Exhibiting the Empire Cultures of Display and the British Empire

About this book

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

Contents

Introduction: Cultures of display and the British Empire - John M. MacKenzie and John McAleer

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

Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

John McAleer is Curator of Eighteenth-Century Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. John MacKenzie is Emeritus Professor of Imperial History, Lancaster University and holds Honorary Professorships at Aberdeen, St Andrews and Stirling, as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Edinburgh.