71. 50. Regenia Gagnier and Martin Delveaux, “Towards a Global Ecology of the Fin de Siècle,” Literature Compass 3.3 (2006), pp. 572–87 (579). 51. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, p. 10. 52. Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 2–3. 53. “Characteristics of National Industry,” Economist 9 (28 June 1851), pp. 701–3 (702). 54. Samuel Newcombe, Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition (London: Houlston, 1851), pp. 122–3; further page references appear in parentheses. In 1866 Matthew Arnold would famously highlight, in particularly qualified terms, these Celtic roots for their capacity to enhance an English sensibility diminished by “the triumph of the prosaic, practical Saxon.” See “On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1866), On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (London: Dent, 1910), pp. 13–136 (20). 55. Michel Chevalier, “Letters of M. Michel Chevalier,” in Lardner, Great Exhibition, pp. 477–572 (490). 56. Daniel Wilson, Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862), p. vii. 57. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 128. 58. For more on this turn to the “East,” particularly with regard to India and China’s complex position at the Exhibition, see Carol A. Breckenridge, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs,” Contemporary Studies in Society and History 31 (Spring 1989), pp. 195–216; Lara Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace,” in Purbrick, Great Exhibition, pp. 146–78; and Catherine Pagani, “Chinese Material Culture and British Perceptions of China in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 28–40. 59. See Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, p. 157. 60. Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, p. 236. 61. Ronald Inden, Imagining India, 2nd edn (London: Hurst, 2000), pp. 51–3. 62. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (23 April 1851), p. 5. 63. M. D. Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century: A Series of Illustrations of the Choicest Specimens Produced by Every Nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851, Vol. 1 (London, 1851), Plate 44, quoted in Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” p. 161. 64. A Reminiscence of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Jones, 1853), p. 12. 65. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (2 October 1851), p. 5. 66. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (2 October 1851), p. 5. 67. Benjamin, “Paris,” p. 33; “The Exhibition – The Crystal Palace,” Economist 9 (4 January 1851), pp. 4–6 (5). 68. John Ruskin, “The Opening of the Crystal Palace Considered in Some of its Relations to the Prospects of Art” (1854), in Culture and Society in Britain



218

69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90.

1850–1890: A Sourcebook of Contemporary Writings, ed. J. M. Golby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 174–7 (174–5). J. S. Mill, “M. de Tocqueville on Democracy in America,” Edinburgh Review (October 1840), quoted in Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 11. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 195. Chevalier, “Letters,” p. 493. Mayhew and Cruikshank, 1851, p. 137. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 193. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (15 May 1851), p. 5. Charles Dickens and R. H. Horne, “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” in Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from Household Words, 1850–1859, Vol. 1, ed. Harry Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), pp. 319–29 (329, 322). Charles Dickens, Hard Times: For These Times, ed. David Craig (1854; London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 65–6. Dickens and Horne, “Great Exhibition and the Little One,” pp. 322–3. Dickens and Horne, “Great Exhibition and the Little One,” p. 320. In a letter to none other than Henry Cole, Dickens emphasized that, far from being philosophically opposed to utilitarianism, he was inclined only to rein in what he saw as its totalizing tendencies: “I often say to Mr. Gradgrind that there is reason and good intention in much that he does – in fact, in all that he does – but that he overdoes it.” Quoted in Kathleen Blake, “Bleak House, Political Economy, Victorian Studies,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 25.1 (1997), pp. 1–22 (15). Said, Orientalism, p. 43; Jorge Luis Borges, “The Thousand and One Nights,” Seven Nights, trans. Eliot Weinberger (London: Faber, 1986), pp. 42–57 (42). Borges, “Thousand and One Nights,” p. 51. “A Christmas Tree,” Household Words 2 (21 December 1850), pp. 289–95 (291). John Bright, The Diaries of John Bright, ed. R. Walling (London: Cassell, 1930), p. 292. Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, p. 19. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Comparison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 120. Ray Desmond, The India Museum 1801–1879 (London: HMSO, 1982), p. 72. “Costume as Portrayed at the Great Exhibition,” Illustrated London News 18 (14 June 1851), pp. 564–5 (564). “India and Indian Contributions to the Industrial Bazaar,” Illustrated Exhibitor (4 October 1851), pp. 317–23 (318); Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, p. 33. William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847–48; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 26–7. Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds (1873; London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 57, 223. Karl Marx, Capital (1867), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, pp. 415–506 (436).



Notes, pp. 116–21 219

Notes, pp. 122–9

91. “The Bijouterie and Sculpture in the Crystal Palace,” Crystal Palace and its Contents (22 November 1851), p. 119. 92. Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, p. 158. 93. “A Lady’s Glance at the Exhibition. No III,” Illustrated London News 19 (23 August 1851), pp. 242–3 (242). 94. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (24 May 1851), p. 8. 95. “Five Shilling Days and One Shilling Days,” Illustrated London News 19 (19 July 1851), pp. 100–4 (102). 96. “The Great Exhibition,” Illustrated London News 19 (6 September 1851), pp. 290–1 (291). 97. “The Exhibition and its Management,” Crystal Palace and its Contents (1 November 1851), pp. 74–5. 98. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 226. 99. Suzanne Daly, “Kashmir Shawls in Mid-Victorian Novels,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2002), pp. 237–56. 100. Nupur Chaudhuri, “Shawls, Jewelery, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 231–46 (236). 101. Tennyson, “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen” (1886), Poems of Tennyson, pp. 1357–8 (1358). 102. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, p. 54. 103. “India,” Illustrated Exhibitor, pp. 317–18; see note 87 for full reference. 104. Said, Orientalism, p. 7. 105. Purbrick, “Introduction,” in Great Exhibition, p. 18. 106. Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” p. 146. 107. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, p. 54. 108. Hoffenberg, Empire on Display, p. xv. 109. Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” p. 149. 110. Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, p. 150. 111. Warren, Lily and the Bee, p. 71. 112. Official Catalogue, Vol. 2, pp. 695–6; Hunt’s Hand-Book to the Official Catalogues: An Explanatory Guide to the Natural Productions and Manufactures of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1851, Vol. 1 (2 vols; London: Spicer Brothers, [1851]), p. 30. 113. Davis, Great Exhibition, p. 138. 114. Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent,” pp. 166–7. 115. Bernard S. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 165–210 (179). 116. The Guide-Book to the Industrial Exhibition; with Facts, Figures, and Observations on the Manufactures and Produce Exhibited (London: Partridge, 1851), p. 3. 117. “The Black Diamond – The Real Mountain of Light,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 252. 118. Tallis’s History, Vol. 1, p. 258. 119. Anne Lohrli identifies Horne as the authorial source. Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850-1859/ Conducted by Charles Dickens. Table of Contents, List of Contributors and Their Contributions Based on the Household Words



220

120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125.

