Twentieth-century British history is finally getting its due; such is also the case with the twentieth-century British Empire. Both of those histories converge in Daniel Stephen's study of the British Empire Exhibition of 1924–25, the largest exposition in British history (216 acres and 26 million visitors), and, as the author suggests, one whose full significance has not been appreciated. Stephen claims that it was significant not only for the British and their interwar empire but also for colonial and commonwealth subjects. In his case, those include West Africans and South Asians at Wembley or in London and at home, in Mumbai and Accra. Buttressed by recent scholarship and impressive forays into British and formerly colonial archives and newspapers, the book claims that we can study the exhibition to better understand continuities about trade, race, and gender, before and after the Great War; the ways in which exhibitions are organized, debated, and built—thus often resulting in shows quite different than those originally intended; how exhibitions in general and this one in particular cannot be divorced from compelling contemporary political, economic, and cultural developments and controversies; and the various roles that active colonial subjects could and did play in the planning, resistance to, and finally the unfolding of grand, bold, self-conscious imperial and nationalist events. Stephen sees Malays, Burmese, South Asians, Nigerians, and others as active agents, not as human showcases or imperial collaborators. He also sees in such men and women how domestic and imperial were tangled in the 1920s.

Wembley's expensive expression of an “empire of progress” apparently revived Joseph Chamberlain's pre-1914 aspirations for imperial preference and continued racial and social hierarchies amid seemingly more liberal pronouncements about an imperial family and mutual development. One also hears an echo of Lord Lugard's “Dual Mandate.” While doing so, the exhibition planning “opened new avenues for colonized subjects” to influence imperial policies, or at least to try to do so (52). Stephen contends that such tensions, continuities, and trends are more effectively revealed by studying West African and Indian participation, rather than by focusing on the dominions, including Canada and Australia, both conspicuously present and both previously studied by other scholars. The nonwhite subjects proved to be “effectively assertive” within the imperial and exhibition system, and thus provided an “accurate bellwether of a changing gravity in colonial relations and a coming crack up” (6). Funding and participation suffered in India, for example, in the face of unpopular government of India actions and dominion policies toward South Asian emigrants. Imperial civilization's so-called progress at and outside of the exhibition had its fair share of discontents.

Most readers already know that the British world included riots, noncooperation, rejections, and controversies; far fewer would have known beforehand how such events and the ideas that motivated them affected the seemingly popular and consensus-built Wembley British Empire Exhibition. Some South Asians and West Africans remained loyalists; some turned to the exhibition to try to and generate change; others boycotted or otherwise resisted. Tiruvaliyangudi Vijayaraghavacharya, commissioner for India, is one fascinating and little-studied figure caught in this triangulation. “Empire development” and “empire consolidation” were among his goals for the Indian Pavilion; they were not uncontested goals. He among others trod unstable political paths, as well as the revived battleground of imperial cooperation and imperial hierarchies.

This study also helps us place this finite event in the larger imperial infrastructure or network of film, wireless, printed propaganda, school curriculum, royal speeches, voluntary societies, and even the final imperial moment for Kipling, Elgar, and Baden-Powell, that trinity of empire builders. Each formally participated at the exhibition. The king gave a famous speech opening the event and broadcast on the new wireless system throughout Britain and the empire. Stephen also reminds us that the exhibition was significant because of its extensive use of reinforced concrete and electricity, both of which drew upon a long-standing sense of fantasy at the shows: night could become day, a modern building material could create an ancient structure. Wembley Stadium's contribution to the history of English football remained a popular and at times infamous reminder of the exhibition.

Not surprisingly, Stephen discusses how Wembley's advocates called upon the Great Exhibition of 1851. As he points out, that was a fanciful analogy. The Crystal Palace celebrated unequal Fair Trade and Britain's dominance in that global world. Wembley in fact recalled the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, held as one of South Kensington's annual specialized shows during that decade. The British Empire Exhibition was an exclusionary affair, as was that predecessor; both events contained within them sharp and clear representations of economic, social, and cultural interaction and difference. In contrast, as Stephen notes in many places, the political world after the Somme, Leningrad, and Paris was quite different. The United States and the Soviet Union offered political and economic alternatives and competitors. Colonial nationalism raised challenges to the war-weary and economically suffering British. Where was Gandhi in 1886? The Indian National Congress was but one year old. Where were the West African nationalists at South Kensington? Ironically, the celebration of empire at Wembley nearly forty years later provided a stage for such figures and groups.

In perhaps the most compelling argument of this nicely laid-out book, Stephen reminds us of the predominance of politics in public life—political figures, groups, ideas, and claims—and how that predominance works with and sometimes against fundamental ideas about how the economy and society should be. The British and their colonial allies might have expressed imperial will at Wembley, but did they have the imperial resources? Was this expression of hubris a hollow one, one that “foreshadowed the breakup of empire” after 1945 (141)? Stephen thinks so. The British Empire Exhibition—halfway between the end of the Great War and the start of the Great Depression, when the globe showed more imperial red splotches than at any other time—is a fascinating case study of those enduring issues and daunting relationships.