Expanding Nationalisms at World's Fairs ― Identity, Diversity, and Exchange 1851-1915

Expanding Nationalisms at World’s Fairs: Identity, Diversity, and Exchange, 1851–1915 introduces the subject of international exhibitions to art and design historians and a wider audience as a resource for understanding the broad and varied political meanings of design during a period of rapid industrialization, developing nationalism, imperialism, expanding trade and the emergence of a consumer society. Its chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars, are global in scope, and demonstrate specific networks of communication and exchange among designers, manufacturers, markets and nations on the modern world stage from the second half of the nineteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth.

Within the overarching theme of nationalism and internationalism as revealed at world’s fairs, the book’s essays will engage a more complex understanding of ideas of competition and community in an age of emergent industrial capitalism, and will investigate the nuances, contradictions and marginalized voices that lie beneath the surface of unity, progress, and global expansion.

David Raizman is Distinguished University Professor of Art and Art History in the Westphal College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Ethan Robey is Assistant Professor of the History of Decorative Arts and Design at Parsons School of Design, and Associate Director of the MA Program in the History of Design and Curatorial Study run by Parsons and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.