126. 127. 128.

129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

Office Book in the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Princeton University Library (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1973), p. 80. Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone: A Romance (1868; London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 3–4. “A Penitent Confession,” Household Words 3 (2 August 1851), pp. 436–45 (436); further page references appear in parentheses. “India,” Illustrated Exhibitor, p. 318; see note 87 for full reference. Adas, Machines as the Measure, p. 271. Quoted in Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and the Fall of the East India Company: A Sociological Appraisal (London: Monthly Review, 1974), pp. 399–400. William J. Barber, British Economic Thought and India 1600–1858: A Study in the History of Developmental Economics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 178. John Forbes Royle, “The Arts and Manufactures of India,” Lectures on the Results, Vol. 1 (1852), pp. 443–539 (444). Official Catalogue, Vol. 2, p. 857. J. Forbes Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere, With an Account of the Experiments made by the East India Company. Appendix: Papers Relating to the Great Exhibition (London: Smith, 1851), pp. 20–1. Royle, Culture and Commerce of Cotton, p. 12. Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India” (1853), Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization: His Despatches and Other Writings on China, India, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Shlomo Avineri (New York: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 132–9 (134, 136). “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (23 April 1851), p. 5. “Foreign and Colonial Departments,” Crystal Palace and its Contents (15 November 1851), pp. 100–3 (100–1). “A Guide to the Great Industrial Exhibition,” Illustrated London News 18 (10 May 1851), pp. 392–7 (392). Greeley, Glances at Europe, pp. 87, 90–1. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 83. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (1901; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 306. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 38. Edward Forbes, “On the Vegetable World as Contributing to the Great Exhibition,” in Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue, pp. i–viii (iii). Official Catlogue, Vol. 3, p. 1428. Forbes, “On the Vegetable World,” p. i. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 133. Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” p. 302. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 16. “Exhibition Notes – No. V,” Illustrated London News 19 (6 September 1851), pp. 302–3 (303). “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (20 October 1851), p. 5. Whewell, “On the General Bearing,” pp. 30–1. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 225. Langdon, “Great Exhibitions,” p. 29. Dickens and Horne, “Great Exhibition and the Little One,” p. 320.



Notes, pp. 129–42 221

Notes, pp. 142–50

150. Harvey, New Imperialism, p. 45. 151. “Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition,” Edinburgh Review 94 (October 1851), pp. 557–98 (590). 152. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 279. 153. Thomas Carlyle, “Chartism” (1840), Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 149–232 (210–11). 154. Carlyle, “Chartism,” p. 231. 155. Adas, Machines as the Measure, p. 4. 156. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 1.2.310–64.

4

Pax Britannica

1. “The First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Fraser’s Magazine 43 (1851), pp. 1–15 (1–2). 2. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 224. 3. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 15. 4. Williams, “Introduction,” in Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 12. 5. Sally Ledger, personal communication. 6. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855–57; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 331. 7. “The French Critic in London. (A Free Translation of the Original Letters [unpublished] in a Paris Journal,” Fraser’s Magazine 44 (1851), pp. 497–502 (497); further page references appear in parentheses. 8. Kingsley, Yeast, p. 90. 9. “Philoponos” [James Ward], The Great Exhibition of 1851; or, The Wealth of the World in its Workshops (London: Churton, 1850), pp. 13–14, quoted in Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 166. 10. S. H. Blackwell, “The Iron-Making Resources of the United Kingdom,” Lectures on the Results, Vol. 2 (1853), pp. 147–83 (182). 11. Thomas Bazley, A Lecture upon Cotton, as an Element of Industry: Delivered at the Rooms of the Society of Arts, London, in Connexion with the Exhibition of 1851 (London: Longman, 1852), p. 25. 12. “The Great Exhibition,” Illustrated London News 18 (31 May 1851), pp. 487–9 (487). 13. Bremer, England in 1851, pp. 64–5. 14. Christine MacLeod, “James Watt, Heroic Invention and the Idea of the Industrial Revolution,” in Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives, ed. Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland (Cheltenham: Elgar, 1998), pp. 96–115 (110). 15. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, pp. 161, 172. 16. Henry Cole, “On the International Results,” p. 420. 17. “The Exhibition Plague,” Punch 19 (1850), p. 191. 18. “Rules for the Prevention of the Promised Plague Next Year,” Punch 19 (1850), p. 239.



222

19. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 184. 20. See Auerbach, Great Exhibition, Chapter 6. 21. Benjamin Disraeli, “Conservative and Liberal Principles: Speech at the Crystal Palace, June 24, 1872,” Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 2, ed. T. E. Kebbel (2 vols; London: Longman, 1882), pp. 523–35 (531, 534). 22. “First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Fraser’s Magazine 43 (1851), pp. 3, 15. 23. Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade,” pp. 2–3; further page references appear in parentheses. 24. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 17, 143–4. 25. Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 33, 154. 26. William Forster, The Closing of the Great Exhibition or, England’s Mission to All Nations. A Discourse (London: John Cassell, [1851]), p. 14. 27. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 3. 28. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London (2000; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 5. 29. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 9, 68. 30. “Our Phantom Ship. Central America,” Household Words 2 (22 February 1851), pp. 516–22 (521). 31. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 1. 32. Peter Mandler, “‘Race’ and ‘Nation’ in Mid-Victorian Thought,” in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 224–44 (242–3, 230). 33. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, pp. 128–9. 34. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 129. 35. John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848; London: Routledge, 1891), p. 81. 36. Gagnier, Insatiability of Human Wants, p. 28. 37. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 271. 38. “The State of Trade,” The Times (28 April 1851), p. 7. 39. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (1852–53; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 49. 40. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 129. 41. Felkin, Exhibition in 1851, pp. 13, 28–9. 42. Richard Cobden, “England, Ireland, and America” (1835), The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, intro. Louise Mallet (London: Ridgway, 1878), pp. 1–66 (45–6). 43. See Daniel R. Headrick, “The Communications Revolution,” The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 127–210. 44. Marx, “Future Results of British Rule,” pp. 132–3. 45. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, p. 210. 46. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, pp. 88–9.



