ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the manifestations of the dynamics at the first world's fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, and its pivotal role in establishing a visual, material, and experiential model of "the East" that served to negate physical distance while confirming cultural difference. It examines the modifications, their cultural impacts, and long-term legacies. When positioned in relation to foreign peoples and cultures—such as those of Tunisia, Western nationalisms and the vision of collective progress they created were brought into sharper focus. The awareness included the Arab-Islamic world, most often constructed in accord with Western interests and the emerging global order they championed. The world's fairs held in the second half of the nineteenth century were a distinctly modern phenomenon. In the way, an object that conveyed complex, shifting, and entangled meanings within mid-century Tunisian politics and culture could also serve to uphold the discourses of Oriental exoticism advanced in the West.
