Exhibiting Irishness: Empire, Race and Nation, c. 1850-1970

Exhibiting Irishness traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and 1960s as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally-connected state. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exhibitions captured the imagination of organisers and visitors. The global displays were heralded as a unique, profitable, and unsurpassed forum for celebrating a country’s wares, vying for increased trade, and consolidating national mores. Exhibitions were grand spectacles that showcased the manufactures, industries, arts, technologies, histories, and communities of various nations on an international platform for the consumption of millions of visitors over several months. Each chapter demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland’s political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland, a separation that continues today. A saleable Irishness appeared in historic exhibits which was later adapted in tourism propaganda offering the Irish landscape, the Irish people, and Irish products. In sum, this book tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness – an Irish identity always on sale.