Notes, pp. 151–64 223

Notes, pp. 164–78

47. Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 241. 48. Freeman, Railways, p. 1. See Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 93. 49. C. W. Grant, Bombay Cotton and Indian Railways (London: Longman, 1850), p. 82. 50. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, p. 53. 51. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Stanley Wells (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 2.1.175–6. 52. Carlyle, “Chartism,” p. 211. Carlyle was here speaking of steamships as well as railways. 53. See Dickens, Bleak House, p. 182. 54. “The Great Exhibition,” Illustrated London News 18 (3 May 1851), pp. 343–4 (343). 55. Lardner, Great Exhibition, pp. 67, 122. 56. Mrs. [Catherine] Napier, The Lay of the Palace (London: Oliver, 1852), p. 12. 57. “There Are Questions of Extraordinary Interest,” The Times (11 January 1851), p. 4. 58. Bazley, Lecture upon Cotton, pp. 25, 46–7. 59. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 73. 60. E. D. Chattaway, Railways, Their Capital and Dividends (London: Weale, 1855–56), pp. 132–3. 61. Chattaway, Railways, p. 132. 62. Stuart-Wortley, “Anticipated Close,” p. 237. 63. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857; London: Penguin, 1997), p. 18; further page references appear in parentheses. 64. This label is confusing in that it calls to mind Disraeli’s nostalgic, antiprogressive Young England group of the 1840s. 65. Anne Lohrli indicates that the author of the tale was Charles Knight, Dickens’s long-time friend and collaborator. See Lohrli, Household Words: A Weekly Journal 1850–1859, pp. 71, 333. 66. “A Christmas Pudding,” Household Words 2 (21 December 1850), pp. 300–4 (301); further page references appear in parentheses. 67. Cobden, “England, Ireland, and America,” pp. 45–6. 68. Royle, Culture and Commerce of Cotton, pp. 20–1, 12. 69. John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” (1859), Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. 21, ed. John M. Robson (London: Routledge, 1984), pp. 109–24 (119). 70. Quoted in Martin Lynn, “British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 101–21 (108). 71. Lynn, “British Policy,” p. 109; “Business and the Bayonet,” Punch 19 (1850), p. 234. 72. Mill, “Few Words,” p. 111. 73. Peter Osborne, “Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological Category,” New Left Review 192 (1992), pp. 65–84 (74, 83). 74. Samir Amin, “Globalism or Apartheid on a Global Scale?” in The Modern World System in the Longue Durée, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004), pp. 5–30 (5).



224

75. Harvey, New Imperialism, pp. 31–2. Here I would remark David Landes’s useful observation that it is often not the state which sets the agenda: “Where one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so. Even if the state would abstain from aggression, companies and individuals will not wait for permission. Rather, they will act in their own interest, dragging others along, including the state” (Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor [London: Norton, 1999], p. 63). If I agree with Landes here, I should note more broadly that, in discussing the thesis to which his book’s title is directed, Landes emphasizes the cultural failures and socio-economic inadequacies of the global poor, where I prefer to emphasize the exploitative strategies and discriminatory mindsets of the global rich. 76. Doreen Massey, “Is the World Really Shrinking?” A Festival of Ideas for the Future – Open University Radio Lecture, BBC Radio Three (9 November 2006). 77. Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1995), p. 30. 78. William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 81–2. 79. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, p. 85; further page references appear in parentheses. 80. On the need to avoid such economic reductivism, characterized by a priori deductions and an inattention to historical specificity, see Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Race Critical Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 38–68 (especially 42–3). 81. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Holt, 2003), p. 45. 82. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, p. 222. 83. The quotation is from Charles Dickens’s anonymously published essay “The Noble Savage,” Household Words 7 (11 June 1853), pp. 337–9 (337). 84. Charles Dickens, “The Niger Expedition” (1848), Miscellaneous Papers from “The Morning Chronicle,” “The Daily News,” “The Examiner,” “Household Words,” “All the Year Round,” etc. and Plays and Poems, Vol. 1 (London: Chapman, 1911), pp. 117–35 (124). 85. Carlyle, “Chartism,” p. 231. 86. On the growing gap in income levels which characterized the nineteenth century see Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century (London: Sage, 2003), pp. 512–13. 87. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 36. 88. Arendt, Imperialism, pp. 63–4. 89. Said, Orientalism, p. 43. 90. Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, p. ix. 91. Cora Kaplan, Victoriana – Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 143–4. 92. “A Curious Contribution to the Great Exhibition,” The Times (31 January 1850), p. 8. 93. T. H. Lacy, Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851: An Exceedingly Premature and Thoroughly Apropos Revue ([1850]), p. 10; “Foreign Families of Distinction in London,” Punch 21 (1851), p. 135.



