ABSTRACT
Any type of international festival capable of surviving in recognisable form from 1851 to the present is clearly resilient. Despite the profound social and economic changes that had occurred in the two decades between the 1939 New York World’s Fair and its successor, the 1958 Brussels Exposition Universelle et Internationale, the old pattern soon returned. The list of host cities and nations shown in Table 5.1, for instance, contains few surprises. Brussels, Seattle and New York, which staged the first three expositions after the Second World War, had all previously done so and each persevered with the science-as-progress theme. Brussels and New York even reused parts of their previous fairgrounds. Two of the three new host countries found in Table 5.1 – Canada and Portugal – were entirely within the established mould. The third, Japan, differed by being the first Asian country to stage an exposition, but the Japanese had enthusiastically participated in such events since the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. They themselves had planned to hold expositions in Tokyo in 1917 and 1940, but were twice thwarted by the outbreak of war. Any suggestion that the entry of Japan represented much departure from the norm is, therefore, debatable.
