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Course of Study:
HT52205A
Title:
Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New
World Order
Author:
Paul Young
Publisher:
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN/ISSN:
9780230520752
Designated Person authorising scanning:
Rebecca Randall
4
Pax Britannica
Dominance or degeneracy?
If the perceived emergence of a new world order can inspire, it can also
threaten, even for those considered in the vanguard. "The First Half
of the Nineteenth Century," published in January 1851, saw Fraser's
Magazine celebrating Britain's standing in the world. But the journal was
also drawn to consider "Whether the nation still retains those energies
and talents which have raised it to such an unexampled pitch of greatness, or whether it exhibits any marks of that degeneracy which history
records as having been, sooner or later, the fate of all great and powerful empires?" While this troubling question was thus related to previous
eras, there was also a pressing sense of historical specificity. The article
began with reference to the impact and effect of modern times, which
were characterized by commercial freedom, "the rapid movement and
incessant whirl of material things," and the overturn of "the old sluggish
mediaeval mould." l Famously, Marx and Engels cast industrial capitalism's energy with regard to the dissolution of all "fixed, fast-frozen
relations"; the bourgeois epoch was about the "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,
everlasting uncertainty and agitations. liZ In asking the question that
it did, then, Fraser's can be understood to have provided a national
context within which to consider modernity as, in Marshall Berman's
noteworthy formulation, "an environment that promises us adventure,
power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and,
at the time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything
we know, everything we are." 3 Raising some of the themes and issues
discussed in the book's introduction, and calling to mind in particular Raymond Williams's description of the mid-nineteenth-century in
145
146 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
Britain as) a "transforming, liberating and threatening time/' I tum
in this chapter away from the question of whether liberal, globalized modernity made sense, to that of how Exhibition commentators
believed Victorian Britain - and by extension Victorian values - would
fare under the conditions which it engendered. 4
Nine months later Fraser's was able to reassure its readers with a view
from abroad, answering in the negative those scaremongers who forecast Britain's decline, and validating the magazine's own decision to
cast aside its conservative inclinations and conclude the aforementioned
article by formally announcing its support for free trade. Arriving in
London as the Great Exhibition drew to a close, "The French Critic
in London" offered a fictional Frenchman's take on Britain's impressive and intimidating global standing, although one that focused on
the capital city. Sally Ledger points out that the style of the piece
echoes the peculiarly fantastical mode that was coming to characterize journalism and fiction in Dickens's Household Words, launched six
months earlier.s Notably too, the essay anticipated the opening word
of Bleak House, rehearsed the opening chapters of Dombey and Son, and
elaborated the "world-wide commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital" that Mr. Merdle would come to embody in
Little Dorrit: 6
I have arrived in London! I might end all I have to say, or ever shall
have to say, in that one word. London! It is the beginning and the
end, and comprises everything. London! the symbol of a dominion
that rides round the world with the sun, and commands the commerce of the earth over seas and continents, through the agency
of necromancers seated on tall stools, in little dark dens, with pens
behind their ears, their thin legs dangling in the air, and their faces,
hideous and cadaverous from the effects of the incantations they perform, brooding day and night, over huge books of magic that are
stretched out before them.?
While in the ancient world all roads had led to Rome, it now seemed
all roads led to London. And while we have encountered the Britainas-Prospero analogy, and will encounter it again, it is significant to
note that here a bitter and fearful Frenchman fleshed out the financial
underpinnings of a Victorian global sway that other commentators Carlyle included - would cast in the mechanistic terms of technological
sovereignty:
Pax Britannica
147
These are the Ariels that put girdles round the earth in forty
seconds - the Prosperos that agitate the waters and still the tempests
at will - the potent spirits that call up out of darkness the hidden
treasures of the earth, and congregate by the wave of a quill upon
one spot, at a given moment, the industry and genius, the muscle
and brains, the art and the SCience, the energy and the wealth, the
past and the future, of all the nations of the globe. This is London a magician's cell, buried in eternal twilight, where the sorceries are
prepared that control the destinies of kings and populations. (497)
Strength, control, retention of a competitive edge, and thus the preservation of hegemony. This was the view of Britain supposedly sent back
across the channel by Fraser's Frenchman. It was a sentiment that British
observers, enthused by their nation's showing at the Crystal Palace, were
happy to share, albeit that they were able to depict a Victorian dominion
in a far less Gothic manner.
Fraser's had cast financial brains and inventive genius as the undeniable but wholly unappealing guarantors of Victorian power. Searching
for an alternative take on things, however, its readers might have
remembered that in 1848 Charles Kingsley's Yeast had appeared serially in the magazine. Published the same year that Dickens completed Dombey and Son, the novel featured another character to give
fictional form to a Victorian globalism energized by the nation's
advanced industrial, technological and financial position. "Naturally
keen, ready, business-like, daring," Lord Minchampstead represented
the man Dickens's Dombey hoped to become, having "carved out his
own way through life, and opened his oyster-the world, neither with
sword nor pen, but with steam and cotton. liS Three years later the Great
Exhibition furnished an opportunity for commentators to suggest Minchampstead's qualities encapsulated the spirit of his nation and his time,
thus bringing to the fore industrial muscle as well as commercial wherewithal in order to figure in optimistic terms where the nation was - and
where it was headed.
As this healthier, more holistic vision had it, the peculiarly advantageous nature of the nation's ecology and geography, coupled with
the predilection of its inhabitants for liberty, hard work, scientific
advance and commercial enterprise, had served as the internal generators of the Industrial Revolution, and had established the conditions
that would sustain industrialized global leadership. Thus James Ward,
.~---
148 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
writing as "Philoponos," in The Great Exhibition
of 1851; or,
The Wealth
of the World in its Workshops:
We are - with our great national advantages, our unbounded supply
of coals and of all the useful metals, the energetic and never-tiring
industry of our population, the enterprising spirit of our Anglo-Saxon
blood, our peculiar climate which renders bodily and mental activity
a condition of healthy eXistence, and our insular pOSition, so preeminently favourable to commerce - we are, by these and other great
national advantages, and for an indefinite term continue to be, the
great manufacturing and mercantile nation of the world. 9
Such confidence in an ongOing Victorian pre-eminence jarred with the
more fluid conception of international relations that free traders such
as Cobden could chose to present. But for those who were reluctant to
countenance the possibility of shifts in global power, the preservation
of Britain's advanced position invigorated other nations, and so could
be justified on moral grounds.
According to this logic, the Victorian metropolis was distinguished
not only for the cosmopolitan spirit that had seen it inaugurate free
trade, but also for those socio-economic features, qualities and virtues
that would continue to make the world work better, even as they preserved Britain's leading position. A lecture on iron-making, from the
aforementioned Exhibition series, had iron manufacturer S. H. Blackwell
remarking that "wise and beneficent arrangement" that saw "stores
of mineral wealth, so needful for the world's progress," deposited "in
climates temperate as our own, which has produced the strong and vigorous Anglo-Saxon race; to whom work is less a toil than a passion."lo
Likewise a domestic boom in cotton manufacturing was presented in
relation to a fortuitous dovetail between national development and
global responsibility. Thomas Bazley figured the penetration of international markets with cheap cotton goods in terms of "destined duty"
that England was to perform, "her sons having been the honoured
representatives of genius and labour.JJ!1 For the nIustrated London News
the world had to thank the "mechanical genius" of men such as Watt
and Arkwright, alongside the nation's "mineral treasures," for Britain's
unrivalled capacity to supply through its cotton industry humankind's
"second great want."12 Confirming such optimism with a view from
abroad, Exhibition visitor Frederika Bremer suggested that, as a result of
its industrial might and commercial sense, Britain's power was "increasing every year in extent and strength." But Bremer also insisted that ,
':A'
Pax Britannica
149
with this material sovereignty came the elevating extension of Victorian
values, and so she eulogized what she designated "England's mission"
with relation to the pre-destined spread of "her civilisation over the
greatest part of the world." "It is in the sublime benevolence of her
national character which so strengthens her human nature/' she commented, before adding, "It is the high degree of culture possessed by
England that adapts her to be the cultivator of the world."13
While it did not give rise to the celebratory mode of writing
on Britain's status as the industrialized workshop of the world that
Christine Macleod has dubbed a "heroic genre/' it is in this sense that
the Great Exhibition played a critical function in encouraging it.14 But
it would be quite wrong to infer from such reactions that commentators
were unanimous in welcoming the internationalist and liberal era with
which the display had become associated, or thought that Britain was
necessarily set to thrive in this new globalized order. Pace the triumphalism of the Exhibition's grand narrative, and pace the contention that this
was a story with Britain guaranteed a leading role, the Exhibition generated emphatic accounts of what the nation stood to lose not gain as
cosmopolitan sympathies and free-trade industrial capitalism took hold
of the world.
As Fraser's intimated, such accounts brought to the fore very different
ideas about Victorian national identity and the results of modernity's
momentum to those we have encountered. Remarking that the "overarching tenor of the Great Exhibition was pacifist internationalism/' and
highlighting Albert's pivotal speech as emblematic of this fact, Auerbach
notes also that the Exhibition inspired strands of nationalist thinking that "rejected both the ideals and the reality of industrialization
and questioned the very idea of progress put forward by Albert at his
Mansion House address." He goes on to remark that many observers
turned away from accounts of Victorian cosmopolitanism, embracing
instead "a vision of 'Englishness' that was rooted in an idealization
of tradition and a rejection of change, an ideal that was shared by
both Tory and Radical leaders, as well as the participants in the Oxford
Movement, Young England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the
Gothic Revival."15 With little time for Henry Cole's celebration of
Britons' progressive internationalist instincts and heterogeneous racial
lineage - comprising the "blood of Saxons, Celts, Germans, Dutchmen,
Frenchmen, Hindoos, and probably even Negroes"16 - these accounts of
Englishness feared that the increasingly open way in which Britain was
conceiving its position in the world would damage both the nation's
global standing and its sense of identity.
150
Globalization and the Great Exhibition
As a result, Exhibition commentators mounted attacks on what
they perceived to be the unwelcome foreign influences the Exhibition encouraged. Of a number of publications to have fun with such
concerns, Punch stood out. Two articles from 1850 in particular, entitled liThe Exhibition Plague" and "Rules for the Prevention of Plague
Next Year," perfectly encapsulated the way in which the confident cosmopolitanism that had prompted Britain to host the Exhibition was
seen to expose and endanger Victorian SOCiety. The first, featuring a letter from An Anxious Wife and Mother," maintained that among other
contributions to the forthcoming display could be expected,
II
THE BLACK JAUNDICE, FROM AMERICA;
PALSY, FROM RUSSIA;
CONVULSION FITS, FROM FRANCE;
THE MUMPS, FROM GREECE;
THE KING'S EVIL, FROM NAPLES;
RICKETS, FROM SPAIN;
ST. ANTHONY'S FIRE, FROM PORTUGAL;
DROPSY, FROM HOLLAND; AND
THE SCARLET FEVER, FROM ROMEY
The second, published some weeks later, saw Punch responding to these
fears by offering its readers details of the "stringent precautions" with
which a specially instituted Board of Health would seek to control
the spread of disease. Included among the proposed sanitary measures
were the establishment in the capital of Foreign Baths and Washhouses,
the provision of two pounds of yellow soap to every visiting foreigner
(to be paid for by a Foreigners' Charitable Soap Fund), the demand that all
foreigners provide a medical certificate of good health, and the distribution of camphor bags to all suspicious foreigners" twice weekly in Hyde
Park. The French would be washed head to foot upon entering London.
Germans would be required to provide evidence of fresh clothing before
access was granted. 18
More than throwing into question the wisdom of opening up the
capital city in the summer of 1851, it is notable that the pieces from
Punch signalled the way in which positive concepts and tropes associated in particular with free trade - contact, exchange, circulation,
fluidity and vitality - could be transposed, inverted and mobilized in
ways that refused the idea that relaxing border controls and encouraging freedom of movement was necessarily a good thing. By extenSion,
then, it is clear that fears over permeable borders tapped into the idea
II
Pax Britannica
151
that as trade regulations were relaxed so too Britain's industrial rivals
would prosper at the nation's expense. This is not to say that Protectionism was necessarily the root cause of, or the overriding factor in,
reactions against cosmopolitan globalism. Alongside perceived problems
with industrial and commercial competition, concerns in 1851 ranged
from grave fears about Papism, post-1848 revolutionary movements, linguistic purity and miscegenation to trivial and light-hearted issues that
included complainants moaning that continental fashions for long hair
and wooden shoes were set to sweep through the isles. So anxieties
over politics, culture and race, as well as economics, fed into the fact
that, as Auerbach notes, "British writers worried that foreigners would
cross all sorts of boundaries."19 It is equally the case, however, that these
fears were very much fuelled by a perception that as Britain embraced
a commercially liberal new world order so too it turned its back on the
important and traditional strengths, commitments and ideals that had
made the British empire what it was. To this way of thinking the possibility of national degeneracy raised by Fraser's was all too real, as the
"energies and talents" on which the nation's success was founded were
dissipated and eroded in a climate of misplaced priorities at home and
dangerous threats from abroad.
What has emerged here, then, is a stark opposition, one that can
be usefully, if simplistically, characterized in terms of internationalism
versus nationalism. 20 The Great Exhibition inspired some observers to
suggest that in an increasingly commercially liberal nineteenth century,
Victorian steam, cotton and capital rendered the world Britain's oyster, with the nation's wealth and health set to improve in line with
but also in front of the rest of the world. It prompted others, however,
to detect just the metropolitan hubris and complacency, coupled with
growing and encroaching foreign powers, that had seen nations and
empires fall in the past, and that now seemed set to destroy the socioeconomic prosperity and cultural integrity of a great British/English
way of life.
Twenty-one years after the Exhibition, Benjamin Disraeli would use
the occasion of his famous Crystal Palace address to urge Tories that
the time was right to overturn the principles that for so many had
been connected with the original building in which he spoke. Detailing
Liberalism's concerted efforts over the past forty years "to effect the disintegration of the Empire of England/, Disraeli announced to his party
that such a policy had fallen out of favour, and that a moment was
approaching "when England will have to choose between national and
cosmopolitan principles." The choice, like the opposition, was stark; it
.~
152 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
fell between what two decades ago had been heralded as a Victorian
new world order, but which was now cast as "continental" contamination, and what Disraeli acclaimed as the expansionist drive that would
come to be called the New Imperialism:
It is whether you will be content to be a comfortable England, mod-
elled and moulded upon continental principles and meeting in due
course an inevitable fate, or whether you will be a great country, an imperial country - a country where your sons, when they rise, rise
to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem of their
countrymen, but command the respect of the world. 21
This was compelling stuff, but the simplistic opposition obscured the
imperial ideology and practices underpinning mid-nineteenth-century
Britain's new world order.
At this point I return to the article with which this section began.
