Scottish Internationalisms at the 1938 Empire Exhibition: Between Britain, Europe, and Empire

The 1938 British Empire Exhibition held in Glasgow was the last of its kind, a spectacular event that celebrated the British Empire and sought to bring global attention to Scotland. The exhibition was a celebration of empire at a time when anti-imperial movements were growing in strength across the globe, and a hopeful expression of peaceful world unity at a time when war seemed increasingly inevitable. This essay considers the ambivalences at the heart of this exhibition through readings of various literary responses to it in contemporary journals, the popular press, and ephemera. It argues for the particular significance of the location for the exhibition, positing the 1938 British Empire Exhibition as a cultural event that suggests Scotland’s complex negotiation of various international networks and identities as well as its ambivalent place in Britain, Europe. Glasgow, 1938 becomes a significant place and time to view the emergence of modern Britain.

The 1938 British Empire Exhibition held in Glasgow was the last of its kind, a spectacular event that celebrated the British Empire and sought to bring global attention to Scotland. The exhibition was a celebration of empire at a time when anti-imperial movements were growing in strength across the globe, and a hopeful expression of peaceful world unity at a time when war seemed increasingly inevitable. This essay considers the ambivalences at the heart of this exhibition through readings of various literary responses to it in contemporary journals, the popular press, and ephemera. It argues for the particular significance of the location for the exhibition, positing the 1938 British Empire Exhibition as a cultural event that suggests Scotland's complex negotiation of various international networks and identities as well as its ambivalent place in Britain, Europe. Glasgow, 1938 becomes a significant place and time to view the emergence of modern Britain.
Publisher's Note: This article was originally published with an incorrect peer review statement, which said that this article was an internally reviewed editorial. This has now been amended to reflect the fact that this is a piece of research that underwent double blind peer review by two external reviewers.