Notes, pp. 178–85 225

Notes, pp. 185–96

94. Altick, Shows of London, pp. 268, 279. 95. “The Approaching Festival of Nations,” Family Herald 9 (3 May 1851), pp. 12–13 (12). 96. Mayhew and Cruikshank, 1851, pp. 1–2. 97. In fact Soyer’s Symposium proved popular but failed commercially, running for five months and shutting just after the close of the Exhibition some £7000 in debt. See Ruth Cowen, Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef (London: Weidenfeld, 2006), p. 231. 98. Alexis Soyer, Memoirs of Alexis Soyer, ed. F. Volant and J. R. Warren (1859; Rottingdean, UK: Cooks, 1985), p. 200. 99. Soyer, Memoirs, p. 201. 100. “Refreshments at the Great Exhibition of 1851,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 33. 101. “London Dining Rooms,” Punch 20 (1851), frontispiece; “The Haycocks in 1851,” Punch 20 (1851), frontispiece. 102. Thomas Onwhyn, Mr. and Mrs. John Brown’s Visit to London to See the Great Exposition of All Nations (London: Ackerman, n.d.), quoted in Auerbach, Great Exhibition, pp. 174–5. 103. Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), pp. 109–40 (114). 104. Soyer, Memoirs, p. 208. 105. See Helen Morris, Portrait of a Chef: The Life of Alexis Soyer, Sometime Chef to the Reform Club (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 104. 106. “Visions in the Crystal,” Punch 20 (1851), p. 188. 107. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 56; further page references appear in parentheses. 108. Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Fraser’s Magazine 40 (1849), pp. 527–38 (534). 109. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, p. 78. 110. Quoted in George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992), p. 32. 111. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 43. 112. Tallis’s History, Vol. 2, p. 129. 113. Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, p. 18; John Ruskin, “Conclusion to Inaugural Lecture as Slade Professor of Fine Art” (Oxford University, 8 February 1870), in Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870–1918, ed. Elleke Boehmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 16–20 (18). 114. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (15 May 1851), p. 5. 115. “Foreign and Colonial Departments. No. 2,” Crystal Palace (11 October 1851), pp. 20–2 (20). 116. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 30. 117. “The Noble Savage,” Household Words 7 (11 June 1853), pp. 337–9 (337). 118. Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 70. 119. “Noble Savage,” p. 337; see note 117 for full reference. 120. “The Great Exhibition,” The Times (16 June 1851), p. 8. 121. Hunt’s Handbook, Vol. 1, p. 245. 122. Lemoinne, “Letters,” pp. 580–1. 123. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 170.



226

Notes, pp. 196–203

227

Postscript: America, Anglobalization and the Great Exhibition 1. Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, “Introduction,” pp. 2–3. 2. George W. Bush, “Securing Freedom’s Triumph,” New York Times (11 September 2002), op-ed. 3. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (London: Allen, 2004), p. 25; further page references appear in parentheses. 4. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003; London: Penguin, 2004), p. xxi; further page references appear in parentheses. 5. Ferguson, Empire, p. 372. 6. Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, “Introduction,” p. 3. 7. Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams, p. 8. 8. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments: To Which is Added, A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages (1759; London: Bell, 1907), pp. 341, 342–3. 9. Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 343.



124. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, p. 708. 125. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 87. 126. “Some Moral Aspects of the Great Exhibition,” Economist 9 (17 May 1851), pp. 531–2 (532). 127. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 31–2.

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Soyer, Alexis, Memoirs of Alexis Soyer, ed. F. Volant and J. R. Warren (1859; Rottingdean: Cooks, 1985). Spencer, Herbert, Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness (London: Chapman, 1851). A Spiritual Watchman of the Church of England, The Theology and Morality of the Great Exhibition (London: Painter, 1851). St. Clair, William, The Great Exhibition: A Poem (London: Partridge, 1850). Stephenson, Roberts, The Great Exhibition: Its Palace, and its Principal Contents with Notices of the Public Buildings of the Metropolis, Places of Amusement, etc. (London: Routledge, 1851). Stocking, George, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free, 1987). Stuart-Wortley, Emmeline, The Great Exhibition: Honour to Labour, A Lay of 1851 (London: [1851]). —— “On the Anticipated Close of the Great Exhibition” (London: [1851]), in English Poetry, Second Edition (accessed 16 May 2007). Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851 (3 vols; London: Tallis, [1851]). Teichgraeber, Richard, “Adam Smith and Tradition: The Wealth of Nations before Malthus,” in Economy, Polity, and Society: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 85–104. Tennyson, Alfred, In Memoriam A.H.H., ed. Robert H. Ross (1850; New York: Norton, 1973). —— “Locksley Hall” (1842), Poems of Tennyson. —— “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen” (1886), Poems of Tennyson. —— The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969). Thackeray, William, Vanity Fair (1847–48; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Thomas, William Cave, Suggestions For a Crystal College or New Palace of Glass For Combining the Intellectual Talent of All Nations (London: Dickinson, 1851). The Times (various dates 1849–51). Trollope, Anthony, The Eustace Diamonds (1873; London: Penguin, 2004). Voltaire, “Letter VI. On the Presbyterians” (1733), Letters Concerning the English Nation, introduction by Charles Whibley (New York: Franklin, 1974), pp. 32–5. Wallace, Jeff, “Introduction: Difficulty and Defamiliarisation – Language and Process in The Origin of Species,” in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 1–46. Wallerstein, Immanuel, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1995). Warren, Samuel, The Lily and the Bee: An Apologue of the Crystal Palace (London: Blackwood, 1851). Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (1957; London: Pimlico, 2000). Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1904–05; London: Unwin, 1968). Whewell, William, “On the General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science,” Lectures on the Results 1 (1852), pp. 1–34. Whish, J. C., The Great Exhibition Prize Essay (London: Longman, 1851).



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Whorf, Benjamin Lee, “Science and Linguistics,” Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John Bissell Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1956), pp. 207–19. Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (1973; New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). —— “Introduction,” Dombey and Son, by Dickens, pp. 11–34. Wilson, Daniel, Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilisation in the Old and the New World, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862). Wordsworth, William, “Poetry and Poetic Diction [Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, 1800],” in English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century, ed. Edmund Jones (1916; London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 1–32. —— “The Tables Turned: An Evening Scene on the Same Subject” (1798), William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 356–7. Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). —— Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).