Disraeli wanted Britain to reject the liberal orthodoxy Fraser's embraced
there. But the way the journal explicated Britain's capacity to survive
and prosper under these conditions usefully problematized the binary
Disraeli would insist upon. Having introduced the possibility of national
and imperial decline, the article moved very quickly to highlight the
recent annexation of Scinde and the Punjab as bearing witness to the
"vigour and vitality of England, - another proof that we have not yet
arrived at that stationary period of our history that may be regarded
as the prelude to national decay. The work of national aggrandizement
is going on with ever-increasing spirit." As well as India, Fraser's indicated that it was going on in Hong Kong, Aden, Australia and New
Zealand. All this acclaim for colonial activity in an article that would
conclude with Fraser's "acceptance of the bold measure of the late
Sir Robert Peel as a fait accompli, and devote ourselves to the advocacy of such reforms as that new system shall seem to have rendered
necessary. "22
As the last chapter made clear, it was not only the work of such formal
aggrandizement" that could and should be set against the sense that
free trade would necessarily put an end to the opportunity for Britain to
shape its global expansion in accordance with its own needs. Calling to
account the idea that "mid-Victorian 'indifference' and late-Victorian
'enthusiasm' for empire were directly related to the rise and decline
in free-trade beliefs," John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson's influential
essay liThe Imperialism of Free Trade" begins by considering in terms of
formal control the imperial results of such supposed indifference:
II
Pax Britannica
153
Between 1841 and 1851 Great Britain occupied or annexed New
Zealand, the Gold Coast, Labuan, Natal, the Punjab, Sind and Hong
Kong. In the next twenty years British control was asserted over
Berar, Oudh, Lower Burma and Kowloon, over Lagos and the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, over Basutoland, Griqualand and the
Transvaal; and new colonies were established in Queensland and
British Columbia.23
While the summary confirms and elaborates the assessment of Fraser's,
much of the essay's thrust warns against the consideration of imperialism only in terms of formal annexation, extending the analysis in
order that the informal economic and political measures that characterized British expansion in the Victorian period are brought into focus.
Thus Robinson and Gallagher describe the "general strategy" to convert
areas of non-Europe "into complimentary satellite economies, which
would provide raw materials and food for Great Britain, and also provide
widening markets for its manufactures" (9). As they assert that "formal and informal empire are essentially interconnected and to some
extent interchangeable" (6), they maintain that it is only by heeding
the many-sided manner with which this empowered push to expand
via conversion was pursued by the Victorians that imperialism can be
properly understood.
We return, then, to the previous chapter, and its conclusion that the
Great Exhibition served as a site that naturalized and promoted this
manifold imperial drive. Where Disraeli followed some mid-nineteenthcentury Exhibition commentators who predicted that a liberal commercial order would result in a loss of empire and identity, this chapter is
far more inclined to follow the example of Fraser's and the arguments
of Robinson and Gallagher. In so doing it addresses a pronounced body
of Exhibition commentary that was confident that, for the foreseeable
future at least, there existed currently underdeveloped global communities whose lands could be profitably penetrated and positioned in
order that Victorian dominance in the world might be sustained. Such
commentary was bound together by its proposal of a Pax Britannica,
an imperial order based upon the organizing principle of a rational division of labour, and underpinned by the notion that it was
legitimate for Britain to intervene formally or informally in order to
mobilize wasted or underused global resources. This was an imperium
that both revolved around and continued to nourish the "energies and
talents," as well as values and tradition, on which the nation could
pride itself. But this reassuring imperial vision was not united by a
154 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
shared conceptualization of either the precise nature or outcome of
the relationship between Britain and the indigenous inhabitants of the
non-European world, which such imperial activity would necessitate.
Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object clarifies the central thrust of the argument this chapter makes
regarding the expansionist drive the Great Exhibition was seen to
legitimize. Interested in the fact that the perception of historical backwardness served to plot imperialism, Fabian argues that, as it emerged
in the nineteenth century, Anthropology established a geo-historical
scheme that situated all living societies within II a stream of Time some upstream, some downstream." Asserting that IIgeopolitics has its
ideological foundations in chronopolitics," it is the fact that Anthropology sustained such a chronopolitical vision that leads him to conclude the discipline was implicated in the lIintellectual justification"
of imperialism. 24 Fabian elaborates this point when he contends that
by denying IIcoevalness, or allochronism" to the global communities it explored, the geo-historical scheme around which his discipline
revolved created temporally inflected alterity: liThe absence of the Other
from our Time has been his mode of presence in our discourse - as an
object and a victim."25
Having set out in Chapters 1 and 2 the universal scope of the Great
Exhibition's globalized vision, I showed in Chapter 3 the way in which
the Crystal Palace was understood to reveal those savage and barbarian peoples who had failed to mix properly their labour with their
land. As indicated at the end of the previous chapter, given the existence of such communities, and given the need to extend the scope
of the world economy, the question then became what would become
of the primitive Other thus delineated? If we tum to commentary that
answered this question, we see that much of what follows brings to
the fore the conceptualization of a Victorian Pax driven by the desire
to integrate non-European peoples as well as their lands into the new
world order. Commentators claimed that such integration would effect
the socio-economic, cultural and spiritual uplift of these communities.
While this pervasive idea was born out of the good story the Crystal
Palace told about globalization, however, not everyone saw the Exhibition upholding such an imperial vision. That this was so was due in large
part to uncertainty over how Fabian's Other might respond given the
opportunity to join globalized modernity. But it was prompted also by
doubts over whether the opportunity should even be extended. We have
seen that the Great Exhibition raised concerns over the anachronistic
character of non-European goods. We shall see towards the end of this
Pax Britannica
155
chapter that it raised concerns too over the anachronistic character of
non-European peoples.
England's mission
In October 1851 the Reverend William Forster, Quaker minister and philanthropist, preached a sermon that appeared in pamphlet form with
the subtitle England's Mission to All Nations. Therein Forster described
the Crystal Palace as the "embodiment of free trade and universal-peace
ideas." He went on, however, to outline the providential commission
under the auspices of which his own nation had hosted the Exhibition,
and was now preparing to extend its global role:
We told them [all nations] that the interchange of productions and
the maintenance of peace were indispensable to the prosperity of
each and all. We assured them that henceforth we designed to labour
to raise other nations in the scale of social order, not only because
it was benevolent, but prudent. It is our work to go on doing this.
We have the commission from that Providence, which made of one
blood all the nations of the earth, to soothe down national animosities, to draw closer together national bonds, to interpret national
interests, to forward national objects, and to make other peoples feel
we consider their prosperity ours, and that what will benefit them
cannot be injurious to US. Z6
In figuring the operations of a global economy with regard to a homogenous interdependency, tending towards pacific harmony and mutual
enrichment, Forster did no more than to rehearse free trade's new world
order, as it was encountered in Chapters 1 and 2. What Forster so clearly
introduces, however, when he discusses in missionary terms England's
privileged position as the hands-on facilitator of this new world order,
is a way of thinking prepared to embrace the notion that globalization was a process to be realized via procedures of interventionism and
reorientation, especially as visited upon backward peoples by their civilized counterparts. The idea that the Crystal Palace legitimized a global
economy organized around the formation of industrialized centres and
agricultural hinterlands has been established. Attention now shifts to
the fact that the Exhibition served to celebrate Victorian expansion in
the non-European world, heralding with missionary zeal a project that
as well as securing metropolitan interests would also, in Forster's words,
"raise other nations in the scale of social order." As a result of this focus,
156 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
the conviction that non-European peoples would be both capable of and
receptive to the possibility of such a rise comes to the fore.
In Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races,
1800-1930, Patrick Brantlinger sets outs the Gothic stereotype he numbers as "among the causes - and not just effects - of the global
decimation of many indigenous peoples" in the nineteenth century:
"Shadowing the romantic stereotype of the Noble Savage is its ghostly
twin, the self-exterminating savage."Z7 Falling somewhere between these
two types is the object of the imperial civilizing mission, neither the
idealized Rousseauian innocent nor the irredeemably (and perhaps
inherently) removed degenerate, but the savage for whom salvation
is possible given suitable forms of interaction with its dvilized betters. In this section and the next I emphasize the way in which the
metropolis was held by commentators to forge via commerce padfic and
progreSSive connections with these peripheral peoples and their lands,
presenting them with a place within the industrialized modernity of
the Victorian new world order. Understood in its simplistic sense as that
which "is new or contemporary and represents a distinct temporal break
from the past," modernity was offered as something non-Europe could
be born into, there to be brought into being and up to speed, pulled
out of its historical backwaters and into a globalized mainstream. z8
With this integration was to come more than economic prosperity.
In line with its Anglocentric character, this imperial interaction was conceived with relation to one-way cultural as well as two-way commercial
exchanges. Thus England's Mission promised to redeem the existence
of savage and barbaric peoples, reuniting them in a productive manner with their material environment, but also bestowing cultural form,
spiritual point and moral order upon their empty, meaningless and
wicked lives.
One of the key themes to emerge here is thus the idea of development - assodated with modernization and enculturation - and more
specifically the idea of the developing world. Doreen Massey helps clarify this focus in For Space, a manifesto in which she presses the need
for global space to be conceived of in terms that acknowledge the possibility of "contemporaneous plurality," of "coexisting heterogeneity," of
the "simultaneity of stories-so-far." That this is not currently the case,
she argues, is the result of a manoeuvre characteristic of modernity, the
convening of spatial difference into temporal sequence:
Different "places" [have been] interpreted as different stages
in a single temporal development. All the stories of unilinear
Pax Britannica
157
progress, modernisation, development, the sequence of modes of
production ... perform this operation. Western Europe is "advanced",
other parts of the world "some way behind", yet others are "backward" ... That turning of the world's geography into the world's
(single) history is implicit in many versions of modernist politiCS,
from liberal progressive to some Marxist. 29
As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, the globalized politiCS of the
Crystal Palace helped to embed - within Victorian society and beyond just that refusal of co-existing spatial heterogeneity with which Massey
is concerned. Instead I demonstrated how a vision of historicized spatial
heterogeneity characterized by barbarism and wasted resources was contrasted with a correct Victorian/Western way of being in the world. With
this in mind, what Massey does not register here is what I have stressed
above: modernity's unilinear temporal sequence could be offered to historically failing communities as an opportunity to live and to flourish
properly. Hence the interpretive process Massey mentions was celebrated in a far more active sense by William Foster. I shall turn later
to the tension that clearly opens up between the structural logic of capitalist development and the coalescence of peripheral and metropolitan
interests towards which such celebrations pointed. For the moment it is
important to underscore the fact that we are dealing with the conception of interpretation and intervention that aimed to make global spaces
and their inhabitants "backward" in a qualitatively different way to the
barbarism and savagery that had preceeded them. Once again Marx and
Engel's famous phrase is pertinent: to this way of thinking the creation
of a world after Britain's image meant making non-Europeans behind
"us" in such a way as to make non-Europeans like "us."
A short story from Household Words, "Our Phantom Ship, Central
America," written in the year of the Great Exhibition, furnishes a useful
point from which to begin a more detailed analysis of the way Britain's
mission took shape. Featuring a fantastic maritime journey distinguished by a panoptical scope that speedily and assiduously anatomized
Central America, the story provided readers of Dickens's journal with
an exciting taster for the type of industrial surveillance and economic
rationalization with which both the Exhibition and England's Mission
would become associated. Having detailed the fertile properties and
rich abundance of raw materials of a terrain shamefully wasted by its
current owners, the piece concluded its tour by remarking that "The
present inhabitants of Central America - Spanish, mixed or coloured know no more of the use that they might make of their unlimited
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resources, than a baby knows what it can buy with hal£-a-crown." That
being so, it was left to "Anglo-Saxon energy," the kinetic potential of
which would be so ably and noisily evidenced within the Palace later
that year, to "stir this sluggish pool into life." Only via civilized knowledge and technologically driven capitalism could the "wealth lavished
by Nature" be realised, and a district of the earth "whose part in the
world's history is destined to be hereafter as large as it is now little" take
its rightful (and rural) place within a modern global order. 3D
As with earlier remarks concerning Carlyle, it must be noted that
here integration was figured with relation to territory not inhabitants, a
fact that left room for ideas concerning "the 'doom' of 'primitive races'
caused by 'fatal impact' with white, Western civilization."31 That said,
however, the infantile imagery deployed in this context spoke to the
notion that reterritorialization could place non-Europeans upon a developmental curve. Elaborating this notion, and falling very much in line
with the catholic strain of thinking that has characterized so much of
the Exhibition commentary we have considered, Peter Mandler asserts
that a mid-nineteenth-century Christianized discourse of political economy generated "a fundamental belief in 'civilisation' as a universal
human potential," as well as helping explain Britain's leading historical position in the world: "what glued all of these liberals together
was their willingness (even eagerness) to conceive, in various ways,
of an English nation or people carrying common characteristics - a
predilection for liberty and free-thought, a capacity for self-government,
Protestant piety, enterprise, expansion." The fact that by their very
nature such characteristics were transferable sheds light on the commentary considered in Chapter I, where the historical and geographical
specificity of the Great Exhibition was explained with relation to a Victorian cosmopolitanism that should be followed, not just admired. And
as Mandler also observes, it shaped too a sense of Victorian duty to its
global subjects, however infantilized:
If that kingdom and empire contained peoples not yet liberated
from their uncivilised clannishness - Celts, Negroes, aborigines - it
was the responsibility of the English to maintain their institutional
hold on such peoples in order gradually to wean them from their
childishness. 32
With reference to Mandler'S remarked conception of a Victorian
predilection for enterprise and expansion, and with relation to my
emphasiS here upon the universally redemptive possibilities afforded
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by industrial capitalist intervention, it is important to recognize that
this sense of responsibility extended far and wide. As we shall see, again
with relation to British India, some form of institutional hold could certainly be held useful in effecting a programme of regeneration. But there
were no such institutional preconditions held necessary to effect industrial capitalist penetration and reorientation, only the need to direct
the ignorant to make use of the "unlimited resources" that lay at their
fingertips.
While "Our Phantom Ship" did not make this at all clear, then,
for many observers in 1851 what was exciting was the range of nonEuropean peoples it was possible to raise up via Victorian industry and
enterprise, and the reoriented division of labour it allowed to take shape.
Typical of such was an article from Tallis's History, which urged that "the
highly civilized man" should "subdue his own prejudices" regarding
those peoples "who are commonly called Aborigines, or the less civilized
races," to be found across Africa, Central and Southern America, China,
India, Turkey and Russia. Reminding readers that even the "most polished nations may in them trace their own perfection backward to its
source," the article declared that such primitive peoples could acquire
those "superior qualifications that shall rightfully place them" on the
same "level" as their industrialized betters. Here the piece invoked
Brantlinger's Gothic stereotype, but only to refuse "that numerous portions of our race should be doomed by Providence at the approach of
their more instructed brethren":
Facts encourage a nobler and a wiser prospect. A capacity for a
safer and better condition of life is clearly established by these
productions of industry - exercised in every climate, within the
burning tropic and at the pole, by Negro and by Esquimaux; by
the gloomy American forests, and over the bare steppes of Tartary:
by the half-amphibious islander of the Pacific equally as by the
kaffir ... each ... having his peculiar operation. 33
The empirical "facts" to which the article was especially drawn were,
perhaps inevitably, the raw materials displayed in the Palace. With
each item enhancing their prospects of development because of their
use to the Victorian market, Tallis eagerly listed "the dyes, the gums, the
drugs, the oils, the seeds, the woods, the woven and textile plants,
the leaves, the roots, the skins, the furs, the feathers, the shells" that
these primitives would need to cultivate in order to progress. So it
was that the civilized creation of an extended economic nexus was
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
held to offer a "peculiar operation" in place of supposedly self-sufficient
sluggishness.34 Moreover, commentators maintained that the peripheral
demand for the manufactured goods of the metropolis promoted such
a vitalizing endeavour more than did the need of Victorian factories.