Peat: Scottish Internationalisms at the 1938 Empire Exhibition 2
In 'Birthday Poem ' (1970), the British poet and critic Ian Hamilton remembers his dying father keeping an 'Empire Exhibition shaving mug' as a 'spittoon,' biting its 'gilded china mouth' and staining its 1938 inscription with ' droppings of … blood.' Hamilton's poem commemorates his father's illness and death, but the birthday alluded to in the title is that of the poet, who was born in 1938, the same year that a British Empire Exhibition was held in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park. Hamilton connects this supposedly illustrious public event with personal death and decay, and a breach between generations. The commemorative shaving mug is both a defensive weapon -the father holds it 'tight in [his] hands ' and 'wait[s] for attack' -and debased memento -it is 'bloated,' 'stained,' and redolent of deception. More broadly, it serves as a cultural emblem of an almost forgotten occasion, an uncomfortable reminder of a troubling year in Scottish, European, and world history, and, finally, a tarnished souvenir of a lost empire, one that was faltering even as the exhibition opened its doors to welcome the world to Glasgow in 1938. In this essay I refer back to the 1938 British Empire Exhibition as a cultural event that suggests Scotland's complex negotiation of various international networks and identities as well as its ambivalent place in Britain, Europe, and the empire. In so doing, I seek to move beyond Hamilton's evocation of the exhibition as a tawdry symbol of decay and staleness, and instead consider how Bellahouston opens up a dizzying array of views on the emergence of modern Britain. The exhibition took place at a significant moment of crisis, both for Britain's crumbling imperial project and for European stability. When the gates of Bellahouston Park closed in October 1938, the exhibition was proclaimed in the popular press as ' an historic event' in a 'year we will remember for all time' (Weir 1938). However, when World War Two broke out less than twelve months later, the exhibition's promises of peace and international unity seemed hopelessly out of date, and, by the end of the war, the empire itself was living on borrowed time. The Glasgow exhibition was overshadowed by dire world events and is now mostly forgotten. Nonetheless it exposed the currents that connected modern Scotland to Britain, Europe, and the empire, even as it, ultimately, was overwhelmed by them. Remembered and re-examined from our contemporary perspective, the exhibition reveals the ideological underpinnings of an imperial Peat: Scottish Internationalisms at the 1938 Empire Exhibition 3 project that was always both central to Britain's identity and deeply intertwined with ideas about internationalism, particularly Britain's complicated relationship with Europe. Bellahouston sought to offer its visitors a glimpse of a globally-minded modern Scotland with a prosperous future; in retrospect, it shows us a world on the brink of upheaval and evokes provocative possibilities for alternative histories.
The 1938 exhibition was the last of its kind, providing a curious bookend to the long list of imperial exhibitions that had taken place over the past century. While large scale international exhibitions became popular in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century was, as Clennell Wilkinson affirms in The London Mercury, 'the age of exhibitions,' each larger and more ambitious than any that proceeded them (1924 termed ' a convenient occasion for a process of imperial stocktaking' (Zimmern 1924: 588), and were seen by some as a valuable opportunity to rethink international relations and global responsibilities.
Modern exhibitions did not so much display the world as attempt to create a new version of it that was in line with the imperial ethos of the organisers. Exhibitions, Tony Bennett argues, are ' object lessons in … the power to command and arrange things and bodies for public display' (Bennett 2005: 60). Moreover, empire exhibitions not only demonstrate the power of individual display objects, but also seek to collect up, organise, and display a version of the whole world that pretends to be complete and stable. Caroline Levine's theorisation of forms is useful for understanding the form, function, and affordances of the modern exhibition. Levine argues that forms 'do political work in particular historical instances' (Levine 2015: 5, emphasis in original) and suggests that 'formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere' (2). Her work centres on the affordances, both intended and latent, of form (i.e. what forms are 'capable of doing' [6]). As structures which purport to represent and give shape to a particular version of the world (in this case the British Empire), exhibitions are in some ways pure form, and, in Levine's terms, they most obviously correspond to the form of 'wholes' in their aim to contain, arrange, and display a world to an audience of spectators. Levine addresses the 'unifying power' of a whole with the ' capacity to hold together disparate parts': there is an ' effective homology between the bounded wholeness' of the exhibition and the 'bounded wholeness' of the empire (24-25). Yet, while the representation of a coherent imperial whole might be the intended affordance of the empire exhibition, it is also true, as Levine reminds us, that ' aesthetic forms never actually achieve a bounded wholeness' and they cannot, moreover, ever be 'separated from the social worlds of [their] creation and reception' (24). Moreover, there are also latent affordances that invite different kinds Peat: Scottish Internationalisms at the 1938 Empire Exhibition 5 of engagements, meetings, and meanings within the frame of the exhibition grounds.
We might remember here Ian Hamilton's father's empire exhibition shaving mug. In Derridean terms, the mug can be understood as both a supplement to and substitute for the exhibition, one which, like the empire exhibition, accrues simultaneous, even conflicting, affordances.
I am interested in not only the 1938 exhibition itself but also the various narratives that circulated around the exhibition in periodicals, the popular press, and other ephemera as well as the literary responses by a surprising number of contemporary writers and artists, from Neil Gunn to Edwin Morgan. This expanded story of exhibition culture provides a complex cultural map of Scotland in the late 1930s. Taken together, these materials suggest that the empire exhibition represented various, sometimes conflicting, contemporary Scottish, British, European, and empire identities. They also reveal Scotland's struggle to locate and promote itself on a world stage. The 1930s were a period which saw intense debate around both imperial and European identity. As a product and cultural barometer of its time, the Glasgow exhibition helps us understand the ways in which legacy of empire is both central to Britain's identity and deeply intertwined with its relationship with Europe. According to Mark Hewitson and Matthew D'Auria (2015), ' defining and understanding the "European soul" became central in all cultural and intellectual milieux' in the interwar period; they contend that 'such debates stemmed' both 'from the immediate need to banish the risk of a new war and, more fundamentally, from the urge to avoid the complete destruction of European civilization' (1). As Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton (2019) note, 'the 1930s are again en vogue,' seemingly providing a 'resonant backdrop to current historical events' (1). While I concur with Kohlmann and Taunton's warning against ' attempts to instrumentalise the 1930s for contemporary political debates,' they convincingly define the 1930s as ' a key transformational moment in the cultural and literary history of the twentiethcentury' (2). If we see the 1930s as a period during which various, often conflicting, ideas about the possibilities and perils of internationalism were modelled and debated, then we can better understand both the cultural narratives that we have inherited and the alternative possibilities that we have left behind.

