World exhibitions grew directly out of failed colonial industrialisation projects.

Evidence

It was exactly this kind of global transformation that world exhibitions were built to promote. The Saint-Simonists, believers in the new religion of ‘social science’ who had travelled to Cairo in the 1830s to begin from within Egypt their project for the industrialisation of the earth, and had miserably failed, were subsequently among the first to turn to the idea of world exhibitions. Michel Chevalier, editor of the Saint-Simonist journal Globe, advocated exhibitions for the same reason he advocated constructing canals at Panama and Suez: to open up the world to the free movement of commodities. ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ was the full title of the first of them, the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851. In place of the industrial exhibitions exclusive to one nation that had become popular during the first half of the century, all foreign nations and manufacturers were invited to exhibit at the Crystal Palace, reflecting the desire to promote unrestricted international trade on the part of British industrialists. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 90

Categorization

• QUESTION: The genealogy from Saint-Simonist failed mission in Cairo to the 1851 Crystal Palace is striking — worth chasing the connective tissue between these.