Thus, the rational division of labour desired by British industry emerged
out of the diSCiplinary impact of the market, not the disciplinary measures of the British themselves. Which is to say, industrial capitalist
intervention and reorientation was effected by means of the carrot not
the stick.
John Stuart Mill declared that liTo civilize a savage, he must be
inspired with new wants and desires, even if not of a very elevated
kind, provided that their gratification can be a motive to bodily and
mental exertion."35 So it is, notes Regenia Gagnier, that the "economics of British expansion meet the goals of civilizing," adding that
"baubles" were held to transform barbarians. 36 Catherine Hall elaborates
by remarking that this was a vision that saw the onset of civilization
distinguished by the creation of "'artificial wants' - luxuries, which
encouraged the development of an aesthetic, comforts which went
beyond bare necessities."37 Both these analyses pick up on the idea
that Victorian political economists could follow Adam Smith in tracing socio-economic development with relation to a commodity shift
from the practical to the luxurious, the useful to the useless. But given
the earlier emphasis upon a prevalent conception of the commodity as a utilitarian item, and given the way in which non-European
cultures were dismissed as decadent and sybaritic, it is instructive
to note that Exhibition commentators trod carefully with relation to
the preCise nature of this move from savage subsistence to civilized
consumption. As with commentary considered previously, most were
content to avoid making mention of the specific character of those
manufactured goods to which savages were supposed to respond so
favourably, preferring instead to invoke the aforementioned notion that
British industry produced the kind of generic goods that could still
be associated with Smith's three great wants, and that would elicit a
universal demand.
For observers who did wish to specify at least the kind of commodities with which this civilizing miSSion might be associated, clothing, the
second of these wants, furnished a useful point of reference. The textile
industry not only provided a powerful register of Britain's status as the
workshop of the world, but it also drew upon the trope of the naked
savage transformed into that of the clothed gentleman. A fortnight into
the Exhibition The Times assured its readers that "there is no sounder
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axiom in political economy than the one so ably advocated by John
Mill- that 'supply creates demand.'" It then explained how the diffusion of cheap, mass-produced Victorian hosiery would, in Hall's phrase,
civilize subjects:
it is impossible but that, from the natural wants of mankind, and the
advancing progress of civilization in so many regions of the earth,
a vast and steadily increasing demand for such articles must be the
result of their supply. Thus employment will be created, labour remunerated, wealth be increased at home, the comforts and elegancies of
social life be diffused abroad, and the patriot and the philanthropist
find equal cause of rejoicing. 38
The final clause of this sentence is significant. In 1851 Charles Dickens
was composing Bleak House, the novel in which he would attack "telescopic philanthropy," pouring scorn upon Mrs. Jellyby's Borrioboola
scheme to effect "the general cultivation of the coffee berry - and
the natives."39 The enterprise spoke to the not uncommon belief that
colonialism could act as a drain upon the nation's resources, and was
too often motivated by misplaced charitable sentiment towards peoples who neither could nor would help themselves. That being so, it
was an understanding of Britain's imperial project emphatically countered in the months before it appeared in print. Dickens's depiction
of a bizarrely conceived and badly managed programme of de- and
re-territorialization, carried out by the restricted and hapless endeavours of one bad mother, was strikingly out of key with the systematic, state-supported and profit-growth-oriented manner in which such
enterprise was acclaimed at the Palace. In echo of both The Times
and William Forster's definition of England's Mission, Tallis observed
succinctly that the efficacy of Victorian intervention overseas would
work only because" our interests as manufacturers and merchants, and
consumers" could be made to "coincide happily with our duties as
men."40
While advocates of such integration did not need to play down
metropolitan gain, however, they often chose to emphaSise peripheral advantages. Notably then, the orchestrated but happy coincidence
between the market and the mission bore with it a conviction that reorientated industrialized interdependency would do more than foster
material development. "To induce all the world to become customers
and consumers, would seem to be the wisdom of our country and
age," alleged lace manufacturer William Felkin, before declaring, after
162 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
the fashion of Tallis, that the true value of lithe hidden treasures of
the forest and the mine, of earth and seas," must be made apparent
to those barbaric or "half civilized" peoples who presided over them.
Here he elaborated, in representative fashion, on the market-driven
mechanics of this civilizing process. Keen to acquire Western commodities, the self-interested motives of these communities would then serve
disdplinary ends, prompting them not only to "forget their long cherished habits of idleness and plunder," but also opening them up to
"higher influences." "Commercial intercourse," Felkin could thus assert,
was lithe handmaid of Christianity."41 So it was that non-Europeans
were provided with the opportunity to become both industrially useful and culturally complete. As Richard Cobden signalled when he
pictured bales of British merchandise bearing the "seeds of intelligence and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened
community," with Srnithian functionality came Arnoldian meaning. 42
And, despite Dickens's reservations, the image of the metropolis sowing
seeds in this manner chimed well with a vision that saw the growth
of raw materials effect the cultivation of productive, proper global
citizens.
Organic development then, both in material and non-material terms,
but only because of careful husbandry. When discussing this imperial
mission I am dealing with a peculiar combination of free-market forces
and directive rationale. Supply and demand was presented as the natural law underwriting the enterprise, but it was a law that took effect
via the dvilized and adult supervision of ignorant and infant populations, at least in the first instance. I shall expand later upon the fact that
such supervisory activity could be conceived variously, so that the idea
of temporary formal or informal interventionism tending towards complete autonomy could give way to the idea of permanent custodianship.
With the focus remaining upon the need to institute a regenerative division of labour, I tum now to the notion that non-European products
and their cultivators had to be reached and networked, which is to say,
locked into predse, exacting and uplifting circuits of production and
consumption. Returning here to "Our Phantom Ship, Central America,"
I argue that Britain's energizing capadty was as much dependent upon
the way in which it traversed the planet, and thus enabled commerdal flow to and from primitive areas of the world, as it was upon its
manufacturing sophistication. Certainly it was the case, as we shall see,
that as they looked for ways of heralding its civilizing impact, prophets
of England's Mission found the steam-engine easier to work with than
hosiery.
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Ariel's girdle
As was mentioned in the previous chapter, William Whewell's declaration that the Crystal Palace annihilated the space and time separating
one nation's progress from another's said much about a modern capacity to bridge historical difference, as well as to reveal it. Incredible as
the celerity and range of the "Phantom Ship" was, then, its currency
was not confined to the literary realm; the ghostly vessel in which
readers of Household Words journeyed around Central America found
its physical incarnation in the communication technologies through
which the great powers of the age encompassed the earth. Although
it would be a great mistake to suggest that for a mid-nineteenth-century
audience the sailing ship was an anachronistic image, it is true to say
that the Victorian imagination was excited by the idea that wind power
was no longer the only means with which to traverse the planet. 43
In terms of what has preceded in this section, and what will follow,
then, it is significant that it was a "combination of railways and steam
vessels" that Marx emphasized as he wrote in 1853 of the need for
England "to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other
regenerating -the annihilation of Old Asiatic society, and the laying of
the material foundations of Western society in Asia."44 Like Marx, Exhibition commentators discussed Victorian communication technologies
with a missionary zeal, universalizing Eurocentric understandings of
progress and denying historical agency to supposedly isolated, industrially backward and commercially naIve peoples. Unlike Marx, however,
they also denied hegemonic intent, as well as refusing the dialecticism
that saw capitalism realizing socialism. Instead, the same technologies
that Marx cast in terms of bourgeois exploitation and socialist revolution were acclaimed with relation to the forces by which barbarian
communities would be ushered into what Household Words labelled
"the world's history." And although steamships (perhaps most notably
Isambard Kingdon BruneI's revolutionary ss Great Britain of 1843) and
the electric telegraph (which in autumn 1851 would successfully link
via submarine cable Britain and France) bore witness to this modern
capacity, at the Palace the train stood out.
In his introduction to the section labelled "Machines for Direct Use,"
the Official Catalogue's editor Robert Ellis spoke of the gripping appeal
of a technology I have already discussed as a phenomenon felt to
give form to a new way of being in the world. Of all the exhibits
he could have mentioned individually, Ellis found space to single out
only one for special praise. BruneI's "stupendous wide-gauge engine,"
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
the Lord of the Isles, conveyed an overwhelming impression of steam
and power," declared the editor, with a Turneresque flourish. 45 Remarking this overwhelming character, Eric Hobsbawm proposes the railway
as a "synonym for ultra-modernity in the 1840s, as 'atomic' was to
be after the Second World War," pointing out that it established lithe
notion of a gigantic, nation-wide, complex and exact interlocking routine symbolized by the railway time-table."46 For Michael Freeman
it was not until the late nineteenth century that this assessment of
the train's scope could be extended from the nation to the planet,
so that it might be legitimately claimed that the Victorian railway
constituted "all the world": lilt was not merely that it loomed large
in all the complex machinery of Britain's empire, but that Victorian
iron foundries, steel mills and engineering shops furnished permanent
way and rolling stock for railways across all continents."47 That being
so, we should note that the material and ideological foundations for
global coverage were already being laid at the mid-point of the century, and the train figured in the Victorian imagination very much as
an international as opposed to a national phenomenon. So while the
years from 1845 to 1847 witnessed the mania and "daemonic energy"
that characterized the most dramatic growth of railway building in
Britain, neither the energy nor the capital was domestically restricted,
feeding into British railway investment and construction allover the
world. 48 One commentator in 1850 captured the confidence behind this
expansive mindset. Discussing the introduction of railways throughout
Europe, North and Central America, and the East and West Indies, he
dismissed any qualms his readers might have over this internationalist range with a simple reminder of the logistics of the operation:
"We already know that iron lines of rail can be laid, and that steamlocomotives can travel on them."49 Suddenly, it seemed, nowhere was
out of reach.
Writing on conceptualizations of the railway journey in the nineteenth century, and elaborating this geographical impact, Wolfgang
Schivelbusch draws attention to what he usefully deSignates lithe industrialization of time and space." In terms that remind us of Hobsbawm's
"complex and exact interlocking routine," and that can be associated
with the "planetary consciousness" Pratt read through scientific discourse, Schivelbusch highlights geographical space" as the conceit that
comes to replace "landscape" under the technological conditions of
industrial capitalist modernity: geographical space is closed, and is
therefore in its entire structure transparent. Every place in such a space
is determined by its position with relation to the whole and ultimately
II
II
II
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by its relation to the null point of the coordinate system by which this
space obtains its order. Geographical space is systematized."so It was
such a systematic vision of global space that sustained the fantasy of
a global village outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, and that broke down in
Chapter 3. I return to it now with the proviso that the dramatic reconfiguration of global geography enabled by steam power was crucial to its
inception. While BruneI's Lord of the Isles represented the engineering
ambition and skills of a man who would do much to put in place this
industrialized international network, it was another train in the Palace
that, for our purposes at least, spoke more suggestively to the kind of
joined-up thinking the railways stimulated.
Ariel's Girdle was a light locomotive engine displayed in the Palace
alongside BruneI's much larger, more imposing train. Its name was erroneous: it was Puck, the fairy from A Midsummer Night's Dream, who
declared his capacity to throw "a girdle round about the earth, / In
forty minutes."S! Nevertheless, the same recalls Carlyle's claim in "Chartism" that just as Pro spero took captive the world through Ariel, so too
Britain sent its Fire-demons "on cunning highways, from end to end
of kingdoms."s2 Although Carlyle did not use the word "girdle," his
invocation of Shakespeare in this engineered context perhaps fed into
the mistaken although apparently accepted Victorian belief. Maybe the
locomotive was on Dickens's mind as he wrote Bleak House, for the novel
furnishes canonical form to this popular misconception. S3 Whatever the
case, it is certainly true that the idea of The Tempest's sprite engirdling
the world, under the direction of its master magician, was borne out
by a body of commentary that highlighted the railway as the temporal
means through which Britain could incorporate global space, extending (as if by magic) modern commerce and civilization to previously
secluded and stagnant regions of the globe.
At the heart of such commentary was the notion that if free trade and
reterritorialization made a Victorian new world order pOSSible, steampowered travel made it both realizable and practical. AddreSSing the
cosmopolitan sentiment and technological progress that had given rise
to the Great Exhibition, and underscoring the important position of
the railways to nineteenth-century understandings of globalization, the
Illustrated London News observed that "the intercourse of nations, caused
by the practical annihilation of space and time which we owe to the
railway system, has removed a whole world of difficulties."s4 In so
removing a world of difficulties, though, the point was that the railway
opened up a whole world of opportunities. Steam enthusiast, popular
scientist and economist Dionysius Lardner, who had published Railway
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
Economy: A Treatise on the New Art of Transport in 1850, was encouraged
by his visit to the Crystal Palace to discuss the future role of communication technologies on the global stage, extolling their capacity to institute
the modern, the factual and the universal at the expense of the anachronistiC, the illusory and the parochial. The girdle thrown around the
earth by European powers might have seemed magical, then, but giving
the lie to such supernaturalism was the perceived impact of the industrialization of space and time. Linking the train with the electric telegraph
and steamship, all of them emblems and bearers of scientific rationality,
Lardner instructed readers of The Great Exhibition and London in 1851
that the West had established a far more powerful and tangible control
over the earth than anything the tall tales of the East might recount:
"Compared with all such realities, the illusions of Oriental romance
grow pale; fact stands higher than fiction in the scale of the marvellous; the feats of Aladdin are tame and dull; and the slaves of the lamp
yield precedence to the spirits which preside over the battery and the
boiler."55
Other commentators were equally drawn to this perceived impact,
and emphatically elaborated its results. Mrs. Napier's The Lay of the
Palace was a poem that singled out the locomotive's unstoppable drive
to dominate the material world, spread the gospel, and eradicate the isolation of those parts of the earth still languishing within the It old time"
of pre-modern culture:
Hark, to the roaring engine rushing here:
Nor hill, nor torrent can impede its way;
It scorns all distance in its mighty sway;
With fearless hunger, swallowing everything,
Devours old time and mocks his ancient wing.
Each valley shall be filled, hill be brought low,
The trackless desert shall the stranger know,
And words of saving truth to utmost islands go!
Ye lofty hills, your glittering hoards unfold!
And commerce bear away the hidden gold. 56
The stress of the last line here was unfortunate, given the concerns of
other observers to cast such penetration in terms of reciprocal exchange
and universal prosperity. More sensitive than Napier to this idea, and
drawing attention to the industrial reorientation with which steam
power was aSSOCiated, The Times suggested to its readers that the Crystal
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Palace would "open men's eyes as to what may be done and what will
be done with the means in our possession
II :
How much more may be done with steam? How much more with
railways? How much better may we arrange the intercourse of distant
provinces and nations? How cheaply may we offer, and how widely
may we diffuse, the ennobling pleasures hitherto confined to the
wealthy few. 57
Thus the ethical conception of an economic sovereignty wrought
through the power to annihilate space by time. And perhaps unsurprisingly, given Governor-General Dalhousie's programme to modernize
the subcontinent via transport, commentators were especially drawn to
India as a locus with which to think through its results.
