An empire on display: English, Indian, and Australian exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War

The grand exhibitions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are the lens through which Peter Hoffenberg examines the economic, cultural, and social forces that helped define Britain and the British Empire. He focuses on major exhibitions in England, Australia, and India between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Empire sixty years later, taking special interest in the interactive nature of the exhibition experience, the long-term consequences for the participants and host societies, and the ways in which such popular gatherings revealed dissent as well as celebration. Hoffenberg shows how exhibitions shaped culture and society within and across borders in the transnational working of the British Empire. The exhibitions were central to establishing and developing a participatory imperial world, and each polity in that world provided distinctive information, visitors, and exhibits. Among the displays were commercial goods, working machines, and ethnographic scenes. Exhibits were intended to promote external commonwealth and internal nationalism. The imperial overlay did not erase significant differences but explained and used them in economic and cultural terms. The exhibitions in cities such as London, Sydney, and Calcutta were living and active public inventories of the Empire and its national political communities. The process of building and consuming such inventories persists today in the cultural bureaucracies, museums, and festivals of modern nation-states, the appeal to tradition and social order, and the actions of transnational bodies

World Expositions. Tra Nation-Building e processi di globalizzazione. Interventi di Robert W. Rydell, Christiane Demeulenaere-Douye\u300re, Peter H. Hoffenberg, Luis A\u301ngel Sa\u301nchez-Go\u301mez, Anna Pellegrino, Iain Chambers

This forum addresses some of the key issues regarding the historical analysis of the great world expositions: how did the great expositions developed over a 150 years history and how was it attempted to regulate them ? have world fairs a future ? how did expositions reflect a reality of conflicts much more than of cosmopolitan integration ? which is the Future of Exhibition Studies ? which was the the participation of Christian Churches at the colonial and international Exhibitions, 1851-1958 ? how did the expositions work as a socially inclusive device ? and finally, what was the meaning of exhibiting Humanity ? These are questions put by the coordinator of the forum and which some internaitonal specialists answer to trying to make the point to an extrenmely update subject, awaiting the opening of Expo 2015 in Mila

Bringing the State back in /

Bringing the state back in: strategies of analysis in current research / Theda SkocpolHegemony and religious conflict: British imperial control and political cleavages in Yorubaland / David D. LaitinOn the road toward a more adequate understanding of the state / Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda SkocpolSmall nations in an open international economy: the converging balance of state and society in Switzerland and Austria / Peter KatzensteinState power and the strength of civil society in the southern cone of Latin America / Alfred StepanState structures and the possibilities for Keynesian responses to the great depression in Sweden, Britain, and the United States / Margaret Weir and Theda SkocpolThe state and Taiwan's economic development / Alice H. AmsdenThe state and economic transformation: toward an analysis of the conditions underlying effective intervention / Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Peter B. EvansTransnational linkages and the economic role of the state: an analysis of developing and industrialized nations in the post-world war II period / Peter B. EvansWar making and state making as organized crime / Charles TillyWorking-class formation and the state: nineteenth-century England in American perspective / Ira Katznelso