240

Abrams, M. H. 100 Adas, Michael 132, 143 Machines as the Measure of Men 116–17, 118 Albert, Prince 17, 18, 47, 51–3, 56, 60, 64, 66, 70, 83, 196 Mansion House Address 88, 149, 211 Altick, Richard D. 40 The Shows of London 185–6 America, and Americans 37, 53, 63, 76, 94, 100, 111, 117, 133, 134, 137, 138, 150, 168, 169, 188, 189, 192, 194, 198–203; see also United States Amin, Samir 178 anachronism East 131 humans 190–1 space 190–3 Anglobalization 198–203; see also Ferguson, Niall anthropology 15, 19, 20, 30, 32, 50, 54, 59, 140, 154, 180, 182, 183 Royal Anthropological Society 183 Victorian Anthropology 31 anti-Semitism 176 Arabian Nights 120–2 Arendt, Hannah 92, 183 The Origins of Totalitarianism 183 “Ariel’s Girdle” 163, 165, 169, 171, 177, 181; see also railways Arkwright, Richard 148 Ashantee 138 Auerbach, Jeffrey A. 6, 10, 27, 65, 149, 151 The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display 6 Australia and Australians 140, 152, 169, 192, 193, 195 Babbage, Charles 41, 83, 98–9 Babel 19, 22, 28, 47, 50, 51, 53

Bacon, Francis 40, 43, 45, 46 The Praise of Knowledge 40 Bank of England 1 barbarism 8, 16, 31, 89, 115, 117, 119, 120, 131, 132, 140, 142, 144, 154, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 175, 176, 177, 181, 182, 188, 191 Barber, William J. 133 Barrell, John 4–5 Barthes, Roland 26, 53, 56 “The Great Family of Man” 19–20 bazaars 98, 125, 131 Bazley, Thomas 148, 167 Beer, Gillian 47, 78–9 Belgium 26 Belshazzar’s Feast 47 Benjamin, Walter 89, 105, 115 Bennett, Tony 12, 81, 86, 95 “The Exhibitionary Complex” 81, 86, 95 Bentham, Jeremy 87 Berman, Marshall 145 Bernard, Bayle 76; see also Wheeler, Peleg E. Binney, Thomas 45–6, 84 Birch, Henry 53–5 The “Great Exhibition” Spiritualized 53–4 Blackwell, S. H. 148 Blanqui, Adolphe 114, 139 Blomfield, Charles, Bishop of London 49 Bolt, Christine 183 Victorian Attitudes to Race 50 Borges, Jorge Luis 120 bourgeois 8, 11, 12, 58, 65, 79, 85, 89, 91–3, 97, 117, 137, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 163, 179, 110, 200 bourgeoisie 8, 12, 80, 92, 140 Bowlby, Rachel 105 241



Index

Index

Brantlinger, Patrick 159, 192 Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races 1800–1930 156 Bremer, Frederika 76, 79, 80, 148–9 Bright, John 25, 120, 189 Britain 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 37, 41, 91, 99, 110, 116, 117, 118, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 143, 144, 145–9, 150–4, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189, 193, 198–201 British (concept) 6, 9, 15, 18, 25, 26, 29, 30, 42, 65, 67, 68, 73, 99, 111, 115, 117, 126, 128, 130–4, 136, 147, 151, 153, 159, 160, 162, 164, 167, 169, 170, 174, 175, 176, 177, 181, 183, 185, 191, 193, 199, 200, 201, 207 Brontë, Charlotte 104, 120, 122 Buckle, Henry Thomas 22–3 History of Civilization in England 22 Burke, Edmund 65, 213 Burrows, H. W., The Great Exhibition: A Sermon 84 Bush, George W., “Securing Freedom’s Triumph” 199, 203 Buxton, Charles 181 Buzard, James 13, 14, 198, 202 Victorian Prism 13, 14 Cain, P. J. 9; see also gentlemanly capitalism Canada 143, 193 cannibalism, 188–9 capitalism 1, 6, 9–15, 21, 22, 29, 33, 34, 37, 40, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 55, 58–63, 65, 67, 78, 80, 81, 84, 86, 89, 90, 92–3, 105, 116, 124, 125, 126, 134, 141, 157, 158, 163, 180, 191 capitalist enterprise 2, 8 capitalist growth and expansion 2, 4, 11, 61 capitalist modernity 11

free-trade capitalism 5, 16, 17, 20, 39, 80, 97, 149 gentlemanly capitalism 9 global capitalism 57, 62, 142, 178 as global economic organism 84, 87 industrial capitalism 4, 10, 11, 52, 60, 66, 88, 93, 97, 98, 107, 109, 110, 116, 118, 119, 124, 132, 136, 139, 142, 145, 149, 159, 160, 164, 174, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182, 190, 192 Carlyle, Thomas 102–3, 182, 191 “Chartism” 142–3, 144, 165 Catlin, George 194, 195 Catlin’s Indians 194, 195 Ceylon 113, 172 Chartism 91 Chattaway, E. D., Railways, Their Capital and Dividends 167–8 Chaudhuri, Napur 124 cheeses 75, 173 Chevalier, Michel 113, 117 Childers, Joseph W. 198, 202 Victorian Prism 13, 14 China, and the Chinese 28, 29, 39, 44, 53, 55, 72, 76, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 137, 140, 159, 176, 186, 187, 188, 210 Chomsky, Noam 180 Christianity 15, 20, 27, 48, 49, 50, 53, 162, 167, 169, 181, 200 Christianisation 158, 181, 196 Church of England 48 civilization 2, 8, 25, 31, 37, 41, 50, 52, 89, 90, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 119, 138, 158, 160, 161, 165, 167, 175, 181, 183, 192, 195, 196 Cobden, Richard 25, 26, 69, 74, 148, 162, 175–6, 189, 199–200 Cohn, Bernard 128 Cole, Henry 17, 18, 29, 30, 99, 149 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue 29, 41, 51 Collins, Wilkie, The Moonstone: A Romance 129–30 commodity culture 13, 66, 105, 124 Communist Manifesto, The 8, 9, 60, 91, 140, 142



242

Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness 196–7 Corfe, Tom 12 Corn Laws, repeal of 24, 26, 34, 207–8 Anti-Corn Law League 25; see also Economist cosmopolitanism 3, 5, 6, 8, 13, 22, 24, 29–30, 38, 50, 51, 55, 64, 85, 148, 149, 150, 151, 158, 165, 170, 177, 187, 196, 198 Cruikshank, George “All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition of 1851” 186 1851, Or the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys 18 Crystal Palace and its Contents, The 18, 42, 53, 83, 90–1, 92, 122, 123, 135–6, 193 Crystal Palace Game 58 Cuvier 65, 68 Daguerrotypes 3, 73 Dalhousie, Marquis of, Governor General of India 133, 167 Daly, Suzanne 124 Darwin, Charles 78–9, 184 Origin of Species 78 Davis, John R. 12, 14–15, 55, 66, 100–1, 128 The Great Exhibition 6 Davis, Mike, Late Victorian Holocausts 11 Debord, Guy 105 Defoe, Daniel 29–30, 34, 59, 69 “Mr Review Plumps for Free Trade” 57–8 Robinson Crusoe 32–4 “The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr” 30 Dehaene, Michiel 82 Delveaux, Martin 110 democracy 21 Denny, Alice 111, 112 Dickens, Charles 1, 88, 103–4, 120, 162, 181–2, 189, 190, 194–5, 217, 219 Bleak House 146, 161, 165