Running through such commentary was the remarked insistence
upon directed development, with the efficiency of the mode of transport
here feeding into the efficiency of the mission. In a lecture delivered
in conjunction with the Exhibition, free trader and cotton manufacturer Thomas Bazley would eulogize Britain's "destined duty" to effect
via railways and cotton cultivation "commercial prosperity" and the
"extension of civilization and Christianity" in India. He spoke here of
the subcontinent's "industrial emancipation," but, securely engirdled
within a Victorian order, this was a freedom to follow a prescribed path
that distributed wealth, dissipated ignorance and was understood by
metropolitan commentators, in the broadest terms, to leave Indians
part of the Victorian world. 58 Others commentators followed the same
line. Emphasizing the metropolitan benefits of an industrialized bind
as it enthused about the subcontinental produce that was to pour into
Europe "with a profusion and regularity never yet dreamed of," Tallis's
History was quick to underline the peripheral advantages of a British
capacity to conquer distance: "The steam engine is destined to do more
for India than all her other teachers have yet effected. The iron apostle
of civilization does not declaim; it does not dispute or vituperate; but
it works, and always succeeds." 59 While India proved particularly attractive in this context, Tallis might have added, of course, that neither was
this "iron apostle" limited in its scope.
Five years after the Exhibition had closed, E. D. Chattaway concluded
Railways, Their Capital and Dividends with a brief but effective summary
of technologically induced globalization as it had been popularly understood at the Crystal Palace. Linking the "iron road with the steamship
and electric telegraph, Chattaway emphasized Britain's leading role
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
in creating these "highways of civilisation." Thus inspired to wish the
locomotive "God speed," he pictured railways penetrating previously
unknown or underexploited parts of the world:
Through the backwoods and vast prairies of America, - across the
arid sands of Egyptian deserts, - through the thick jungles of India, over wildernesses where, before, the foot of man never trod, - in
glades his vision never penetrated, and wild secluded spots which
have remained undisturbed by mortal presence since the dawn of
creation, - is already heard the shrill whistle of the steam engine, proclaiming the triumphs of human progress and the advent of peace.
And still railways are extending their iron arms, under the guidance
of men whose indomitable energies suffer them to be deterred by
no difficulty, daunted by no danger, - men who, in the prosecution of their objects, have constructed works before which the seven
wonders of the ancient world fall into insignificance. 6o
In line with the enthusiasm of the above commentary, so it was
Victorian enterprise was supposed to create and sustain a network
within which "local prejudices" were dispelled and "comforts and conveniences that formerly only fell to the lot of the privileged few, or
were indigenous only to favoured spots," were "placed within the reach
of the humblest." Perhaps Chattaway had visited the Palace earlier in
the decade, perhaps not. Either way, the image he chose to convey the
global unity that resulted from these endeavours was familiar. Railways,
he averred, were "gradually drawing together in amity the whole family
of man, encircling the world with their Ariel-like girdle."61
Chapter 2 cited Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley's observation that
international free trade would create "many a tie and not one thrall,"
with interdependency seeing all "on one proud footing placed,- / As
with one broad golden girdle clasped: by one Grand Law embraced."62
Against a perceived backdrop of socio-economic inadequacies that
allowed such industrial cooperation only subsequent to intervention,
this section has proposed instead an iron girdle as the deus ex machina
through which to realize globalized interdependency. Conquering space
and time, leaving nothing beyond modernity's pale, railways and
related communication technologies furnished a dramatically empowering context within which backward non-Europe - its inhabitants' bodies
and minds as well as its non-human resources - could be re-imagined
in terms of contact, penetrability and growth, as against distance,
inscrutability and stagnation. But with the concerns raised by Massey
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in mind, further attention must be paid to the fact that, even as it was
heralded as a phenomenon that annihilated space and time, Victorian
modernity proposed a starting point characterized by differently advantaged because differently advanced global communities. While some of
the above commentary blurs the distinction, then, the rapidity of the
technology that was held so crucial to non-European integration should
not be conflated with the rapidity or the results of the socio-economic
rise it might be expected to effect. Neither should we accept the suggestion that the "Grand Law" Ariel's Girdle enforced was universally
welcomed.
The proof of the pudding
First published in 1857, Tom Brown's School Days begins with a chapter
entitled "The Brown Family." Here Thomas Hughes's narrator reflected
upon that exemplary body of peoples, the Browns, whose sturdy values
and gallant actions had laid the foundations for the "greatness" of the
British nation, both at home and abroad. Having for centuries subdued
"the earth in most English counties," "in their quiet, dogged, homespun way," such yeoman had also left their mark "in American forests
and Australian uplands."63 Hard-working and equally "hard-knocking,"
these "homespun" peoples are cast as a "great army of Browns, who
are scattered over the whole empire on which the sun never sets." The
narrator attests their "general diffusion" "to be the chief cause of that
empire's stability" (21). Later he elaborates on this connection between
their domestic agrarian enterprise and the nation's overseas conquests.
The Brown family lived off a country-side "teeming" with those "Saxon
names and memories" belonging to and inspired by the battles that
had seen Alfred overthrow the Danish yoke, thereby making "England a Christian land" (29). Used to "treading on heroes," working that
"sacred ground for Englishmen" under which their ancestors' bones lay
whitening, it was small wonder that the Browns were capable of winning glory and maintaining order in the world beyond their counties
(25). All is not quite right, however, and the security of this familial
imperial order seems threatened from distinctive developments within
the mother country.
"Dh young England! young England!" exclaims Hughes's narrator,
"You who are born into these racing railroad times, when there's
Great Exhibition, or some monster sight, every year." Such youthful
dynamism, marked as it is with a profoundly different form of global
perspective and propensity to travel, prompts unease. Pointing out that
170 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
"You're all in the ends of the earth," the narrator is concerned to ask of
his young countrymen, "why don't you know more of your own birthplaces?" The internationalist flux of the new age is juxtaposed with "my
time," presented as a regionally rooted and culturally secure rural age:
And so we got to know all the country folk, and their ways and songs
and stories by heart ... We were Berkshire, or Gloucestershire, or Yorkshire boys, and you're young cosmopolites, belonging to all counties
and no countries. No doubt it's all right - I dare say it is. This is the
day of large views and glorious humanity, and all that. (21-3)
Voicing as he does the opposition sketched out in this chapter's introduction, the narrator's bemoaning the failings of young England is
unsurprising. 64 His resigned acceptance of a new geo-political order
identifies the same global philosophy that led Exhibition commentators
to demand "observation with extensive view," asserting the universality of humankind and positioning the Victorians as exceptionally
cosmopolitan rather than peculiarly national. Hughes presented a limited notion of Englishness set against this order, one derived specifically
from a Saxon heritage and one that found socio-economic and cultural
form in terms of a particularly nationalist way of life. That this organic
sense of national identity is seen to feed an aggreSSive drive towards
settler colonization would only appear to underscore its remove from
a catholic drive towards a world distinguished by economic freedom,
pacific relations and cultural homogeneity. Again then, we see the way
in which the Great Exhibition could be mobilized in order to warn
that with the loss of a traditional way of life, with all its memories of
the emergence of a strong and martial people, cosmopolitan England
seemed in danger of lOSing both its empire and identity.
Since it revolved around a British metropolis strengthened by the particular character of its relations with non-European satellite economies,
and since it was marked by the dissemination rather than watering
down of Victorian values, Britain's industrialized expansion as set out by
commentary considered in the previous two sections clearly troubles the
link Hughes drew between his "racing railroad times" and his nation's
imperial collapse. That said, however, the Anglocentric order of things
that emerged so clearly was nevertheless presented as an imperium
underpinned by those universalist, emancipatory beliefs against which
Old England could be made to stand. When Tallis raised the prospect
of aboriginal peoples being elevated to the same level as their civilized
brethren, then, it invoked after the fashion of others a pacific form
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of overseas intervention and interaction that was welcomed by those
it incorporated, and that seemed geared towards the development of
a world characterized by autonomous states, historical harmony and
dynamic growth.
It would be wrong though to suggest that the Great Exhibition
inspired consensus in this regard; there were other ways of conceiving
Britain's industrialized expansion, both in terms of the way in which
it would take hold of the world and in terms of the consequences it
would effect. The two pieces of Exhibition commentary to which I now
turn - one a short story from Household Words, the other a short sketch
from Punch - threw into doubt the belief that the industrialized order
encapsulated by Ariel's Girdle was necessarily distinguished by peace or
progress. What comes into focus as a result is the notion not only that
the hard-knocking talents of the Browns would be needed in order to
implement this Anglocentric order, but also that they would be further
required to police its operation in order that it sustained metropolitan
advantage. At this point it is worth remembering that while Prospero
was keen to cast his rule as an embrace, both Ariel and Caliban felt it as
entrapment and exploitation.
"A Christmas Pudding," a short story by Charles Knight that appeared
in Household Words immediately before Christmas 1850, cast an interesting light upon Britain's role in the globalizing process around which
so much of the forthcoming Exhibition would revolve. 65 It featured a
strange encounter between its protagonist, Mr. Oldknow, and the seasonal pudding his wife reveals to him as it cooks upon the kitchen
stove. Left alone to smoke a cigar, Oldknow is drawn to contemplate the
wider significance of the "rich, semi-liquefied mass, speckled throughout with plums and currants" that sits before him. As he "mused and
mused over the mercantile history of the various substances of which
that pudding was composed/, the kitchen undergoes a fantastic change,
expanding to expose a great mirror within "which landscapes of every
clime were reflected" as "vivid pictures."66 This expansive visual compass serves to establish a magical geography, and the international
ingredients of the pudding appear before Oldknow as a succession of
genies, each one of which represents a combination of product, terrain
and people.
The Genius of the Raisin is the first of the anthropomorphized ingredients to appear within the mirror. Dressed "with the fresh vine-wreath of
a Greek Bacchante on the head, and the Cashmere shawl of an Arabian
Sultana round the waist/, the Raisin immediately subjects Oldknow,
whom he describes as the "son of a vineless land,}} to a tirade of abuse
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
for depriving the regions he represents of significant local productions,
and forcing upon their peoples unwanted manufactures:
Your ships throng my Andalusian ports ... and they bear to your cold
and cloudy land the richest gifts of our sunny south. Why come ye,
every year more and more, with your linens and your woollens, your
glass and your pottery, to exchange with our native fruit? Why strip
ye the gardens which the Faithful planted, of the grapes which ought
to be reserved for the unfermented wine which the Prophet delighted
to drink? (301)
Faced with such Islamic hostility, and keen to emphasize the socioeconomic stagnation that it serves to encourage, Oldknow announces
that "Man only worthily labours when he labours for exchange with
other labour." That being so, then it is English commodities, the
result of technological advances and sophisticated industrial practices, that serve as a particularly powerful stimulus to labour and
consumption:
"Immortal child of the Arab," replied the son of the vineless land,
"your nation gave us the best element of commerce when you gave
us your numerals. Your learning and your poetry, your science and
your industry, no longer fructify in heaven-favoured Andalusia. The
sun which ripens your grapes and your oranges makes the people lazy
and the priests rapacious. We come to your ports with the products
of our looms and our furnaces, and we induce a taste for comforts
that will become a habit. When our glass and our porcelain shall find
its way into your peasant's hut, then will your olives be better tended
and your grapes more carefully dried." (301)
Oldknow then seizes the opportunity to expand upon England's wider
global role as industrialized workshop and economic driver. With the
pudding thus emerging as "the emblem of our commercial eminence,"
he spells out the way in which by giving "commercial value" to "the
raisins of Malaga and the currants of Zante - the oranges of Algarve,
the cinnamon of Ceylon, and the nutmegs of the Moluccas," the
pudding has "called them into existence as effectually as the native
cultivator" (301).
The encounter with the Raisin over, next to appear is the Genius
of the Currant, a figure who is far more in tune with Oldknow's way
of thinking. The Currant indicates that Zante and Cephalonia enter
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173
willingly into a trade relationship with England, and appreciate the
global produce that such a connection realises: "Welcome are ye with
your sugar and your coffee, your rice and your cheese. Welcome are
ye with your gold." Elaborating Oldknow's reading of the pudding
with relation to England's pre-eminent role in the mobilization of
global resources and the rationalization of international industry, the
Currant rehearses the environmental logic of the international division of labour it has come to associate with the possibilities afforded
by Victorian enterprise: "It is better to grow currants in the soil which
they delight in, and buy our wheat, than plough up our little vines for
bread-producing crop." "Bravo, my little free trader," exclaims Oldknow,
delighted by this recognition of an autochthonous pattern to global
economic relations (302).
Other spirits that appear, however, do not articulate such a rational, liberal philosophy. But the resulting dialogue between Oldknow
and the figures allows the metropolitan patriarch, confident in his economic rationale, to suggest that the proper place for such products is in
the pudding. Having voiced protectionist dogma, the Genius of Bread
and the Genius of Nutmeg are sternly reprimanded, with the latter
giving up its "contest against nature" and coming to accept "that the
end of commerce is ... to diffuse all the productions of nature and art,
among all the inhabitants of the globe." "You have taught me a lesson," it informs Oldknow, praising as it does so the Victorians for taking
a lead in "diffusing comfort and equal laws, opening roads, encouraging industry, destroying forced labour" (302). Lesson learnt, and as it is
becoming increaSingly clear that the pudding stands as the metaphorical vehicle through which to conceive the benefits of globalization,
Oldknow's fantastical encounter ends with the appearance of "a brisk
power-loom weaver" who steps forth, "with pudding cloth in hand":
"'The water boils,' said hei 'the ingredients are mixed. Be it mine to
bind them together!'" (303). Representing in general England's industrial assiduity and technological progress, and in particular the artisans
of Birmingham and Manchester to whom (alongside the seamen of
London and Liverpool) Oldknow required the Raisin to give thanks,
the power-loom weaver is the figure to underscore Britain's instrumental role as a manufacturing and commercial hub around which a
global economy can take shape. This pre-eminent (and profitable) position established, Oldknow proclaimed the lesson that could be drawn
from the culinary enterprise: "We, in our united interests, well bound
together, produce Christmas pudding." Underlining this moral, the relationship of the pudding to the world is made clear: "Suddenly the
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
great-pudding bowl swelled into an enormous globe, black with plums,
and odorous with steaming sauce" (303).
If it anticipated the fact that an international division of labour would
come to serve for so many as the organizing prinCiple through which
to comprehend the Great Exhibition, and if it worked against the suggestion that a liberal world order would diminish Britain's standing,
"A Christmas Pudding" also undercut the imperial fantasy that allowed
for Victorian industrial capitalist expansion to be figured as a wholly
consensual, pacific process. The Genius of the Currant stood for a fecund
terrain and a rational people, a part of the earth ready and willing to
accept the agricultural economic identity with which Britain would provide it. Set resolutely against this fantasy figure, however, is the Genius
of the Raisin. Having extolled the virtues of free trade as an entirely
natural, inherently dynamic and mutually beneficial system, Oldknow
triumphed, "Child of the Arab civiliser, be grateful." He is not, however,
rewarded with the compliance he might expect: "Mr. Oldknow looked
for an approving answer; but the Genius of the Raisin had fled" (301).