From Bellahouston to Brexit Britain
The debates surrounding Britain's last empire exhibition in 1938 reveal and reflect Britain's difficult and incomplete transition from outward looking imperial power to an inward looking post-imperial nation unsure about (or unhappy with) its place in the world, and remind us, moreover, of a legacy of empire that has never quite been laid to rest. I use the terms 'inward' and ' outward' looking with caution here as helpful, albeit oversimplified, categories for sketching out the historical shifts taking place in this period. The dichotomy between outward and inward looking becomes 4 Some of this nostalgia is reflected in a spate of films and television programmes about the empire that appear in this period, including, for example, Viceroy's House, or what political scientist Andrew Dougall has termed the 'Commonwealth pivot' enacted by certain brexiteers.
Peat: Scottish Internationalisms at the 1938 Empire Exhibition 8 usefully complicated when we take into account that even an avowedly outwardlooking event like an empire exhibition also reveals national and local anxieties and interests, just as an inward-looking event like Brexit is also about Britain's place in the world. Furthermore, neither of these categories are themselves monolithic: discussions about the British empire cannot be separated from the nation's troubled attitude towards alternative models of internationalism, including but not limited to the European Union, nor can they be disentangled from debates about the borders of the nation itself. Scotland [we read] had always occupied a larger place in events than her population, or, let us be frank-her earlier achievements, wholly justified. She lay, a hard nut to crack, in the hinge between the cultures of the Baltic and of the Mediterranean. She was always conscious both of the negation of the ice (her northern coast looks out towards no further shore) and of the fruitful southern lands, with which she also had kinship… Scotland was a microcosm of Europe, in a sense the great fenced, fertile self-centred metropolitan country of England, to the south, never was… (1969 [1950]: 111) Scotland is contrasted with England: while the latter is 'fenced' and self-contained, the former is a 'microcosm' of Europe. Scotland is defined by its coasts and linked by its North Sea to two different seas -the Baltic and the Mediterranean. The conception of Scotland here is primarily metaphorical, for, after all, England is also linked by paradigm Scotland can be imagined in relation to Britain, to its northern community, to its European neighbours, to its American allies, to the Scottish diaspora, and to the commonwealth. This is an international network of shifting connections and conflicting loyalties, and one that recognises, moreover, a complex and diverse world. The organisers of and audiences for the exhibition wondered what exactly it meant to look at the empire from Scotland and to look over or back at Scotland from the empire. There was, for some, a fierce pride that the Scots 'made the Empire' (Gibb 1938: 30-31); the Pageant of Empire celebrated the story of 'Empire Building by Scots' and the Scottish diaspora (specifically imagined as Canadian, American, or Antipodean) were welcomed back to their ancestral home. The writer Neil Gunn wrote 'A Scots Welcome ' (1938) in the lifestyle magazine The Scottish Field, hailing those who came back from 'the colonies' to 'the soil that nourished the ancient root,' although he sardonically noted that ' all Colonial visitors may not boast some Scottish blood! There are many of us who may be prepared politely to say that they are none the worst for that' (20). There was a keen awareness that, for good and bad, Glasgow's wealth, power, and prosperity had come from a history of empire trade of such items as tobacco, cotton, jute, and linen in the eighteenth century, and a fear about what the disintegration of that trade might mean for Glasgow and Scotland as a whole.
On the other hand, instances of imperial jingoism contrasted sharply with a fear that Scotland's 'imperialist aggression' lay ' contrary to her national idealism' (Wood 1938: 15) The Voice of Scotland (the journal that MacDiarmid returned to co-edit in 1938) declared that 'the working class policy ought to be to break up the Empire to avert war and enable the workers to triumph in every country and colony. Scottish separation is part of the process of England's Imperial disintegration and is a help towards the ultimate triumph of the workers of the world' (Grieve 1938: 8). There was an uneasy awareness that Scotland identified with the colonised as well as the coloniser.
Criticisms of the empire (and the exhibition) can also be connected to a yearning to belong to a different, more egalitarian kind of international community. The writer Edwin Scouller offered a view of working class internationalism untethered to nationalism when he argued that 'improved transport and communications, cosmopolitan finance, the cinema, wireless, and a hundred other agencies are softening the lines of demarcation between the Chinese coolie and the Leith docker' (Scouller 1936: 79-80). A June 1936 article in the journal Outlook (a journal formed when The Modern Scot merged with The Scottish Standard in 1936) 9 suggests the importance of small nations such as Scotland in international networks such as the British commonwealth and the League of Nations, and advocates, in terms that continue to resonate with Scottish politics today, for 'the ideal of independent nationhood and common co-operation' (9-10). This alternative international community could be specifically European. In October 1936, Outlook found it 'impossible to accept the conclusion that foreign affairs are no concern of Scotland' and launched a series of articles on the 'foreign policies of the major European nations' that concluded with ' an outline of the part which a self-governing Scotland might play in the turmoil of Europe' (11). The novelist Dot Allan articulated her scepticism about 'the Scots Renaissance movement and other rallied movements, which, in my opinion, tend to cut us off from the rest of the world,' arguing, 'I think, in fact, that a United States of Europe wouldn't be at all a bad idea, and there doesn't seem to be any reason why it wouldn't work ' (qtd. in Burgess 1989: 133) 1928-1955. Routledge, 2017 Exhibition. Tiny human figures scurry around his feet, while he points his sword northwards with a beneficent expression on his face. In the background are the mountains of the highlands and there is even a small airplane circling above the exhibition's Tait Tower. The slogan underneath the illustration reads 'Northward Ho!', an invocation that both draws attention to Scotland and celebrates it.

Conclusion: Flying Over Bellahouston
On the surface, the 1938 Empire Exhibition seems old-fashioned, wilfully utopian, and it will occur in a similar spirit as Bellahouston, and it will certainly be fascinating to see how it negotiates such complex and competing narratives of national and international identities. To cast our eyes back to the 1938 Empire Exhibition at this particular historical moment, then, enables a richer understanding of a knotty inheritance of conflicting national identities and international affiliations that has never quite been resolved.