Features

Editorial

Alastair Wilson, Margery Masterson, William Raybould

The editorial committee are pleased to announce the arrival of the 3rd edition of Ex Plus Ultra: an international postgraduate e-journal in colonial and post-colonial studies. Founded at the University of Sydney in 2009, and hosted by the University of Leeds in 2010, the latest edition of the journal is published by an editorial team based at the Centre for the Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Societies at the University of Bristol. Next year it will travel to yet another ex-colonial, global hub when graduate students at one of the WUN’s partner universities will produce the journal’s 4th edition...

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'The Arms of England that Grasp the World': Empire at the Great Exhibition

Tony Swift

The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London’s Hyde Park in the summer of 1851, represented many things. As its royal patron Prince Albert remarked in March 1850, the exhibition was to be ‘a true test and living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived..., and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions’. In other words, it was a public exercise in ranking the nations of the world according to their manufacturing achievements and thereby demonstrating the superiority of industrial civilisation...

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A 'Grand Show' for East Africa: The Zanzibar Exhibition of 1905

Sarah Longair

On 16 August 1905, in a now forgotten display of imperial ‘ornamentalism’, the Sultan of Zanzibar opened the Zanzibar Exhibition in the presence of the Aga Khan and assembled dignitaries. Displays from across East Africa and the Indian Ocean islands included ‘Tropical and European Fruits, Vegetables and Economic Products; flowers and plants; livestock and poultry; [and] articles of Native Industry’. In his opening address, Alexander Stuart Rogers, the Regent and First Minister of Zanzibar, expressed his aspirations for the event: ‘Such Exhibitions tend to the advancement of a country and the inhabitants whether white or black’...

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An Imperial Affair to Remember: Spanish Memorialisation of the Philippines in the New Millennium

Jose Miguel Diaz

Circa 1875, Francisco Van Camp photographed a young, wealthy, beautiful mestiza. The Dutchman, who was one of the most celebrated photographers established in Manila in the nineteenth century, was ‘renowned for his ability to capture the sensual air of strikingly beautiful women’. Well over a hundred years later, Van Camp’s image was to become, interpreted through Spanish eyes, a symbol of the Philippines, as it adorned the cover of the catalogue for the 2006 exhibition entitled ‘Filipiniana’. This cultural event, organised by the Spanish institution Casa Asia, was one of the major events of the Philippines-Spain year, which was conceived by the Spanish government in an attempt to strengthen diplomatic relationships with the Philippines...

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