This book introduces the subject of international exhibitions to art and design historians and a wider audience as a resource for understanding the broad and varied political meanings of design during a period of rapid industrialization, developing nationalism, imperialism, expanding trade, and the emergence of a consumer society. Its chapters, written by both established and emerging scholars, are global in scope, and demonstrate specific networks of communication and exchange among designers, manufacturers, markets, and nations on the modern world stage from the second half of the nineteenth century into the beginning of the twentieth.