243

Dombey and Son 1–2, 4, 8, 15, 60, 146, 147 “The Great Exhibition and the Little One” 118–19, 141–2 Hard Times 118 Little Dorrit 146 “The Niger Expedition” 181, 182, 190, 194 “The Noble Savage” 194 see also Household Words Disraeli, Benjamin 151–2, 153 Dutch 30, 44, 112, 132, 149 Holland 150 Eagleton, Terry 33, 58 The Ideology of the Aesthetic 79–80 East, the 8, 104, 108, 109, 112–19, 120–1, 122, 123–7, 130–1, 140, 166, 183, 216–18 East India Company 121, 122, 127, 131, 133, 135 Economic Man see Homo Economicus Economist 34, 45, 106, 112, 115 “Some Moral Aspects of the Great Exhibition” 196–7 Edinburgh Review 67, 142 Edwards, Steve 107 Egypt 74, 100, 112, 115, 138, 168, 194 Eliot, George, Middlemarch 29 Ellis, Robert 163; see also Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue empire 9, 13, 68, 119, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 135–6, 139, 145, 151, 152, 153, 158, 164, 169, 170, 183, 190, 199, 200, 202 Engels, Friedrich 91–2, 132–3 The Communist Manifesto 8, 9, 60, 91, 140, 142 and Karl Marx 8, 9, 10, 91, 92, 145 Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politisch-Ökonomische Revue 91 England 22, 26, 43, 72, 76, 119, 129, 142, 143, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155, 163, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 177, 200 England’s Mission 149, 155–62, 181, 182, 190



Index

Index

England – continued the English 20, 22, 24, 29–30, 44, 75, 91, 112, 117, 118, 129, 130, 132, 151, 158, 169, 172, 176, 185, 200, 207, 218 Englishness 149, 170 Enlightenment 5–6, 13, 24, 40, 54, 59, 73, 181, 182, 198 evolution 84 evolutionary theory 78 process of 80 Excelsior 87 Exhibition Special Commissioner 64 exhibitionary complex 81, 86, 95, 96; see also Bennett, Tony Fabian, Johannes 154, 183 Time and the Other 154 Family Herald 38–9, 45, 89, 90, 186 Fanon, Frantz 189 Felkin, William, Mayor of Nottingham 76, 161 Ferguson, Niall 199–200, 202 Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire 199 Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World 199–200 ffrench, Yvonne 12 Forbes, Edward 138 Forster, Reverend William 155, 161 England’s Mission to All Nations 15 Foucault, Michel 12, 81 Discipline and Punish 86 The Order of Things 77 France 24, 25, 44, 64, 65, 72, 73, 75, 76, 104, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 146, 150, 163, 185, 189 Frenchmen 30, 146–7, 149, 187 Frank, André Gunder 9 Frankenstein 18, 20 Fraser’s Magazine 145–7, 149, 151–2, 153 “The First Half of the Nineteenth Century” 145 “The French Critic in London” 146 free trade 5, 10, 15, 23, 24, 27, 28, 37, 49, 53, 54, 95, 148, 152, 155, 172, 175, 177, 180, 199, 207–8

Freeman, Michael 164 Fukuyama, Francis 38, 46 The End of History 21 Gagnier, Regenia 31–2, 35, 160 The Insatiability of Human Wants 33–4 and Martin Delveaux 110 Gallagher, Catherine 84, 87 Gallagher, John 111, 112 “The Imperialism of Free Trade” 152–3 see also Robinson, Ronald Geertz, Clifford 54 gentlemanly capitalism 9 Germany 24, 30, 37, 44, 72, 76, 112, 117, 149, 150 Gillooly, Eileen 13, 14, 198, 202 Victorian Prism 13, 14 The Glass Berg 103 global village 36, 38, 83, 93, 96, 141, 165 Gramsci, Antonio 12 Greece 150 Greeley, Horace 100, 140 Glances at Europe 137 Greenhalgh, Paul 12, 125, 126 Gurney, Peter 15 Gwinn, Nancy, and Robert Rydell 96 Halberstam, Judith 15 Hall, Catherine 160, 161 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri 63–4, 67 Empire 124 Hardy, Thomas 60, 88 “The Fiddler of the Reels” 60 Harvey, David 5, 59, 60, 61, 73, 92–3, 142, 178 Hegel, G. W. F. 192 Heidegger, Martin 72 Hindley, Charles 23, 24 Hobhouse, Christopher 12 Hobsbawm, Eric 10, 164 Hoffenberg, Peter H., An Empire on Display 13, 63, 95–6, 97, 126 Holland see Dutch Homo Economicus 31–5, 36, 40, 44, 51, 54, 55, 56, 59, 189



244

Index

Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art 74–5, 121, 125–6, 128, 131, 132, 135, 187 Illustrated London News 22, 41–2, 43–4, 64, 70, 76, 79, 101, 122, 123, 136, 139, 148, 165 imperialism 8, 9, 10, 16, 111, 126, 142, 152, 153, 154, 183–4, 192, 196, 199, 201 India 72, 75, 108, 109, 113, 114, 122, 124, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 136, 152, 159, 163, 167, 168, 175 Industrial Revolution 5, 13, 60, 91, 116, 147 Ireland 67, 75, 200 Irwin, Robert 120; see also Arabian Nights Italy 43, 44, 51, 75, 112 Jerrold, Douglas 43; see also Lamb, Arthur Jones, Owen 41