Maintaining a religious relationship with its material environment, and
thus unwilling to cede to the position that Oldknow's account of freetrade economics holds out, the Raisin served dialogically to counter
those Exhibition commentators who maintained that the international
products on display at the Palace gave metonymic voice to globalization's supposedly univocal narrative. While the Currant represented
an imperial fantasy, then, the Raisin represented an imperial problem,
bringing home to the metropolis the fact that different peoples of the
world were not necessarily given to understand their place on the planet
with recourse to the Victorians' globalized logic.
But there were still raisins in Oldknow's pudding. The story had concluded with its protagonist moved to sing a song from his youth, a time
when "England was threatened with invasion":
Britain, to peaceful arts inclined,
Where commerce opens all her stores,
In social bands shall league mankind,
And join the sea-divided shores. (304)
Refusing the eirenic character of this Pax Britannica, the fate of the Raisin
appeared to suggest that the defensive martial spirit that had warded
off a Napoleonic threat had now turned outwards, in order that British
economic interests might be safeguarded, whatever form of intervention and subsequent stewardship this required. Bound by the pudding
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-
175
cloth, and boiled in the pudding bowl, the Raisin can in this sense
be understood to signify the coercion and violence that characterized
British expansion in the mid-nineteenth century, in spite of everything
commentators such as Old know claimed about the Victorian new world
order.
Significantly, however, proponents of this order did not necessarily
need to fight shy of the need for such coercion and violence. In line
with the ideas underpinning commentary discussed in the previous two
sections, Richard Cobden cast commerce as lithe grand panacea, which,
like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the
healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world."67
But the conviction that intervention via the commodity alone (albeit
an intervention facilitated by modernity's miraculous capacity to conquer space and time) would conjure such a global community was
in tension with the view that backward peoples of the world would
find this Victorian panacea a bitter pill to swallow. Hence in the previous chapter I noted that John Forbes Royle contended, in relation
to India, that the spread of commerce depended upon it being "in
some measure" forced upon certain areas of the world by their " more
civilized" counterparts. 68 Refuted by Cobden, but championed in the
mid-nineteenth century by Lord Palmerston in particular, the belief that
such induction required forces other than those exerted "naturally" by
the market was justified on the grounds that only then would occur the
integration of these peoples and their lands within the civilizing, modernizing folds of the "World's History." So it was that even John Stuart
Mill, in "A Few Words on Non-Intervention," would argue "barbarians
have no rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may, at
the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral
laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government,
are the universal rules of morality between man and man."69 Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one's position) morality was easily
moulded to the demands of a dynamic economy. Thus one nineteenthcentury commentator could call attention to the "moral power of the
24 pounder.,,70
In 1850 an interesting, complex article from Punch, entitled Business
and the Bayonet," worried at the idea that British economic imperatives
were secured in a climate where gunboat diplomacy could be couched
as a regenerative imperial mission. As with liThe Christmas Pudding,"
in so doing it can be understood to expose to view the gap that could
open up between the rhetoric and the reality of that interventionist
mandate that the Great Exhibition was seen to encourage. The article
II
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
began by siding with Cobden, denying that "it was justifiable to make
war, in order to increase commerce - to push business at the point of
a bayonet." As it did so it undermined the Palmerstonian pragmatism
that Martin Lynn argues "clearly struck a chord with large sections of
the British public" in the mid-nineteenth century: "Commerce, it is
true, has followed war; nevertheless, we would not have an account
opened even with Japan with howitzers. Bayonets work an ugly kind
of treble entry; nor would we have that Manchester dream fulfilled,
that vision that shows every Chinaman in a night-cap of cotton is to be
realized by the percussion caps of English infantry.JJ71 Playing with the
misguided (although compelling) nature of such economic logic, Punch
wondered whether the potent combination of "seventy-fours, soldiers
and marines" that worked to secure metropolitan interests abroad might
be mobilized on the domestic front in preparation for the forthcoming
Exhibition:
What is lawful for our armies to do in order to force trade, it may, for
the benefits of our imports and exports, be allowable to individual
firms and shop-keepers. For instance, London next summer will be
thronged with foreigners - many of them possibly as wilfully obtuse
to the excellencies of our manufactures, as are the Japanese to our
very thickest Whitney Blankets, and our best-finished skates.
The article then focused attention suddenly on Britain's Jewish
community:
Why, then, should not MESSRS. NOSES - for the civilising benefits
of trade - be permitted to have a company of their own, in uniforms
of their own shade and pattern, a corps of the Israelovsky's, ... who,
without a word, should lay hold upon any foreigner, and carrying
him to their Mart, command him to get rid at once of his cash
and his barbarian ignorance? Why should they not compel him to
be measured, and there pay down the money for the half-dozen
suits of clothes, considered barely decent - the savage - for his
necessities?
If such anti-Semitism was driven by the conceptualization of Jews as
especially ruthless actors within economic life, the sketch indicates
that it was a relationship rather than an opposition between Jewish
culture and the economic underpinnings and imperatives of the Victorian state that was of interest. Mill would later contend that when
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177
Britain routed aggressive barbarians, it did so to "command liberty of
trade" and protect equality of opportunity: "whatever it demands for
itself it demands for all mankind."72 Nine years earlier, Punch offered an
appraisal that destabilized and reversed this logic, casting Britain as the
aggressor and suggesting that whatever the metropolis demanded for
mankind, it demanded first and foremost for itself.
Set against Hughes's account of "young England's" internationalism,
then, "The Christmas Pudding" and "Business and the Bayonet" should
be read not only in terms of the way they countered pacifist idealizations
of free-trade expansion, but also with regard to the manner in which
they refused that line of thought that held Victorian cosmopolitanism
would undermine the nation's sovereign position in the world. And
there is, moreover, an important corollary and an extension to this second point: both texts can be understood to trouble the conviction that,
whether coercive or not, British expansion into the non-European world
promoted the kind of development there that was so often promised.
It is worth re-emphasizing that a Victorian commitment to global free
trade should not simply be dismissed as a cynical attempt to secure geopolitical hegemony. Whether cast in Cobdenite terms as an essentially
peaceful process, or whether modified by figures such as Palmerston or
Mill in order to allow for the necessary coercion of particular communities into modernity, there was a genuine belief that industrial capitalist
expansion along liberal lines would engender universal development,
and the idea that humanity in all its forms could progress must be set
against far bleaker contemporary fates believed to lie in store for savage
peoples. However, as was indicated at the end of the previous section,
while in communicative terms" Ariel's Girdle" brought with it an industrial order that was held to annihilate space and time, in socio-economic
terms it was understood to operate around the clear historical differences that existed between the parts it comprised. Herein lay a critical
tension. Throwing grave doubts upon the capacity of non-Europeans
in particular to progress without some form of metropolitan intervention, commentators such as Tallis could stress this intervention tended
towards historical harmony. But this emphasis sat uncomfortably with
the way in which the city-country model of economic interaction
between Victorian metropolis and non-European peripheries was seen
to work so well as a way of securing British interests. Cast in this light,
celebrations of Britain's missionary role in the creation of a perfectly
free and equitable modern world came into conflict with the idea of an
imperial process that served not only to create but also to maintain a
world after the image of the Victorian metropolis.
178 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
Here some recent analyses of global capitalism are significant. Rebuking those who pretend otherwise, Peter Osborne demands we recognize
"the dialectics of homogenization and differentiation constitutive of
the temporality of 'modernity', and the way in which these are tied
up, inextricably, with its spatial relations." He continues: "Capitalism
universalizes history. Yet, as Vilar points out, 'it has not unified it.' "73
To ignore the fact that the structural logic of the system does not
work to unify is, as Samir Amin points out, to ignore the gap that
exists between a "really existing capitalism" and the "imaginary market," an oversight that suits some more than others.74 Attacking the
notion that commercial liberalization serves to establish a level playing field, and directing attention towards the operations of the state on
the global stage, David Harvey emphasizes that "the equality condition
usually presumed in perfectly functioning markets" is violated because
the "wealth and well-being of particular territories are augmented at the
expense of others":
Uneven geographical conditions do not merely arise out of the
uneven patterning of natural resource endowments and locational
advantages, but, even more importantly, are produced by the uneven
ways in which wealth and power themselves become highly concentrated in certain places by virtue of asymmetrical exchange relations.
It is here that the political dimension re-enters the picture. One of
the state's key tasks is to try to preserve that pattern of asymmetries
in exchange over space that works to its own advantage.75
With discriminatory processes such as these in mind, Doreen Massey
stresses the dangers of conceiving capitalism with relation to a unilinear
historical index tending towards equalization:
this turning of space into time, and of seeing poorer countries as
in some way "backward" (whatever euphemisms for backward are
used), ignores the fact that this inequality is being produced now.
It's not a question of catching up. And that not only makes it less
likely that a majority of "others" can catch up because inequality is
being produced now, but also cunningly ignores our own present day
implication in that process.76
Counter to the idea that industrial capitalist modernity would
lead (rapidly) towards a flattened and free world of opportunities and mutual prosperity, then, is what Immanuel Wallerstein
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179
dubs spatio-temporal "hierarchization." For Wallerstein, this is a
world disfigured by unequal exchange, uneven development and the
"greater polarization between core and peripheral zones of the world
economy."l?
It is not my intention to suggest that the writers of "A Christmas
Pudding" and "Business and the Bayonet" anticipated these contemporary critiques of free-trade globalization. But it is true that as they
dramatized interactions between the imperial metropolis and the nonEuropean world, so too these texts compromised Stuart-Wortley's insistence that Britain's "Grand Law" would see all placed upon "one proud
footing." Fleshing out in the manner that they did the restrictive, discriminatory, "hard-knocking" geo-political arenas in which abstracted
idealizations of market economics found material form, the above
sketches problematized political economy's "good story" about stadial
development. Understood thus, the silence of the Raisin and the violence of the "seventy fours, soldiers and marines" might be seen to
register the fact that Britain's Pax sought to fix in place as opposed to
freeing up those global communities it engirdled. As the nineteenth century came to an end, William Morris would write that the World Market
had come into being as a result of "force and fraud," with bourgeois
powers demanding "helpless, hapless people ... sell themselves into the
slavery of hopeless toil so that they might have something wherewith to purchase the nullities of 'civilisation.' "78 Forty years earlier the
above two tales furnished foundations upon which such an evaluation
could rest.
However, the idea that these examples of Exhibition commentary
shed light upon the discriminatory structural logic of industrial capitalist expansion needs to be contextualized in relation to the discriminatory cultural logic that circulated at the time these texts were
written. So while these sketches illustrate the fact that the inadequacies,
weaknesses and irrationality of particular backward peoples were understood to justify coercive and violent imperial expansion, more needs
to be said on the idea that these same shortcomings were seen also
to hold back the progress of these peoples within the modern world
in which they now found themselves situated. Put another way, the
argument that" A Christmas Pudding" and "Business and the Bayonet"
critiqued the intentions and results of Britain's imperial mission should
not be detached from the widespread Victorian conviction that it
was the restrictive character of race rather than the oppressive operations of industrial capitalism that tended to work against historical
equalization.
180 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
Bringing us back to free trade's anthropological fantasy in order to
introduce the socio-cultural to the economic picture wherein Harvey
traced the political, Wallerstein raises an important proviso to the universalist imperative with which nineteenth-century globalization has
been associated:
There was a catch to universalism. It did not make its way as a freefloating ideology but as one propagated by those who held economic
and political power in the world system of historical capitalism. Universalism was offered to the world as a gift of the powerful to the
weak. TimeD Danaos at dona ferentes[79
This gift harboured racism, by which Wallerstein means those "allegations that genetic and/or long-lasting 'cultural' traits of various groups"
that served to encourage the hierarchization of global peoples and
enforced "highly unequal distributions of reward" (78). Thus, he continues, the emergence of a regionally stratified planet brings with it the
fact that "large segments of the world's population have been defined as
under classes, as inferior beings, and therefore deserving ultimately of
whatever fate comes their way" (122). So we might say that racism constitutes a mode of thinking through which modernity's spatio-temporal
dialectic could be inscribed onto the bodies and minds of those global
communities it incorporated.
With the damaging consequences of such an inscription in mind,
although without insisting racism is in some monolithic, transhistorical sense always and only the result of capitalism, I turn in the final
section of this chapter to consider the idea that Exhibition commentary raised concerns over the capacities of non-European peoples to
develop within the global order.Bo Discussing Mill's "A Few Words on
Non-Intervention," Noam Chomsky suggests that it "is hard to think
of a more distinguished and truly honourable intellectual - or a more
disgraceful example of apologetics for terrible crimes."BI Disgraceful
perhaps, but even here Mill remained committed to a progressive universalism that insisted that global integration of backward peoples via
imperial intervention tended towards a level world of autonomous
nations. To think about race allowed that this insistence could be tempered, if not altogether ignored. So race could be deployed to far more
pernicious effect than straightforward historical difference. This was
the point Mill made elsewhere, when he asserted that, of all the vulgar modes of social and moral thought, lithe most vulgar is that of
attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural
Pax Britannica 181
differences."82 Where previously I have considered commentary that
framed British efforts to raise other nations in the social order with relation to a model of "catch up," my attention now shifts to the suggestion
that barbarian and savage communities would struggle to progress either
at the same rate or to the same extent as their civilized counterparts had
done. And if the Great Exhibition thus generated the kind of thinking about non-Europeans that positioned them as a type of under class
within the global economy, there is no doubt too that it inspired the
kind of fear and loathing that excused their systematic extermination.
I turn also then to commentary that figured such peoples as existing
beyond industrial capitalism's pale, "something highly desirable to be
civilised off the face of the earth."s3
Mission impossible
Speaking to concerns that appeared to trouble the homogenizing drive
associated with globalization, Charles Dickens wrote in "The Niger Expedition" that if it was hard to change "the customs even of civilised
and educated men, and impress them with new ideas," then "to do
this by ignorant and savage races, is a work that, like the progressive
changes of the globe itself, requires a stretch of years that dazzles in the
looking at." The thrust of the piece, which appeared in 1848, was an
attack upon abolitionist Charles Buxton's failed attempt to promote in
Niger precisely that potent combination of free commerce, Christianity
and civilization with which England's Mission was associated at the
Crystal Palace. Notably, then, Dickens poured scorn upon the "heated
visions" of those philanthropists who called for the "railroad Christianisation of Africa and the abolition of the Slave-Trade." So it was
that the perceived dovetail between Britain's technological (locomotive) capacity to annihilate space and time and Britain's capacity to
elevate quickly and efficiently savage hearts and minds via commercial integration was dismissed, brought up short by the way in which
Dickens invoked global geography with relation to racialized geological
time. "The Niger Expedition" offered a far slower paced, less emphatic
account of human improvement to the one proposed by advocates
of modernity's iron apostles of civilization: "Gently and imperceptibly
the widening circle of enlightenment must stretch and stretch, from
man to man, from people on to people, until there is a girdle round
the earth."s4 All peoples seemed capable of development then, but the
process was deliberately disassociated from the supposedly civilizing
temporality of Ariel's Girdle. If this undermined the much-heralded
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
power of industrial capitalist expansion to bring up to speed all those
peoples it encountered, however, the slow radiation of the "widening
circle of enlightenment" certainly did not diminish the primary powers
of those communication technologies at the forefront of this expansive drive, nor the sovereign global compass that they afforded Britain.
