World's Fairs

World's fairs are global events. Such fairs—also called international exhibitions, expositions universelles, or Weltausstellungen—are transient, large-scale installations intended for a global audience. They provide a public display of cultural artifacts, aiming at replicating within their rotating host cities an accurate, miniaturized image of the respective state of human development in the world.

World's fairs, with their national and international sections and pavilions, proved meeting grounds and contact zones of a rapidly evolving world society. Beginning with the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations held in London in 1851, world's fairs are viewed by both contemporaneous observers and present-day historians not only as catalysts but also as active agents in the ongoing globalization process [Page 1826]during the second half of the 19th century. No consensus, however, has been reached as to their role and function in the 20th century, in particular the postwar period and after. Critics contend that present-day international exhibitions have largely lost their sociocultural relevance, subsumed by other mega-events such as the Olympic Games and rendered obsolete by the rise of the Internet and other new meta-media. Proponents, however, advance their cultural significance by referring to the continuing success of world's fairs, most notably the record-breaking Shanghai Expo 2010, the largest international exhibition ever held, with more than 73 million national and international visitors and 230 participating countries.

First advanced through intra-European, inter-urban competition between London and Paris, international expositions extended rapidly across the Western metropolises and began to form a global network, a genuine worldwide web. Staging an exhibition, as well as participating in one, became a matter of national prestige. Over the course of the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, numerous grand-scale exhibitions were held not only in London and Paris, but also in Vienna, Turin, Antwerp, Barcelona, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, Milan, and Liège. Beyond Europe, cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Sydney, and Melbourne hosted international expositions, often multiple times. Besides the pioneering Great Exhibition of 1851, the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893) and the Parisian Exposition Universelle Internationale of 1900 stand out in retrospect: the former as America's most defining expository event, the latter as the spectacular finale of a five-exposition series held at 11-year intervals in the French capital. From the outset, these evolving exhibitionary networks were characterized by multipolarities, with overlapping dimensions of intrametropolitan, transnational, and global competition defining their conjuration and execution. Before the advent of television, no other mass media had reached so many individuals.

The 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal and the Expo 70 in Osaka are considered two of the three most important world's fairs of that period, in addition to the 1958 Brussels Exposition Universelle et Internationale. Like their precursors, all presented themselves as complex and carefully staged conglomerates, composed of various sections and subsections devoted to a wide range of themes, including industrial, artistic, geographical, ethnographic, and historical topics. Objects on display were subject to complex and ever-varying systems of classification, and each artifact—which, until World War II, usually included “exotic” human beings—was allocated a fictitious place in an ideally ordered world.

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