Kaplan, Cora 184, 191 Kingsley, Charles 103 Yeast 147 Kohinoor 125, 126, 127–30, 139 Kriegel, Lara 126, 128 Lacy, T. H., Novelty Fair; or, Hints For 1851 185 “ladder of progress” 111, 112, 136 Lamb, Arthur 43, 79, 80 Landes, David, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor 224–5 Langdon, Philip 62, 140 Lardner, Dionysius 195 The Great Exhibition in London in 1851 166 Railway Economy: A Treatise on the New Art of Transport 165–6 Lefebvre, Henri 14 Lemoinne, John 104, 195 Linnaeus, Carl 65, 138 Systema Naturae 61 List, Friedrich 38 The National System of Political Economy 37 Outlines of American Political Economy 37 Lynn, Martin 176 MacFarlane, Rev. P. 49 The Crystal Palace, Viewed in Some of its Moral and Religious Aspects 48 MacLeod, Christine 149 McClintock, Anne 61–2, 65, 73, 95, 190, 193–4 McCulloch, J. R. 24–5, 36, 70 McLuhan, Marshall 36 Maidment, Brian 15 Malthus, Thomas 79 Manchester School, The 104, 189 Mandler, Peter 158



Hong Kong 152, 153 Hopkins, A. G. 9; see also gentlemanly capitalism Horne, Richard 118, 129 “A Penitent Confession” 129–31 “The Great Exhibition and the Little One” 118–19, 141–2 “The Wonders of 1851” 70 see also Household Words Household Words 70, 118, 129, 146, 157, 163, 171 “A Christmas Pudding” 171–4, 179 “The Great Exhibition and the Little One” 118–19, 141–2 “A Penitent Confession” 129–31 “Our Phantom Ship, Central America” 157, 159, 162, 163 “The Wonders of 1851” 70 see also Household Words Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown’s School Days 169–70, 192–3 humanism 20, 40, 50 Hunt, James 183 Hunt, Robert 101 Hunt’s Handbook to the Official Catalogues 128, 195, 196

245

Index

Marx, Karl 10, 16, 32–3, 54, 85–6, 88, 91–3, 121, 132, 134–5, 145, 157, 163 The Communist Manifesto 8, 9, 60, 91, 140, 142 and Friedrich Engels 91, 92, 145, 157 Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politisch-Ökonomische Revue 91 Massey, Doreen 168, 178 For Space 156–7 Mayhew, Henry 55, 89, 117, 186–7 1851, Or the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys 18 metropolitan 1, 2, 3, 11, 16, 32, 111, 119, 121, 124, 128, 133, 134, 135, 136, 140, 144, 145, 148, 151, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 167, 170, 171, 173, 176, 177, 179, 185, 186, 190, 192, 200, 201 London as the world’s metropolis 13, 22, 26 metropolitan audience 3, 9, 99, 125, 196 Mill, John Stuart 23, 116, 117, 160, 161, 175, 176–7, 180 “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” 175, 180–1 Miller, Andrew H. 13 Mitchell, Timothy 12, 95, 138–9 modernity 4, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 31, 60, 84, 85, 88, 102, 109, 110, 115, 139, 145–6, 154, 156–7, 164, 168–9, 177, 178–81, 190–1, 198, 200, 202 modernization 156, 157, 175 monogenetism 50, 183 Moore, Grace 194 Moretti, Franco 83 Morris, William 179 Mr Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition 39 Napier, Catherine, The Lay of the Palace 166 Native Americans 188, 194 Indians 138, 188, 189, 194, 195 Red Men 188 natural history 137, 140

Negri, Antonio, and Michael Hardt 63–4, 67 Empire 124 New Imperialism 152 New York Tribune 100 New Zealand 140, 152, 153, 187 New Zealanders 138, 187, 188, 195, 196 Newcombe, Samuel, Little Henry’s Holiday at the Great Exhibition 112–13, 117, 119 Noble Savage 156 “The Noble Savage” 194 non-European (concept) cultures 110, 112, 184 economies 170 goods 154 peoples 118, 141, 154–9, 160, 162, 177, 180–2, 184, 186, 191, 192, 201 peripheries 177, 192 resources 144, 182, 190 societies 110 world 9–11, 61, 92–3, 132, 137, 140, 143, 155, 177, 179, 193, 201 visitors to the Exhibition 188–90 Norris, Frank, The Octopus 137 North, Sir Dudley, Discourses of Trade 36, 69 Occident 109 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue 29, 41, 51, 64, 65, 67, 128, 133, 135, 138, 163–4 Onwhyn, Thomas, Mr. and Mrs. John Brown’s Visit to London to See the Great Exposition of All Nations 188–9 Orient 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 130, 166, 183 Osborne, Peter 178 Palace of Glass and the Gathering of People, The 43 Palmerston, Lord 175, 177 panoptical time 190 panopticon 87



246

Parker, Noel 35 Pax Britannica 16, 153, 174, 175, 179, 182, 191, 200, 201, 205 Paxton, Joseph 3, 13, 40, 41, 104, 115 Peel, Sir Robert 25, 26, 152 People’s Illustrated Journal of Arts, Manufactures, Practical Science, Literature, and Social Economy 83 Persia 108, 113 Pevsner, Nikolaus 12 photography 4, 5, 19, 62, 73, 95, 101, 107, 108 Playfair, Lyon, Exhibition Special Commissioner 64–5, 66, 68 political economy 4–5, 15, 20, 22–3, 30, 31–5, 37, 39, 45, 48, 50, 63, 69, 75, 107, 118, 123, 127, 137, 158, 161, 179, 183, 196, 205 polygeneticism 30, 50, 183 Porter, Roy 24 Portugal 112, 132, 150 Pratt, Mary Louise 65, 71, 90, 137, 164 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation 61–2 progress 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 22, 25–6, 27, 29, 31, 48, 79, 81, 84–5, 88–9, 91–2, 107–8, 110, 111–19, 124, 136, 141, 143, 149, 157, 161, 163, 171, 173, 177, 179, 182, 184, 190–1, 195, 198–9, 201 protectionism 22, 24, 26, 27, 34, 37, 38, 49, 67, 77, 151, 173 anti-protectionism 69 Punch 27, 28–9, 40, 44, 45, 47–8, 55, 71, 75, 90, 95, 129, 150, 171, 175–6, 177, 185, 187–9 “Business and the Bayonet” 175–6, 177, 179 “The Cookery of All Nations” 187 “The Exhibition Plague” 50 “Foreign Families of Distinction in London” 185 “London Dining Rooms” 188 “Refreshments at the Great Exhibition of 1851” 188 “Rules For the Prevention of Plague Next Year” 150