When Dickens referred in liThe Niger Expedition" to the underexploited
cotton, indigo, ivory, gums, camwood and palm oil to be found in
Africa, then, he called to mind Carlyle's earlier claim that nine-tenths
of the Terrestrial Planet exhorted of his countrymen, "Come and till
me, come and reap me!"85
While this exhortation met with a positive response, industrial capitalist expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century proved
far more successful at mobilizing non-European resources than it did
at enriching non-European peoples. Contra the manner in which the
Victorian Pax Britannica was articulated at the Crystal Palace, and however laudable the intentions of its proponents, the years following 1851
did not bear fruit for the vast majority of those peoples whom Exhibition commentators identified as historically backward. They witnessed
instead an incredible growth in the gap in per capita income between
Western powers and Africa, ASia and large parts of South America.86
They also witnessed the genocide of non-European peoples by industrialized and industrializing nations. That being so, it is significant to
note that while it promoted so markedly England's Mission to raise up
those global communities that were positioned as passengers rather than
drivers of economic growth, at one and the same time the Crystal Palace
inspired representations of non-European peoples that threw into doubt
the Mission's developmental efficacy.
Examining such representations, I suggest that a tension opened up
at the Great Exhibition between the display's stated universalist scope
and the perception of a historicized divide between the developed and
undeveloped world. In so doing I return to the antithesis between savagery and civilization remarked by George Stocking, where savagery or
barbarism stands for those peoples not yet or no longer "able to subject
themselves to the discipline of labor and delayed gratification, indulgent
of their instinctive passions."87 Central to the argument that follows,
then, is an interest in the idea that as the Victorians proposed a global
order held to level out historical difference, creating a modem world distinguished by universal autonomy, possibility and progress, so too they
were thinking about human life on earth in ways that worked against
this paradigm. In line with the arguments of Stocking, as well as other
scholars working on Victorian Anthropology and Ethnology, the thrust
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183
of this section is to read the antithesis it highlights not simply in terms
of an understanding of relative historical difference derived from political economy's stadial model, but also with regard to the development of
racial discourse in the nineteenth century. As such, it is necessary first
to clarify the way in which I want to think about race as a typological
mode of analysis, before turning to the Exhibition itself.
One hundred years after the Great Exhibition, Hannah Arendt would
note in Imperialism, the second part of The Origins of Totalitarianism,
that "Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as
the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no
race thinking had ever existed in the civilised world." ss This suggestion,
which sits comfortably alongside Fabian's argument concerning Anthropology's link with imperial expansion, has been important to the way in
which much postcolonial scholarship over the past thirty or so years has
discussed the relationship between culture and empire. Race has thus
emerged as an important concept for scholars interested, as Said puts it
in Orientalism, to explore discursive fields of knowledge and power that
have promoted "the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West,
'us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, 'them')."89 Certainly it is true
that from around the 1840s the idea of race, as a scientifically verifiable
maker of cultural and/or biological difference, was increasingly brought
to the fore in Britain and continental Europe by various disciplines and
through various media as a category that could explain why some global
communities were superior to others, as well as why this state of affairs
might be set to continue. However, as Christine Bolt reminds us, race
was a critical but highly contested category in the Victorian period, riven
in particular by the dividing line in the mid-nineteenth century between
monogenetic and polygenetic conceptualizations of racial difference:
During the middle years of the nineteenth century, "race" like "civilization," became one of the great catchwords of those Victorians
who concerned themselves with events outside Britain ... But, as the
president of the Royal Anthropological SOCiety, James Hunt, complained in 1863, "hardly two persons use such an important word
as 'race' in the same sense."90
It is important then, to remain mindful of the fact that if it was
deployed widely so too race was deployed variously in the nineteenth
century. All the more so in the light of recent and variously inflected
moves to suggest in general that postcolonial scholarship misrepresents
and exaggerates the character and impact of British imperial culture,
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
and in particular that it has placed an undue emphasis upon the
conceptualization of ractal difference as an ideological condition for
imperialism.
Cora Kaplan avoids such reductivism, and provides a cogent summary
of the way in which she understands racial thinking as it developed
in Britain in the nineteenth century. Emphasizing that ideas about the
relative progress of global communities were crucial to the historical
index within which this mode of thought operated, Kaplan notes the
way in which race disturbed the idea of generic human progress:
[T]heories of racial hierarchy before and after Darwin used the
metaphor of human development from infant to adult to discriminate between racial types and also between the stages of civilisation
that native peoples were assumed to have reached. Non-Europeans
(and sometimes women) were often thought to be fixed in a perpetual
childhood - monumental in the sense that it remained undeveloped. Even when non-European cultures or non-white peoples were
thought to be able to achieve "civilised" status through education
and acculturation, they were imagined as developing within a different, and slower, temporality, their "catching up" with Europeans
often measured vaguely in centuries rather than decades or generations. The idea that racial types were fixed, but also capable
of improvement, were therefore formally in conflict, and fiercely
debated by ethnologists and social and political thinkers. Popular
opinion often entertained the two ideas at once.91
Thus Kaplan wants to distinguish between different, conflictual modes
of racial thinking. But she also stresses the way in which racial discourse, broadly conceived, structured understandings of enculturated
and/or embodied human inferiority, signalling that non-European peoples lacked the historical impetus upon which Western communities
were felt able to capitalize. When she suggests that popular opinion
could entertain lithe two ideas at once," she underlines too that it is
an attention to the dissemination and interplay of different racial theories, as much as the influence of particular understandings of race, that
should inform our study of Victorian culture on this subject.
With Kaplan's analysis to the fore, I want to propose the Crystal
Palace as a site that, to develop what she says about ractal discourse and
popular opinion, entertained the idea of race. Helping clarify this proposal is a letter that appeared in The Times, some three weeks before the
paper would herald the Exhibition as an event motivated lito consider
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185
all mankind as one people." Addressed from a Mr. Issac Ironside, and
included under the heading" A Curious Contribution to the Great Exhibi tion of 1851," the letter expressed concern that the British public was
not generally acquainted "with the discovery of a race of men, in the
interior of Africa, having tails." Citing the French explorer who had discovered these peoples, Ironside furnished readers with a description of
one such:
His skin was black-bronzed and shining, and soft to the touch like
velvet ... His face was repulsively ugly; his mouth was enormous, his
lips thick, his teeth strong, sharp and very white; his nose broad and
flat, his ears long and deformed, his forehead low and very receding,
his hair not very woolly or thick, but nevertheless curly ... His tail
was more than three inches long, and almost as flexible as that of a
monkey.92
These bestial peoples, it was written, "ate with delight raw flesh, as
bloody as possible," and "they loved human flesh above all things."
"[I]ntroducing these facts" in order to urge the French Government to
exhibit in 1851 "a male and female Ghilane," and invoking Lord Monboddo's famous claims concerning the human status of Orangutans and
the existence of men with tails, Ironside anticipated the display of such
specimens "would produce a sensation not to be produced by anything
else. Lord Monboddo's theories would be discussed by the learned of
all countries." Others seemed to share his enthusiasm. T. H. Lacy's play
Novelty Fair; or, Hints For 1851 expected Exhibition-goers to be directed
"To the men with tails from Central Africa," while in "Foreign Families
of Distinction in London," Punch hinted at the arrival in the capital of
"specimens of the newly-discovered race in the interior of Africa who
are said to have tails, just like monkeys.,,93
By the mid-nineteenth century Londoners and visitors to the city were
increasingly used to witnessing such savage spectacles. Discussing an
increased Victorian demand for the display of live specimens of supposedly primitive peoples from all over the world, Richard Altick contends
in The Shows of London that a shifting emphasis from the exhibition
of individual freaks to the exhibition of generic types in the Victorian
metropolis should be understood not only with relation to the rise of
ethnological interest in human difference, but also to what was becoming "a more and more openly and aggressively displayed aspect of the
English character, its complacent assumption of racial supremacy."94
Given this context, it is significant to note that Ironside's request went
186 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
unheeded at an official level; there was no display of live humanity at
the Palace. So, as Altick himself notes, it would be entirely wrong to
argue that the Great Exhibition was an event intended to promote the
kind of aggressive racism he outlines. But equally we must hold onto
the fact that if race was an overdetermined concept at the time of the
display, so too it was immanent, promoting and sustaining forms of
developmental discrimination that permeated different areas of Victorian society and culture. When I suggest the Palace entertained race,
then, the point I am making is that Ironside's letter, and the fact it was
taken up by Exhibition commentary, can be understood more broadly
with relation to the way in which the Palace acted not only to raise
questions about the origins and propensities of different races, but did
so in a climate where racial variation was seen to provide an opportunity for popular "sensation." While monkey men from Central Africa
were not on view at the Exhibition, an examination of commentary
that wondered what might occur were such savage peoples to visit London sheds light upon the contention that the display served at once to
accommodate and play with the idea of racial inferiority.
As established, the Exhibition did not in fact attract the variety and
numbers of foreigners that had been anticipated. Still less the nonEuropeans. Refusing the prevailing logic that held that the metropolis
would be flooded by overseas visitors for the duration of the Exhibition, the Family Herald was particularly scathing in the run-up to the
display towards those commentators who predicted guests from beyond
Europe. Of some three hundred million Chinese and some one hundred
million "Hindoos," then, the journal expected only "Some half-dozen
pair of cat's eyes" and "Some dozen or two of leather-skinned Pagans,
at the most." Continuing in a similar vein, it questioned how many
Russian serfs would arrive, doubted that "Africa will send any of her
niggers," and wondered whether the emperor of Dahomy would release
for the trip "any of his amazons, or his slaves?,,95 The pessimism of
the piece, however, was in stark contrast to the excitement generated
elsewhere. We have seen that Henry Mayhew's prediction that the display would be visited by "the sight-seers who make up nine-tenths
of the human family" proved false. But George Cruikshank's accompanying illustration, featuring a mass of peoples swarming from all
points of the globe to the Palace that rested on top of the earth, and
inscribed "All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition of 1851,"
spoke to a pronounced Victorian desire to see the sites that such an
exotic influx of visitors in particular would provide. Drawing upon this
desire, Mayhew's 1851 detailed enthusiastically the preparations of the
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187
Exhibition's more "colourful" guests, including the Hottentot Venus,
a Yemassee with his cheeks painted blue "with the rouge of the backwoods," a Cingalese polished "up like a boot," a Truefit of New Zealand
dressed in the "full buzz wig" and a Maripoosan who had japanned
his teeth "with the best Brunswick Black Odonto." Mayhew looked forward especially to the fare these visitors might consume upon arrival.
Alexis Soyer's "restaurant of all nations," he declared, would be serving foods ranging from "pickled whelks to nightingales' tongues - from
the rats a la Tartare of the Chinese" to the "turkey and truffles" of the
Parisian gourmand - from the "long sixes, au naturel" of the Russian to
the "Stewed Missionary of the Marquesas," or the "cold roast Bishop" of
the New Zealander. 96
The establishment to which Mayhew referred here was a venture
that the great Victorian celebrity chef Alexis Soyer had undertaken in
collaboration with the young writer and artist George Augustus Sala.
Having turned down the request of the Exhibition's organizers to submit a proposal to provide refreshments at the display, the Frenchman
instead took over Gore House, conveniently situated just opposite the
Crystal Palace. Soyer opened there the lSOO-seater restaurant he named
Soyer's International Exhibition, The Gastronomic Symposium of All
Nations. As the grandiose title suggested, this was a venue intended
to rival the Great Exhibition, not just furnish a respite from it. But
it was also the case that just as the scheme expected to profit from
visitors to the Palace, so too it was conceived very much with the
event's globalized agenda in mind. 97 Drawing heavily upon the internationalist rhetoric and sentiment with which the display was linked,
as well as playing up the international character of the cuisine for
which the chef was renowned, the catalogue Soyer produced in order to
promote the Symposium promised a gastronomy that would "triumph
over geographical limits," gathering together "from all quarters of the
globe, civilized or uncivilized ... universal humanity." "Cosmopolitan
customers," it continued, "should demand cosmopolitan cooking."98
Thus elaborating the Illustrated Exhibitor's claim that man was a "cooking animal," so it would seem that the Symposium was indeed to
bear witness to the culinary division of labour for which Punch had
called in "The Cookery of All Nations," underscoring as it did so the
beneficial consequences of commercial liberalization and a globalized
world order.
However, celebratory accounts of globalization were called into
question when Soyer turned from cooking to an analysis of consumption, particularly the consumption practices and preferences of the
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
"colourful" races of the world. In a list echoed by Mayhew, the catalogue
promised that visitors to the Symposium might well find themselves
dining opposite Cossacks eating train oil or Chinese eating stewed dog.
Where Mayhew expected cannibalism, though, the Catalogue recanted,
drawing back from the idea of New Zealanders on the premises: "no,
not New Zealanders, for who could form any idea of the horror and dismay that would be caused by some ebony-skinned and boomeranged
chieftain demanding 'baked young woman' for two, and a 'cold boiled
missionary' to follow?"99 Especially given food's prominent position as
Adam Smith's first great want of humankind, and the way in which
it was mobilized as an illustrative motif by champions of global interdependency, such an emphasis upon the strange and dangerous eating
habits of savage and barbarian peoples worked strikingly against the idea
that they could be safely and productively integrated into the new world
order. Notably then, other Exhibition commentators were also drawn
to represent the peculiar appetites of these primitive communities in
similarly divisive ways.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Punch was at the forefront of those observers
keen to play up the curious and somewhat frightening culinary consequences of a non-European presence at the Palace. In "Refreshments at
the Great Exhibition of 1851," the journal rubbished the official arrangements for the provision of food at the display. "As we are expecting
visitors from all nations," it stated, "we may look for a sprinkling of Red
Men, to whom it would be a mockery to offer bread and butter, gingerbeer, or even SaYER'S Nectar." The procurement of a set of diversely
proportioned kangaroos, "to suit the appetites, more or less moderate,
of the Indian epicure," was the journal's somewhat ambitious solution
for the feeding of Native American guests. lOO "London Dining Rooms"
featured Chinese characters ordering bird's nest, rat pie and dog. "The
Haycocks in 1851" depicted a family's trip to the Palace ruined by a
series of misbehaving foreigners, a disastrous adventure that reached its
peak with a tribe of American Indians who, tired of eating dog, prepared to scalp a kitchen boy.lOl Thomas Onwhyn's Mr. and Mrs. John
Brown's Visit to London to See the Great Exposition of All Nations staged
another fictional account of a family trip to the Palace. Here it was the
Brown's son who found himself in danger. One illustration depicted
a group of open-mouthed Negroes exhibiting "their ivories to Little
Johnny." Another rendered this savage menace in still clearer terms,
as a hungry and knife-wielding triumvirate from the Cannibal Islands,
encountered in a London restaurant, offered a price for the Brown's
unfortunate Johnny.I02
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"Mama, the nigger's going to eat me Up."103 What proved to be the
"fact of blackness" for Frantz Fanon was, according to certain accounts
at the Crystal Palace, the black savage's modus vivendi. Cannibalism thus
posed an especially potent threat in general to reassuring ideas about
humanity's shared bodily instincts and cultural drives, and in particular to Homo economicus, the anthropological fantasy of the Exhibition's
grand narrative. But as depictions of non-European hordes so entirely
out of place in Britain's capital suggested, if the cannibal figure was at the
furthest point of remove from the inhabitants of civilized modernity,
its alienation could nevertheless be registered upon an index packed
with other savage specimens. A fresco painted by Sala upon the walls
of Soyer's Symposium underscored just this pOint, making manifest
its damaging implications for those advocates of free trade who suggested that human difference was not near so important as human
similitude. Positioned between what Soyer described as /Ian incongruous medley of grotesque and monstrous-headed figures," among which
were Esquimaux, American Indians and other savage forms, there could
be found on the fresco representatives of white, civilized society.l04 And
alongside prominent personages including Charles Dickens, the Duke of
Wellington and Napoleon, the Manchester School was featured, in the
shape of Richard Cobden and John Bright. lOs In an image that resonates
powerfully with the focus of this section, thus the conviction that it was
both wise and felicitous to consider all mankind as one people came
under threat, as the very people who urged "observation with extensive view" were confronted by the troublesome consequences of such a
global scope.
