Exhibiting the Empire

Cultures of display and the British Empire

Edited by John McAleer, John M. MacKenzie

Publication date:

12 October 2015

Length of book:

304 pages

Publisher

Manchester University Press

Dimensions:

234x156mm

ISBN-13: 9780719091094

Exhibiting the empire considers how a whole range of cultural products – from paintings, prints, photographs, panoramas and ‘popular’ texts to ephemera, newspapers and the press, theatre and music, exhibitions, institutions and architecture – were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. It represents a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the relationship between culture and empire. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, individual chapters bring fresh perspectives to the interpretation of media, material culture and display, and their interaction with history. Taken together, this collection suggests that the history of empire needs to be, in part at least, a history of display and of reception.

This book will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British history, the history of empire, art history and the history of museums and collecting.

Introduction: Cultures of display and the British Empire – John M. MacKenzie and John McAleer
1. An elite imperial vision: eighteenth-century British country houses and four-continents imagery – Stephanie Barczewski
2. Exhibiting exploration: Captain Cook, voyages of exploration and the culture of display – John McAleer
3. Satirical peace prints and the cartographic unconscious – Douglas Fordham
4. Sanguinary engagements: exhibiting the naval battles of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars – Eleanor Hughes
5. Empire under glass: the British Empire and the Crystal Palace, 1851–1911 – Jeffrey Auerbach
6. Ephemera and the British Empire – Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins
7. Exhibiting the empire in print: the press, the publishing world and the promotion of ‘Greater Britain’ – Berny Sèbe
8. Exhibiting the empire at the Delhi Durbar of 1911: imperial and cultural contexts – John M. MacKenzie
9. Elgar’s Pageant of Empire, 1924: an imperial leitmotiv – Nalini Ghuman
10. Representing ‘Our Island Sultanate’ in London and Zanzibar: cross-currents in educating imperial publics – Sarah Longair
Index

‘Exhibiting the Empire is an excellent contribution to the continued debate about the empire’s role in Britain. There is a good deal packed into this relatively short volume, which certainly raises a number of new topics and approaches that warrant further attention from scholars of empire, British and otherwise.’
Stephen Hague, Rowan University, H-Net, Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online

‘This collection is a brilliant example of how the historiography of empire should consider the multiple and complex imperial interactions within and throughout British domestic culture. Contributions from a range of scholars and a variety of disciplinary traditions show that a host of cultural products were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire within the metropole.’
Shahmima Akhtar, University of Birmingham, Journal of contemporary History, Vol. 54, No. 1