before the so-called scramble for africa,indeed before the scramble for territory in china, mid- victorian britain was alreadyestablished as europe's leading imperial power. yet when britain was put on display at thegreat exhibition of 1851 a very different story was being told. unlike at previous nationalexhibitions half of the space within the crystal palace was given over to other countries andtheir industrial and technological achievements were displayed alongside those of britain.partly this was to demonstrate britain's evident superiority in the field but also to showthat all peoples of the world could become as prosperous if they followed her examplesof peace and free trade. the 1851 exhibition was not, first and foremost, an imperial celebration.one has to wait until well over half a century
later to the wembley exhibition of 1924 tofind an event that would fit that description. the colonies of course did figure though,and there were colonial sections that implicitly underlined the economic value of the empire,a message somewhat at odds with the overarching theme of pacifist internationalism. yet whenthe exhibition came to an end and the crystal palace was relocated to a permanent site,in 1854, the indian and colonial exhibits were not transferred and the empire disappeared.one of the challenges for the historian of the nineteenth century who wants to understandthe place and importance of the empire in britain's private and public life is neverjust to look at the empire in isolation but also always to look at the empire in its widercontext. if you read the newspapers of the
time at all levels that's from the times downto lets say reynolds's newspaper, not down in a qualitative way but so far as the ordersof society they were directed at, you find that most attention is given to domestic affairs,in working class papers to murders and things like that, and then to politics. the secondmost common subject of interest was european affairs especially when very exciting thingswere going on in the continent in the 50s and 60s and 70s. thirdly in america, whichwas always a very popular source of news for people in the nineteenth century, and onlyvery lastly from the colonies. and it was only when there was a great crisis in oneof the colonies, and the indian mutiny was one of these that imperial affairs came onto the front page, or the equivalent of the
front page because very often nineteenth centurynewspapers you had advertisements on the front page. i've found that looking at local papersin hull, and it was usually local papers that people bought, daily local papers very often,that even when the indian mutiny was at its height, it usually only came about third orfourth in the order of priorities of news items, tucked away in the bottom of the firstpage or whatever. it is often said that the cambridge historian sir john seeley once claimedthat the british had conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.rather than trying to explain how it had been acquired the point he was actually tryingto make, was that despite their country ruling over vast swathes of the globe, the widerpopulation appeared largely indifferent to
this great phenomenon. 'while we were doingit', he wrote 'we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree to changeour ways of thinking; nor have we ceased to think of ourselves as simply a race inhabitingan island off the northern coast of the continent of europe.' seeley's main complaint thoughwas that historians too had failed to comprehend this tremendous expansion of geopoliticalpower. they remained fixated with parliamentary wrangling and agitations about liberty andwere thus unable to understand that the history of britain was being written elsewhere. whilstwe might question seeley's analysis of wider society there is little doubt that the historybooks of the time echo the story being told about britain at the great exhibition; empiremight appear but only at the margins. the
main themes in them, or theme, was the evolutionof freedom in britain, britain's progress to domestic freedom, as putting her aboveother nations but there no other kind of imperial implication to it than that. that was themain thing taught to britain knowingly or not, which was supposed to be built into theirsense of national identity, that they were a free people, and pride in the empire hardlyappears at all, it is amazing how little there is about the empire. there could just be afew phrases about how britain is bringing the gospel to benighted africans or somethinglike that, or there could be downright criticism of britain's crimes in the past in stealingland from the native americans for example in north america, there was quiet a lot ofthat actually. so it could go either way,
it didn't seem to matter very much beforethe 1870s 1880s. back home in britain policy makers and statesmen were often much moreconcerned with the european balance of power than with anything else; its often been saidthat there was nothing like a debate on india to empty the house of commons. most voters,still a minority of even adult men at this time, were concerned about domestic issues,bread and butter issues, economic and social questions. for the great majority, the empireremained a very remote thing in the mid-nineteenth century. working class memoirs reveal livesof long hours, sparse leisure time and a lack of access to the printed word. not only wasthe empire far away, it often wasn't particularly relevant in lives lived by the passing ofthe seasons or the factory whistle. at a time
when britain was undergoing a period of tremendouseconomic growth and transformation at home many people's horizons were very much fixedon finding their own way in their own world. education for the great bulk of the populationstill remained extremely limited. its value for all classes had been all but universallyaccepted by the 1840s, but there was almost equal agreement among the leaders of societythat its primary function was to fit recipients for their proper station in life. when a royalcommission examined schooling for the children of the labouring classes in 1858, it did soon the understanding that it should be cheap, efficient and not normally take children beyondthe age of eleven. the working classes did no history at all full stop, there was none,so there was no imperial history. there wasn't
virtually any geography and what geographythere was was generally just measuring up their own school yard again it wasn't thoughto be a good thing for children that were just going to be seamstresses and farmworkersand so on to know anything beyond their own village, if they did they might become unsettledand discontented. the ordinary working man or woman might have been aware of the empire,or a particular part of it, through the opportunities it provided their branch of industry, perhapsthrough friends and family who had emigrated or maybe through missionaries generating supportfor their cause back home in the churches and chapels. but such awareness was not necessarilyaccompanied either by detailed knowledge of or a particular enthusiasm for empire, andfor much of the century this situation didn't
seem to particularly trouble those at theheart of the british state. intense popular interest at home in the affairs of empiremight well be disconcerting, destabilising for government and for the rulers of empire.increased interest might mean unwelcome curiosity about the seamier side of what was going onin far flung colonies. increased interest and knowledge might mean increased criticismindeed increasingly as time went by it seemed as though it did. keeping a kind of insulationbetween the affairs of empire and the tides of public opinion at home was valuable andclearly often explicitly desired at least some of the time.