Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discusses in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about commodities, their attendant technologies and human agents, and their shaping role in the British colonial world in the period 1851 to 1914, from the Great Exhibition to the outbreak of the First World War. Commodities played highly complex roles in shaping not only the material world, but also social relations and natural environments. Understanding the ways in which they operated is fundamental to any examination of global modernity. The book seeks to disclose the cultures of commodities as historical sites of global struggle and considers literary texts as heightened interpretive environments in which represented commodities encrypt complex colonial histories. It also argues that moving panoramas were an important means by which mid-Victorian popular culture conceptualized the global circulation of goods, information and people.