World exhibitions dominated what Egyptian travelers wrote about Europe.

Evidence

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, more than half the descriptions of journeys to Europe being published in Cairo were written to describe visits to a world exhibition or an international congress of Orientalists. These accounts devote hundreds of pages to describing the peculiar order and technique of such spectacles – the curious crowds of spectators, the device of the exhibit and the model, the organisation of panoramas and perspectives, the display of new discoveries and merchandise, the architecture of iron and glass, the systems of classification, the calculation of statistics, the lectures, the plans and the guide books – in short the entire machinery of what I am going to refer to as ‘representation’: everything collected and arranged to stand for something, to represent progress and history, human industry and empire; everything set up, and the whole set-up always evoking somehow some larger truth. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 61

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces and defines the book’s pivotal analytical concept — representation as machinery for standing in for larger truths.
• XREF: Echoes Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities and Walter Benjamin’s arcades — both concerned with how displays produce national/imperial subjects.
• SEED: An article angle: the statistics, classification systems, iron-and-glass architecture and guidebooks of world fairs as the grammar of modern bureaucratic knowledge — traceable from 1851 to contemporary data dashboards.