ABSTRACT
From the Great Exhibition to the outbreak of the Second World War, roughly 35 cultural festivals merited the description ‘international exposition’. As Table 4.1 shows,1 there was a remarkable degree of concentration in the places staging these events; a phenomenon that, in turn, had a marked impact on the purposes that they served. Nine western nations staged all the expositions up to the Second World War: the United States of America (ten), France and Belgium (eight each), Italy (three), and Australia (two), and the Netherlands, Austria, Spain and the United Kingdom (one each).2 Given this dominance, it was not surprising that western thinking exerted a powerful hold over exposition design and presentation of content that challenged any assertion about their claims for true universality. Expositions may well have been efficient ways of communicating the wonders of science and technology to the public in a pre-televisual age, but they primarily responded to the western world’s interwoven priorities of trade, promotion, city rivalries, and imperialism.
