ABSTRACT

Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851–1915 introduces the subject of international exhibitions to art and design historians and a wider audience as a resource for understanding the broad and varied political meanings of design during a period of rapid industrialization, developing nationalism, imperialism, expanding trade and the emergence of a consumer society. Its chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars, are global in scope, and demonstrate specific networks of communication and exchange among designers, manufacturers, markets and nations on the modern world stage from the second half of the nineteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth.

Within the overarching theme of nationalism and internationalism as revealed at world’s fairs, the book’s essays will engage a more complex understanding of ideas of competition and community in an age of emergent industrial capitalism, and will investigate the nuances, contradictions and marginalized voices that lie beneath the surface of unity, progress, and global expansion.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

Communities real and imagined: world’s fairs and political meanings

chapter 1|18 pages

East meets West

Re-presenting the Arab-Islamic world at the nineteenth-century world’s fairs

chapter 2|17 pages

From London to Paris (via Cairo)

The world expositions and the making of a modern architect, 1862–1867

chapter 3|21 pages

The Belgian reception of Italy at the 1885 Antwerp World Exhibition

Converging artistic, economic, and political strategies on display

chapter 4|21 pages

A Danish spectacle

Balancing national interests at the 1888 Nordic Exhibition of Industry, Agriculture, and Art in Copenhagen

chapter 5|17 pages

A neoclassical translation

The Hôôden at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition

chapter 6|21 pages

Paris, 1900

The Musée Centennal du Mobilier et de la Décoration and the formulation of a nineteenth-century national design identity

chapter 7|17 pages

“Our country has never been as popular as it is now!” 1

Finland at the 1900 Exposition Universelle

chapter 8|26 pages

“A revelation of grace and pride”

Cultural memory and international aspiration in early twentieth-century Hungarian design

chapter 9|22 pages

When the local is the global

Case studies in early twentieth-century Chinese exposition projects

chapter 10|19 pages

The 1910 Centenary Exhibition in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay

Manufacturing fine art and cultural diplomacy in South America