"Visions in the Crystal," the article from Punch discussed in Chapter 1,
put forward the Exhibition as an occasion at which John Bull could
promote his commercial rationalism and prove his liberal humanism,
instructing the world at large in the "only genuine mode of fraternising." Significantly then, this sketch concluded with a number of
French chefs "introducing the art of civilized cookery among the Caribs,
and other tribes of savages; and Mr. Bull also was - not unsuccessfully - displaying to the same aboriginals the superiority of roast beef
over broiled prisoner, and of plum-pudding over boiled missionary."106
Disrupting the idea that such civilized cooking would elicit a positive response, the above-cited commentary utilized savage hunger in
order to suggest precisely the opposite dynamic: primitive bodies and
minds were at once trapped and overwhelmed by urges and instincts
that were difficult if not impossible to reconcile with civilized life,
and that worked against the idea that such a conversion as Mr. Punch
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
foresaw could be successfully effected. What emerged instead, then,
was a vision of human life that can be understood with relation to a
racial trope Anne McClintock has associated specifically with the Great
Exhibition.
"In 1851," McClintock writes, lithe topoi of progress and the Family
of Man, panoptical time and anachronistic space found their architectural embodiment in the World's Exhibition at the Crystal Palace."107
Explicating "panoptical time" with relation to the encountered idea that
the Palace structured a single image of global history (37), she defines
anachronistic space" in terms that call to mind Dickens's image of
racialized geological time as a conceit with which to problematize the
idea of a homogenous human family:
II
According to this trope, colonized people - like women and the
working class in the metropolis - do not inhabit history proper but
exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of
the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational,
bereft of human agency - the living embodiment of the archaic
"primitive." (30)
Playing as they did with the ridiculous incongruity to be forged by
situating Fabian's absent Other within the contemporaneous Time of
the Victorian Self, thereby dramatizing the consequences of the living embodiments of anterior time visiting modernity, it is the idea of
"anachronistic space" that energized representations of non-European
visits to London in 1851. In one sense "energized" is the wrong word
here, for at once drawing upon and feeding into Victorian racial discourse, what such commentary can be held to have conveyed was a
lack of historical impetus. In contrast, however, it speaks to the fact
that such a lack was illustrated, more often than not, in the "colourful" (and hungry) shape of a particularly animated sense of irrationality.
In any case, by giving various and vivid form to the primitive appetites
of the indigenous populations of the non-civilized world, these representations made manifest the logic of Dickens's argument in liThe Niger
Question," undermining as they did so the logic of England's Mission:
it was ridiculous to imagine that industrial capitalist expansion would
railroad the "savage and ignorant races" of the world into civilized
modernity, swiftly rendering them proper and productive global citizens. Thus the Crystal Palace brought home to the metropolis the fact
that while the industrial capitalist process of de- and re-territorialization
allowed that non-European raw materials could be easily and speedily
j
.j•.'.'
,
1
j
:J
Pax Britannica
191
integrated into the world economy, it would prove impossible to do the
same with non-European communities.
In concluding this section I want to propose two different but interlinked ways in which to interpret the argument that asserts that, by
representing non-Europeans as anachronistic space, the Great Exhibition situated them at a remove from "history proper." The first line of
analysis is interested in the idea that the Victorian new world order did
not in fact effect the socio-economic "catch-up" with which globalization was so often associated. It returns us to the contention that racism
is modernity's spatio-temporal dialectic given human form by emphasizing the discriminatory manner in which the Pax Britannica was seen
by some Exhibition commentators to take hold of savage and barbarian peoples. Here it is instructive to remember Wallerstein's argument
that, under conditions of historical capitalism, racism operates to allege
those inherent or long-lasting traits that sanction sustained asymmetrical development, violent exploitation and the more general sense that
the suffering of racially inferior peoples within the global system is
an inevitable consequence of their integration therein. That being so,
then, it is important to stress the way in which the representations of
non-Europeans considered in this section called to mind the need for
"hard-knocking" domination, and suggested enculturated and/or biologized features of primitive life that disallowed such peoples from making
progress at the same kind of speed or in the same kind of manner as
peoples from the West. While Kaplan made clear that it is not necessary to understand these depictions with relation to the idea that such
anachronistic beings were inherently disadvantaged, it is undoubtedly
possible. So if race could be seen to slow the developmental character of
the parent-child, City-country relationship, then so too it could be seen
to arrest development, justifying a static custodial tie, even if that tie was
transfigured as a master-slave bond. It was certainly a view of the black
savage as "atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency" that prompted
Carlyle, some two years before the Exhibition, to exhort that if the West
Indian "Quashee" would not assist willingly the Saxon British in mobilizing his islands' resources, then Providence decreed that he would" get
himself made a slave again," as the needs of the white man compelled
him to take up the "beneficient whip."108
Although Carlyle took up an extreme position here with regard to
the inferior status of particular communities, it is worth noting that it
was the end point of a racialized spectrum that indicated that, while
some peoples could not inhabit history proper, they could nevertheless
be integrated at some level into the world system, whether this led to
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
their development or not. Wallerstein clarifies his insistence that racism
informs the drive towards such integrated relations when he states that
it must be sectioned off from xenophobia: "Xenophobia was literally
fear of the 'stranger'. Racism within historical capitalism had nothing
to do with 'strangers.'''109 Taking on board this distinction, but concerned at its limitations, I think it is vital to this study to see racism understood as inclusive - and xenophobia - understood as exclusive - as
two sides of a discriminatory coin; both modes were interwoven within
Victorian racial discourse, and both fed into the mindsets and measures that blighted nineteenth-century imperialism. Hence the second
concluding line of analysis I wish to pursue.
Describing Europe as "absolutely the end of History," and Asia as
the beginning, Hegel famously declared of the African that A people
who refuse the rendezvous of History ... that people is finished; you
can put it in the Museum."llo Unlike the international exhibitions that
would follow it, and the other shows of London that surrounded it,
the Crystal Palace did not display live human specimens. So, as I have
suggested, if Patrick Brantlinger is right to argue that "pre-Darwinian
race scientists - Prichard, Smith, Knox, Morton, Nott and Glidden, and
others - insisted that the dark races were everywhere in retreat from
the onslaught of white civilization and that many, perhaps all, of those
races were doomed to extinction," then it is notable that the Exhibition
refused such a Hegelian curatorial policy. 111 But that is not to say that the
idea of the self-exterminating savage was missing from the Exhibition.
Even as it argued that, as a result of indigenous resources and a capacity to labour primitive peoples were not "doomed by Providence at the
approach of their more instructed brethren," the aforementioned article
from Tallis's History noted that such an understanding of the inevitable
human costs of industrial capitalist expansion was a "melancholy feeling too prevalent among US."112 With this prevalent feeling in mind,
I tum away from the idea that the Exhibition can be considered with
relation to a racist process that structured global inequality along the
lines of colour as well as cultural difference. I tum instead to the idea
that the display can be understood with regard to a xenophobic process that tended towards the exclusion and eradication of those peoples
felt to embody anachronistic space. In so doing I shift first from the
representation of non-Europeans within the Victorian metropolis to the
way in which commentators conceived of Victorians in non-European
peripheries.
As Thomas Hughes would attest when he championed the hardworking Browns leaving their mark in American forests and Australian
II
II
Pax Britannica
193
uplands," and John Ruskin would later underscore when he urged that
Britain "must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of
her most energetic and worthiest men; - seizing every piece of fruitful
waste ground she can set foot on," settler colonization found ideological justification in the developed capacity of the British to mobilize
the resources of those territories in which they found themselves. ll3
While such an overtly aggrandizing imperial spirit is often associated
with the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was far from absent
in 1851. Considering the "preponderance of raw produce" displayed
by non-European territories at the Palace, thus it was that The Times
elaborated the idea of "infant societies still struggling forward to a larger
industrial development" with relation to the well-rehearsed image of
Victorians mixing properly and productively their labour with their
new-found land:
The philosophic mind will be attracted by the advantages which
the rising communities that have swarmed from our shores to settle in distant scenes possess - how science and education help them
to investigate the natural resources of the new regions which they
occupy - how, having tilled the virgin soils of Australia or Canada
with the agricultural knowledge of the mother country, they at
length send home the fruits of their labour to be absorbed by our
marketsY4
Following a similar line, the Crystal Palace and its Contents suggested
that had the Great Exhibition been held one hundred years earlier then
Canada's display would have consisted of "a wigwam, some wooden
or horn spoons, rough earthern pots, a few embroidered moccasins, a
few tomahawks, and a dozen or so scalps ... but nothing indicative of
the natural resources of this vast and almost virgin territory." Things
were different now, however, since "European industry has planted the
spade there, and some of the fruits are now before us." Again then, what
was celebrated were "the industrial beginnings of a junior branch of
the great civilizing family of the universe."1l5 So we are returned to the
idea of non-European territories as tabula rasa, profitably integrated as
infant but dynamic units within a global division of labour. Except that
now this determined drive forward appeared to be conducted in the
absence of those "aboriginal" peoples other commentary had insisted
could be found a place within the new world order. As McClintock
notes, the trope of anachronistic space must in this sense be understood with relation to the "myth of the empty land," and the acceptance
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Globalization and the Great Exhibition
that the mobilization of such terrains was necessarily effected via the
exclusion of those indigenous populations that had so badly failed
them.11 6
Thus excluded from the depiction of non-Europe's entry into global
history, it is not entirely true to say that the original inhabitants of these
lands took form at the Great Exhibition only via their industrial produce
or textual representation. Displayed prominently in the American court
were two model Native American figures belonging to George Catlin,
the American painter, ethnologist and exhibitor of Indians (in model
and live form) throughout America and Western Europe in the 1840s
and 1850s. The appearance of these figures in the Palace is significant
not least because two years later, when he came to reflect upon the
likely fate of primitive races in the modem world, it was his remembrance of the live display of Catlin's Indians in London's Egyptian Hall
that prompted Charles Dickens in "The Noble Savage" to label all such
peoples, from "bushmen" to Zulus, "cruel, false, thievish, murderousj
addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customsj a wild
animal with the questionable gift of boastingj a conceited, tiresome,
bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug." That being so, Dickens could not
comprehend why his fellow countrymen might regret the disappearance of such a specimen "in the course of this world's development,
from such and such lands where his absence is a blessed relief and an
indispensable preparation for the sowing of the very first seeds of any
influence that can exalt humanity."117 Dickens insisted towards the end
of the essay that there was no more justification for being cruel to this
"miserable object" than there was for being cruel to William Shakespeare or Issac Newton, a point Grace Moore brings to the fore when
she argues that this was not a straightforward demand for the "obliteration" of such peoples.118 Nevertheless, the thrust of the piece was
encapsulated in the first paragraph, with its emphatic declaration, "I call
a savage something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the
earth."Jl9 Set against Dickens's contention in "The Niger Expedition"
that "savage and ignorant races" should be left alone in order to develop
of their own accord, then, "The Noble Savage" made explicit what
the above representations only implied: distinguished as it was by the
capacity to develop resources and exalt humanity, the West's drive into
non-Europe was also characterized by the loss of those races unable to
respond to the progreSSive, civilizing climate in which they now found
themselves.
As they reacted to the display of Catlin's Indians in the Palace, Exhibition commentators were Similarly inclined to doubt that a place
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195
could be found for such peoples within a globalized world. Drawing
its readers' attention to what it described as "a very repulsive-looking
Indian chief, and his squaw, tricked out with furs, feathers, and paint
in the most approved fashion of the back woods," The Times remarked
that the "red man seems ill at ease" surrounded by "so much civilization," before adding that he had "the obvious intention to scalp
somebody as soon as he gets a favoured opportunity for doing SO."120
In a section devoted to the display of "Guns, Weapons, &c., of All
Nations," Hunt's Handbook was likewise drawn to link savagery with an
aggressive impulse, pOSitioning the "rude figure of the Red Indian" with
relation to the New Zealander, the Mrican and the Australian, and contending that "with his bow and arrows and paint and tattooing, [he]
may be considered as representing man in his savage state whenever or
wherever he has been found."121 Given that Catlin's figures were displayed next to India rubber, increasingly recognized as an important
and useful resource, there was an unfortunate but hard-hitting contrast
to be drawn between valuable raw materials and violent indigenous peoples: some races belonged in the world's market, others in the world's
museum. This at least was the Hegelian reading of things reached by
John Lemoinne, cited by Dr. Lardner in his compendium of Exhibition
commentary:
There is something cruel and ostentatious in the exhibition of these
poor Red-skins. It is nothing but a trophy. They are the slaves chained
to the car of the conqueror; they are the shadows of the old races that
the victorious and implacable civilisation of the West crushes in its
progress. 122
So it was that manifest destiny came to be cast with relation to racial
extermination. And so it was that Dickens's interpretation of the selfexterminating savage as a phenomenon that could be disassociated from
obliterative imperial violence was exposed as inadequate.
Held representative of all such primitive communities, and understood in particular relation to racial images the Palace entertained
elsewhere, Catlin's Indians stood as the anachronistic shadows against
which the civilized process of opening up global resources would
have to contest. We have moved, then, from a vision of imperial
intervention that deployed competition as a means of cultivating people as well as products to one that identified competition in terms
of racial struggle, and the likely need to weed out aboriginals in
I
196 Globalization and the Great Exhibition
order that the work of cultivation - and with it "history proper" could begin:
Just as the land must be cleared of trees and rocks in order to farm it,
so too the terrain must be cleared of the native inhabitants. Just as
the frontier people must gird themselves against the severe winters,
so too they must arm themselves against indigenous populations. 123
In this transfigured version of Prince Albert's mission, where the
conquest of nature was carried out by white races against dark,
a metropolitan audience could at least rest secure in the knowledge that the odds of such a struggle were stacked firmly in its
favour. Seventy-five years before the Great Exhibition began, the
Wealth of Nations had thrown into doubt the inclusive and harmonious order the event would come to foreground when Smith noted
that improvements to firearms were "favourable both to the permanency and extension of civilisation": "In modern times the poor
and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilised. "124 Inviting its readers to compare the archaic
weaponry of Indians, Africans, South Americans and New Zealanders with the advanced guns and artillery of the civilized West, the
aforementioned article from Hunt's Handbook gave little room for
doubt that such an armed extension of civilization would be highly
effective.
