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

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