Enfilade

From Manchester UP (and now 50% off at Oxford UP’s sitewide sale) . . .

John MacKenzie and John McAleer, eds., Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0719091094, $110.

Exhibiting the Empire considers how a whole range of cultural products from paintings, prints, photographs, panoramas and ‘popular’ texts to ephemera, newspapers and the press, theatre and music, exhibitions, institutions and architecture were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. The empire was exhibited for a variety of reasons: to promote trade and commerce; to encourage emigration and settlement; to assert, project and cement imperial authority; to digest and display the data and specimens derived from various voyages of exploration and missionary endeavours undertaken in the name of empire; to celebrate and commemorate important landmarks, people or events in the imperial pantheon. By considering a broad sweep of different media and ‘imperial moments’, this collection highlights the contingent and changing nature of imperial display, as well as its continuing impact in Britain throughout (and beyond) the country’s imperial meridian. Exhibiting the empire represents a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the relationship between culture and the British Empire.

Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, individual chapters bring fresh perspectives to the interpretation of media, material culture and display, and their interaction with the history of the British Empire. Exhibiting the Empire will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British history, the history of empire, art history, and the history of museums and collecting.

John M. MacKenzie is Emeritus Professor of Imperial History at Lancaster University and holds Honorary Professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Stirling, as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Edinburgh University. John McAleer is Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Cultures of Display and the British Empire, John MacKenzie and John McAleer
1  An Elite Imperial Vision: Eighteenth-Century British Country Houses and Four-Continents Imagery, Stephanie Barczewski
2  Exhibiting Exploration: Captain Cook, Voyages of Exploration and the Culture of Display, John McAleer
3  Satirical Peace Prints and the Cartographic Unconscious, Douglas Fordham
4  Sanguinary Engagements: Exhibiting the Naval Battles of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Eleanor Hughes
5  Empire under Glass: The British Empire and the Crystal Palace, 1851–1911, Jeffrey Auerbach
6  Ephemera and the British Empire, Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins
7  Exhibiting the Empire in Print: The Press, the Publishing World and the Promotion of ‘Greater Britain’, Berny Sèbe
8. Exhibiting the Empire at the Delhi Durbar of 1911: Imperial and Cultural Contexts, John MacKenzie
9. Elgar’s Pageant of Empire, 1924: An Imperial Leitmotiv, Nalini Ghuman
10. Representing ‘Our Island Sultanate’ in London and Zanzibar: Cross-currents in Educating Imperial Publics, Sarah Longair
Index