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Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, by Paul Young; pp. x + 249. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £55.00, $89.00.
The very title of Paul Young's book, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: The Victorian New World Order, raises a number of issues that drive the arguments of this excellent new study, underscoring Young's thoughtfulness as he struggles with the assumptions that surround discussions of the Great Exhibition and Victorian culture. From the outset, Young notes that one of the main terms with which he has chosen to frame his project, globalization, is fraught with intellectual and ideological baggage that makes it a difficult signpost for the analysis he is undertaking. Yet he also recognizes that a large part of what his study attempts is to come to terms with how an event like the Great Exhibition generated a "coherent and compelling story about the world" (4). In order for his own account to have some purchase, Young realizes that he must rely on a broad and useful conception of globalization, and he draws on Roland Robertson's pithy characterization of the phenomenon as a "compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole" (qtd. in Young 4).
Of course many concerns are raised by this definition, not least the Eurocentric (indeed, Anglocentric) features of the narrative that emerged from the Crystal Palace in 1851. Young is aware of and attentive to the problems with such a characterization. He goes to some pains in his introduction to outline the subtleties of his argument. In a moment of notable even-handedness, he points out that while...