247

“Visions in the Crystal” 189–90 “You Must Translate, ’Tis Fit We Understand” 44 Purbrick, Louise The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays 12, 126 The Political Economy of Imperialism: Re-visiting the Great Exhibition of 1851 (or Re-Reading Its Official Record) 63 race 19, 30, 35, 49, 50, 78, 111–13, 151, 158, 159, 179, 180, 181, 183–6, 188, 190–2, 194–6, 200, 202 racial struggles 34, 195 railways 60, 85, 115, 133, 143, 144, 163, 164, 165, 167–8 railroads 169, 170, 181 see also “Ariel’s Girdle” Ricardo, David 23, 32, 69 Richards, Thomas 13, 105, 106 Robinson, Ronald 111, 112 “The Imperialism of Free Trade” 152–3 see also Gallagher, John romance 32, 120, 121, 127, 129, 135, 166 Rousseau, G. S. 24 Royle, John Forbes 133–4, 135, 136, 175 On the Commerce of Cotton 134 Ruskin, John 116, 193 The Stones of Venice 117 Russia 75, 76, 101, 123, 150, 159, 186, 187 Rydell, Robert 12, 96 Said, Edward 2, 15, 109, 120, 126, 183 Orientalism 183 savagery 31, 50, 85, 108, 109, 112, 113, 138, 142, 144, 154, 156, 157, 160, 176, 177, 181, 182, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 197 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 103, 110, 164–5 Scotland 75



Index

Index

Scrope, George Poulett 24, 28, 30 Searle, G. R. 23, 32, 37 Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream 165 The Tempest 104, 165 sight-seers 18, 206–7 Smith, Adam 22–5, 29, 30, 33, 36, 37, 45, 54, 58, 61, 67, 69, 96, 106, 116, 141, 160, 207 The Theory of Moral Sentiments 202–3 The Wealth of Nations 22, 26, 33–4, 35, 50, 73–4, 80–1, 196 Smith, Neil 59–60, 63, 67 Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space 59–60 Smith, Paul 5, 11, 61, 202 Social Darwinism 34 Sontag, Susan 73 Soyer, Alexis 187, 189 space 14–15, 16, 33, 56, 59–60, 63, 72, 81, 92–3, 164 anachronistic space 190–1, 192, 193 global space 59, 61, 141, 143, 156, 157, 165 spatial heterogeneity 157 spatio–temporal dialectic 179, 180, 191 and time 60, 61, 67, 108, 110, 144, 163–5, 166, 167, 168, 169, 175, 177–8, 181 Spain 44, 75, 112, 123, 139, 150, 157 Spencer, Herbert, Social Statistics: Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness 34–5 St. Clair, William, The Great Exhibition of 1851, A Poem 53 steamships 85 Stephenson, Roberts 77, 82 The Great Exhibition 82 Stocking, George 31, 32, 182 Victorian Anthropology 31, 32 Stuart-Wortley, Lady Emmeline 84, 86, 87–8, 90, 168, 179 “On the Anticipated Close of the Great Exhibition” 84, 86, 87–8, 90

Sweden 76 Switzerland 26, 75 Tallis’s History of the Crystal Palace 42, 100, 101, 113, 117–18, 121, 122, 129, 137, 138, 159, 161, 167, 170, 192 taxonomy 64–5, 66, 67, 102 telegraph 144, 163, 166, 167 Tennyson, Alfred 47, 84–5, 86, 88, 125 132 In Memoriam 47, 85, 88 “Locksley Hall” 84–5, 86, 88 Thackeray, William Makepeace 121 Times, The 3, 4, 18, 25–6, 27, 29, 42, 43, 51, 65, 66, 68, 73, 89, 101–2, 114, 115, 118, 122–3, 125, 135, 136, 139, 160–1, 166–7, 193, 195 “A Curious Contribution to the Great Exhibiton of 1851” 184–5 Scrutator 98–100, 101–2 Trollope, Anthony 121, 129 The Eustace Diamonds 129 Turkey 41, 75, 76, 115, 139, 159 United States 44, 63, 137, 198, 199 utilitarianism 34, 66, 78, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 107, 111, 113, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 129, 139, 160 Victoria, Queen 102, 127, 128 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English 20 Wales 75 Wallace, Jeff 78 Wallerstein, Immanuel 178–9, 180, 191, 192 Ward, James, The Great Exhibition of 1851; or, the Wealth of the World in its Workshops 147–8 Warren, Samuel 56, 103, 127 Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel 33, 34 Watt, James 148 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 49



248

West, the 8, 9, 16, 54, 97, 106, 108, 109–11, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 130, 132, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 157, 162, 163, 166, 183, 191, 194, 200, 216–17 non-Western world 11, 16, 106, 109–10, 139, 141, 200 Western civilization 115, 117, 158, 195, 196 Western powers 11, 15, 182 Western World 68, 108 Wheeler, Peleg E. 76–7, 80, 94, 95, 97 see also Bernard, Bayle Whewell, William 65, 72–3, 74, 82, 106–11, 113, 117, 140, 163

Whish, J. C. 49–50 Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Science and Lingustics 39–40 Williams, Raymond 2, 142, 145–6 Wilson, Daniel 113 Wordsworth, William 77, 100 Workshop of the World, Britain as the 6, 10, 149, 160, 172, 205 Wyld, James, Great Globe 71–2 xenophobia 192, 200 Young, Robert

9


249


Index

Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The New World Order

Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

'The Jew' in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium

Mapping the New World Order

Oil in the New World Order

The Musical Crowd in English Fiction, 1840-1910: Class, Culture and Nation (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization

Writing the World: On Globalization Essays

The Novel and the Globalization of Culture

Globalization and contestation: the new great counter-movement (Rethinking Globalizations)

Neurology and Literature, 1860-1920 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789-1874 (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The European Union, Mercosul and the New World Order

New World Order

The European Union, MERCOSUL, and the New World Order

Mastery and Slavery in Victorian Writing

A New World Order

New World Order

Ruskin, the Theatre and Victorian Visual Culture

A New World Order

Globalization, Language And Culture (The New Global Society)

Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

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Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium

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