The Empire of Progress ― West Africans, Indians, and Britons at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924-25

For the last several decades, scholars have devoted considerable attention to connections between British domestic culture and imperial expansion, but the twentieth century has received much less attention than the eighteenth and nineteenth. In particular, the imperial culture of the interwar years stands relatively neglected even though propaganda on imperial themes reached a fever pitch after the First World War, culminating in the 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition, the nation's largest public exhibition to date and a major popular cultural landmark. The Exhibition heralded a turning point in the history of British imperialism. Situated as it was at the intersection of empire, national identity, and popular culture, it embodied ongoing conflicts over the future direction of imperialism, and was followed by national publicity campaigns sponsored by the Empire Marketing Board, the documentary films of the 1930s, radio appearances by George V, and a second Exhibition held in Glasgow in 1938. This much-needed study of the British Empire Exhibition helps to correct an historiographical imbalance by illustrating durable, persistent connections between empire and domestic society in Britain during the interwar years. It demonstrates that the Exhibition was a marker of how by 1924 - in spite of massive technological, economic, and scientific advantages - imperial relations were increasingly likely to be shaped by forces located on the colonial periphery. The experiences of colonized Africans and Indians of the period reveal links between the imperial cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bridging the era of Victorian dominance and the new "liberal" discourses of "progress" and colonial "development" that emerged in the 1920s.

Daniel Stephen is Instructor in the History Department at Colorado State University, USA. His work has appeared in Twentieth Century British History and The Journal of British Studies.