The World in a Village: The Word Exhibitions in the 19th century

Research project P 14427 The World in a Village: The World Exhibition in the 19th century Michael GEHLER 08.05.2000 The project aims to reconstruct from a historical perspective, how global public spaces were first created and how they were filled with meaning. It takes the example of the world exhibitions in the nineteenth century which produced such global public spaces. It will analyse how with them, ideas about global societal relationships were defined, debated and transformed; how ideas for economic, political and social development in the industrial age were staged symbolically, creating a kind of global institutional competition which facilitated transnational culture transfer. The project is based on the assumption that in the second half of the nineteenth century, industrialisation, growing international trade and rapid advances in traffic infrastructure and communication technologies allowed for the first time a broader international political discourse about issues of economic, political and social development. The world exhibitions were a key forum for this discourse. Mass visits and wide-spread media reporting guaranteed that they had a substantial international impact. The project will address three main questions. The first concerns the symbolic construction and the discussion of global national, cultural and social hierarchies and the question of to what extent governmental (Japan etc.) and societal exhibitors (trade unions, women`s movement) managed with their contributions to expand the initially hegemonic concept which was Western, bourgeois and male dominated. The second question concerns the symbolic representation and the transnational transfer of political concepts. The project will analyse how the three key questions of the most successful economic modernisation strategy, the most modern and stable political constitution and the most promising policies to deal with the `social question` were discussed at the world exhibitions. Finally, the third question concerns the reception of the symbolically mediated exhibition messages by the visitors and those reporting on them, and thus their societal reach beyond the economic and political elites.

This research project aimed at analyzing the role of the world exhibitions for the political culture of internationalisation in the second half of the nineteenth century. It studied the significance of national representations at the world exhibitions for the growth and enlargement of an economically, politically, and culturally defined `Western` world; the function of the exhibitions in the popularisation and the cross-border transfer of societal arrangements like free trade policy; and finally, the reception of the dominant `messages` of the exhibitions among three main social groups: workers, women and indigenous people from European and US colonies. It is true that all organisers of internationally significant exhibitions had specific hegemonic `messages` that they tried to link to the conception and structure of the exhibitions. At the same time, however, the project results demonstrate that it was not really possible to control the communication spaces of the exhibitions which invited visitors and commentators to organise and articulate alternative concepts of `globalisation` under the conditions of the nineteenth century. This pluralisation ultimately encouraged the cross-border demands of workers, women and indigenous people for co-decision and social improvement, equality and autonomy or independence respectively.