Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace, 1854-1936' examines the presentation of classical civilisations to a mass audience in the 'Peoples' Palace' through reconstructions of ancient monuments and casts of sculpture. Studies of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham have not moved beyond cataloguing exhibits. It tends to be conflated with its predecessor, the Great Exhibition or 1851, which has been widely discussed in terms of content, relationship to the British Empire, and political importance. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham is a significant instance of mid-nineteenth century engagement with the classical past, broadening our understanding of classics in the nineteenth century outside public schools, universities and museums. Using archival material, I build up a picture of how visitors used and understood the displays of classical civilisations at the Palace. I examine the relationship of classical sculpture to nineteenth-century discussions about morality and discipline and industrial design, and the relationship between the British and Roman empires as displayed at this popular leisure destination.

My thesis attends to economic, scientific, imperial, cultural, and religious modes of thought which underpinned the Great Exhibition, focusing particularly upon the mid-nineteenth century discourse of political economy. It offers a critical analysis of a broad scope of literature, ranging from texts concerned specifically with the Exhibition to works of fiction which reflect concepts, motifs, and issues pertinent to this example of Victorian visual culture. The Great Exhibition of 1851 can be understood as an event which was intended to provide visual form to a narrative of capitalist progress, a story which told of the material advance and metaphysical improvements inherent to an international division of labour. Exhibition commentary suggested that through the systematic revelation of global industry, the display would make sense of the way the world should work, indicating an autochthonous, providential symmetry to international commerce, and highlighting particular goods, industrial practices, and technologies which would provide the foundations for a dynamic, mutually beneficial global capitalist order. The study examines writing which did indeed herald the display as a systematic rendition of human industry, underpinned by a coherent, cogent, and universally comprehensible narrative. However, it also analyses commentary which laid emphasis on the bewildering nature of the spectacle, pointing to an absence of commercial sense and narrative. The fact that the display was not universally seen to evince the story which political economy would tell of the industrial world manifests the limited nature of this narrative. Moreover, it draws attention to the fact that only through metropolitan intervention and coercion could such a story be told. The project considers the Great Exhibition in terms of industrial capitalism's desire to create a world after its own image; it also demonstrates the complexities and difficulties which characterised such a representational endeavour.

Apparitions of empire and imperial ideologies were deeply embedded in the International Exhibition, a distinct exhibitionary paradigm that came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Exhibitions were platforms for the display of objects, the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas across and between regions of the British Empire, thereby facilitating contact between its different cultures and societies. This thesis aims to disrupt a dominant understanding of International Exhibitions, which forwards the notion that all exhibitions, irrespective of when or where they were staged, upheld a singular imperial discourse (i.e. Greenhalgh 1988, Rydell 1984). Rather, this thesis suggests International Exhibitions responded to and reflected the unique social, political and economic circumstances in which they took place, functioning as cultural environments in which pressing concerns of the day were worked through. Understood thus, the International Exhibition becomes a space for self-presentation, serving as a stage from which a multitude of interests and identities were constructed, performed and projected. This thesis looks to the visual and material culture of the International Exhibition in order to uncover this more nuanced history, and foregrounds an analysis of the intersections between practices of exhibition-making and identity-making. The primary focus is a set of exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-1880s and early-1900s, which extends the geographic and temporal boundaries of the existing scholarship. What is more, it looks at representations of Canada at these events, another party whose involvement in the International Exhibition tradition has gone largely unnoticed. Consequently, this thesis is a thematic investigation of the links between a municipality routinely deemed the ‘Second City of the Empire’ and a Dominion settler colony, two types of geographic setting rarely brought into dialogue. It analyses three key elements of the exhibition-making process, exploring how iconographies of ‘quasi-nationhood’ were expressed through an exhibition’s planning and negotiation, its architecture and its displays. This original research framework deliberately cuts across strata that continue to define conceptions of the British Empire, and pushes beyond a conceptual model defined by metropole and colony. Through examining International Exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, and visions of Canada in evidence at these events, the goal is to offer a novel intervention into the existing literature concerning the cultural history of empire, one that emphasises fluidity rather than fixity and which muddles the boundaries between centre and periphery.