Tellingly, given the fact that it was so prominent in promoting the
Christianized, cosmopolitan brand of political economy around which
the Crystal Palace's globalized fantasy would revolve, I turn finally to the
Economist, and an article entitled "Some Moral Aspects of the Great Exhibition," in order to reveal the callous way in which such genocidal brutality could be justified. As befitted the article's title, much of the piece
was given over to an idealized conception of the Victorian new world
order, so that the increasingly wide-ranging character of global commerce was linked to an ever-improving international division of labour,
and celebrated with regard to social equalization and the enhanced welfare of the human family. But as it reflected upon the widening scope of
this process, the article introduced a hard-hitting qualification to its triumphant account of comparative advantage and competitive exchange.
Foreshadowing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where imperialism's
civilizing mission is brought up short by Kurtz's cry of "Exterminate all
the brutes, "125 the piece turned suddenly to consider the consequences
for those people it believed to have refused their rendez-vous with
1
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197
history: "When we have savages for our neighbours as in Caffreland,
we seem to have no other alternative than to keep them at bay or
to exterminate them. They have nothing to give us in exchange for
our commodities, and we can get nothing from them."126 Thus the
Great Exhibition's inclusive globalized fantasy was dissipated, its "moral
aspects" falling foul of market forces. In Conrad's novella Marlow would
conclude that the "conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it
too much."m That being so, it seems that on this occasion the Economist
had looked a little too hard into the Crystal Palace.
222 Notes, pp. 142-50
150. Harvey, New Imperialism, p. 45.
151. "Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition," Edinburgh Review 94 (October
1851), pp. 557-98 (590).
152. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973; New York: Oxford
University Press, 1975), p. 279.
153. Thomas Carlyle, "Chartism" (1840), Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings, ed.
Alan Shelston (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 149-232
(210-11).
154. Carlyle, "Chartism," p. 23l.
155. Adas, Machines as the Measure, p. 4.
156. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 1.2.310-64.
4
Pax Britannica
1. "The First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Fraser's Magazine 43 (1851),
pp. 1-15 (1-2).
2. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 224.
3. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience ofModemity
(London: Verso, 1983), p. 15.
4. Williams, "Introduction," in Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 12.
5. Sally Ledger, personal communication.
6. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855-57; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), p. 331.
7. "The French Critic in London. (A Free Translation of the Original Letters
[unpublished] in a Paris Journal," Fraser's Magazine 44 (1851), pp. 497-502
(497); further page references appear in parentheses.
8. Kingsley, Yeast, p. 90.
9. "Philoponos" Uames Ward], The Great Exhibition of 1851; or, The Wealth of
the World in its Workshops (London: Churton, 1850), pp. 13-14, quoted in
Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 166.
10. S. H. Blackwell, "The Iron-Making Resources of the United Kingdom,"
Lectures on the Results, Vol. 2 (1853), pp. 147-83 (182).
11. Thomas Bazley, A Lecture upon Cotton, as an Element of Industry: Delivered at
the Rooms of the Society of Arts, London, in Connexion with the Exhibition of
1851 (London: Longman, 1852), p. 25.
12. "The Great Exhibition," Illustrated London News 18 (31 May 1851),
pp. 487-9 (487).
13. Bremer, England in 1851, pp. 64-5.
14. Christine MacLeod, "James Watt, Heroic Invention and the Idea of the
Industrial Revolution," in Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives, ed. Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland (Cheltenham: Elgar, 1998),
pp. 96-115 (110).
15. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, pp. 161, 172.
16. Henry Cole, "On the International Results," p. 420.
17. "The Exhibition Plague," Punch 19 (1850), p. 191.
18. "Rules for the Prevention of the Promised Plague Next Year," Punch 19
(1850), p. 239.
Notes, pp. 151-64 223
19. Auerbach, Great Exhibition, p. 184.
20. See Auerbach, Great Exhibition, Chapter 6.
21. Benjamin Disraeli, "Conservative and Liberal Principles: Speech at the
Crystal Palace, June 24, 1872," Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable
the Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 2, ed. T. E. Kebbel (2 vols; London: Longman,
1882), pp. 523-35 (531, 534).
22. "First Half of the Nineteenth Century," Fraser's Magazine 43 (1851),
pp. 3,15.
23. Gallagher and Robinson, "Imperialism of Free Trade," pp. 2-3; further page
references appear in parentheses.
24. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 17, 143-4.
25. Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 33, 154.
26. William Forster, The Closing of the Great Exhibition or, England's Mission to All
Nations. A Discourse (London: John Cassell, [1851]), p. 14.
27. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive
Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 3.
28. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London (2000; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 5.
29. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 9, 68.
30. "Our Phantom Ship. Central America," Household Words 2 (22 February
1851), pp. 516-22 (521).
31. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 1.
32. Peter Mandler, "'Race' and 'Nation' in Mid-Victorian Thought," in History,
Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750-1950, ed. Stefan
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 224-44 (242-3,230).
Tallis's History, Vol. 2, pp. 128-9.
Tallis's History, Vol. 2, p. 129.
John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy with Some of
their Applications to Social Philosophy (1848; London: Routledge, 1891),
p.81.
Gagnier, Insatiability of Human Wants, p. 28.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English
Imagination, 1830-1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 271.
"The State of Trade," The Times (28 April 1851), p. 7.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury (1852-53; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 49.
Tallis's History, Vol. 2, p. 129.
Felkin, Exhibition in 1851, pp. 13,28-9.
Richard Cobden, "England, Ireland, and America" (1835), The Political
Writings of Richard Cobden, intro. Louise Mallet (London: Ridgway, 1878),
pp. 1-66 (45-6).
See Daniel R. Headrick, "The Communications Revolution," The Tools
of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 127-210.
44. Marx, "Future Results of British Rule," pp. 132-3.
45. Official Catalogue, Vol. 1, p. 210.
46. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, pp. 88-9.
224 Notes, pp. 164-78
47. Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999), p. 241.
48. Freeman, Railways, p. 1. See Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, p. 93.
49. C. W. Grant, Bombay Cotton and Indian Railways (London: Longman, 1850),
p.82.
50. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, p. 53.
51. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Stanley Wells
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 2.1.175-6.
52. Carlyle, "Chartism," p. 211. Carlyle was here speaking of steamships as well
as railways.
53. See Dickens, Bleak House, p. 182.
54. "The Great Exhibition," Illustrated London News 18 (3 May 1851), pp. 343-4
(343).
55. Lardner, Great Exhibition, pp. 67, 122.
56. Mrs. [Catherine] Napier, The Lay of the Palace (London: Oliver, 1852), p. 12.
57. "There Are Questions of Extraordinary Interest," The Times (11 January
1851), p. 4.
58. Bazley, Lecture upon Cotton, pp. 25, 46-7.
59. Tallis's History, Vol. 2, p. 73.
60. E. D. Chattaway, Railways, Their Capital and Dividends (London: Weale,
1855-56), pp. 132-3.
61. Chattaway, Railways, p. 132.
62. Stuart-Wortley, "Anticipated Close," p. 237.
63. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857; London: Penguin, 1997),
p. 18; further page references appear in parentheses.
64. This label is confusing in that it calls to mind Disraeli's nostalgic, antiprogressive Young England group of the 1840s.
65. Anne Lohrli indicates that the author of the tale was Charles Knight, Dickens's long-time friend and collaborator. See Lohrli, Household Words: A
Weekly Journal 1850-1859, pp. 71, 333.
66. "A Christmas Pudding," Household Words 2 (21 December 1850), pp. 300-4
(301); further page references appear in parentheses.
67. Cobden, "England, Ireland, and America," pp. 45-6.
68. Royle, Culture and Commerce of Cotton, pp. 20-1,12.
69. John Stuart Mill, "A Few Words on Non-Intervention" (1859), Collected
Works oflohn Stuart Mill, Vol. 21, ed. John M. Robson (London: Routledge,
1984), pp. 109-24 (119).
70. Quoted in Martin Lynn, "British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the
Mid-Nineteenth Century," in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume
III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), pp. 101-21 (108).
71. Lynn, "British Policy," p. 109; "Business and the Bayonet," Punch 19 (1850),
p.234.
72. Mill, "Few Words," p. Ill.
73. Peter Osborne, "Modernity Is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological Category,"
New Left Review 192 (1992), pp. 65-84 (74, 83).
74. Samir Amin, "Globalism or Apartheid on a Global Scale?" in The Modem World System in the Longue Duree, ed. Immanuel Wallerstein (Boulder:
Paradigm, 2004), pp. 5-30 (5).
Notes, pp. 178-85 225
75. Harvey, New Imperialism, pp. 31-2. Here I would remark David Landes's
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
useful observation that it is often not the state which sets the agenda:
"Where one group is strong enough to push another around and stands
to gain by it, it will do so. Even if the state would abstain from aggression, companies and individuals will not wait for permission. Rather, they
will act in their own interest, dragging others along, including the state"
(Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some
So Poor [London: Norton, 1999], p. 63). If I agree with Landes here, I should
note more broadly that, in discussing the thesis to which his book's title is
directed, Landes emphasizes the cultural failures and socio-economic inadequacies of the global poor, where I prefer to emphasize the exploitative
strategies and discriminatory mindsets of the global rich.
Doreen Massey, "ls the World Really Shrinking?" A Festival of Ideas for the
Future - Open University Radio Lecture, BBC Radio Three (9 November 2006).
Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization
(London: Verso, 1995), p. 30.
William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), pp. 81-2.
Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, p. 85; further page references appear in
parentheses.
On the need to avoid such economic reductivism, characterized by a priori
deductions and an inattention to historical specificity, see Stuart Hall,
"Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance," in Race Critical
Theories: Text and Context, ed. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 38-68 (especially 42-3).
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
(New York: Holt, 2003), p. 45.
Mill, Principles of Political Economy, p. 222.
The quotation is from Charles Dickens's anonymously published essay liThe
Noble Savage," Household Words 7 (11 June 1853), pp. 337-9 (337).
Charles Dickens, liThe Niger Expedition" (1848), Miscellaneous Papers from
"The Morning Chronicle," "The Daily News," "The Examiner," "Household
Words," "All the Year Round," etc. and Plays and Poems, Vol. 1 (London:
Chapman, 1911), pp. 117-35 (124).
Carlyle, "Chartism," p. 231.
On the growing gap in income levels which characterized the nineteenth
century see Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in
the 21st Century (London: Sage, 2003), pp. 512-13.
Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 36.
Arendt, Imperialism, pp. 63-4.
Said, Orientalism, p. 43.
Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race, p. ix.
Cora Kaplan, Victoriana - Histories, Fictions, Criticisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 143-4.
"A Curious Contribution to the Great Exhibition," The Times (31 January
1850), p. 8.
T. H. Lacy, Novelty Fair; or, Hints for 1851: An Exceedingly Premature and
Thoroughly Apropos Revue ([1850]), p. 10; "Foreign Families of Distinction
in London," Punch 21 (1851), p. 135.
226
Notes, pp. 185-96
94. Altick, Shows of London, pp. 268, 279.
95. "The Approaching Festival of Nations," Family Herald 9 (3 May 1851),
pp. 12-13 (12).
96. Mayhew and Cruikshank, 1851, pp. 1-2.
97. In fact Soyer's Symposium proved popular but failed commercially, running
for five months and shutting just after the close of the Exhibition some
£7000 in debt. See Ruth Cowen, Relish: The Extraordinary Life ofAlexis Soyer,
Victorian Celebrity Chef (London: Weidenfeld, 2006), p. 231.
98. Alexis Soyer, Memoirs of Alexis Soyer, ed. F. Volant and]. R. Warren (1859;
Rottingdean, UK: Cooks, 1985), p. 200.
99. Soyer, Memoirs, p. 201.
100. "Refreshments at the Great Exhibition of 1851," Punch 20 (1851), p. 33.
101. "London Dining Rooms," Punch 20 (1851), frontispiece; "The Haycocks in
1851," Punch 20 (1851), frontispiece.
102. Thomas Onwhyn, Mr. and Mrs. John Brown's Visit to London to See the Great
Exposition of All Nations (London: Ackerman, n.d.), quoted in Auerbach,
Great Exhibition, pp. 174-5.
103. Frantz Fanon, "The Fact of Blackness," Black Skin, White Masks (1952), trans.
Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 1986), pp. 109-40 (114).
104. Soyer, Memoirs, p. 208.
105. See Helen Morris, Portrait of a Chef: The Life of Alexis Soyer, Sometime Chef to
the Reform Club (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 104.
106. "Visions in the Crystal," Punch 20 (1851), p. 188.
107. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 56; further page references appear in
parentheses.
108. Thomas Carlyle, "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question," Fraser's
Magazine 40 (1849), pp. 527-38 (534).
109. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, p. 78.
110. Quoted in George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (1960; Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, 1992), p. 32.
111. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, p. 43.
112. Tallis's History, Vol. 2, p. 129.
113. Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, p. 18; John Ruskin, "Conclusion to
Inaugural Lecture as Slade Professor of Fine Art" (Oxford University,
8 February 1870), in Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature
1870-1918, ed. Elleke Boehmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
pp. 16-20 (18).
114. "The Great Exhibition," The Times (15 May 1851), p. 5.
115. "Foreign and Colonial Departments. No.2," Crystal Palace (11 October
1851), pp. 20-2 (20).
116. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 30.
117. "The Noble Savage," Household Words 7 (11 June 1853), pp. 337-9 (337).
118. Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism
in the Works of Charles Dickens (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 70.
119. "Noble Savage," p. 337; see note 117 for full reference.
120. "The Great Exhibition," The Times (16 June 1851), p. 8.
121. Hunt's Handbook, Vol. I, p. 245.
122. Lemoinne, "Letters," pp. 580-1.
123. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 170.
Notes, pp. 196-203 227
124. Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 2, p. 708.
125. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989),
p.87.
126. "Some Moral Aspects of the Great Exhibition," Economist 9 (17 May 1851),
pp. 531-2 (532).
127. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 31-2.
Postscript: America, Anglobalization and the Great
Exhibition
1. Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, "Introduction," pp. 2-3.
2. George W. Bush, "Securing Freedom's Triumph," New York Times
(11 September 2002), op-ed.
3. Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price ofAmerica's Empire (London: Allen, 2004),
p. 25; further page references appear in parentheses.
4. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modem World (2003; London:
Penguin, 2004), p. xxi; further page references appear in parentheses.
5. Ferguson, Empire, p. 372.
6. Buzard, Childers and Gillooly, "Introduction," p. 3.
7. Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams, p. 8.
8. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments: To Which is Added,
A Dissertation on the Origin ofLanguages (1759; London: Bell, 1907), pp. 341,
342-3.
9. Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 343.