In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, World's Fairs were an especially popular forum that lauded Euro-America as central to global connectivity and progress. Inaugurated with the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, World's Fairs celebrated technological advancements that helped order the modern world and articulated ideational standards that set progress according to Western measures. World's Fairs often confirmed confidence in Euro-American leadership and superiority through the demonstration of racial difference — the display of the “ethnographic other.” This display usually took place on the popular Midway entertainment sections of the Fairs and was often staged in stark dichotomies of “savage” and “civilized.” This perpetuation of the ethnographic other at World's Fairs was part of the projection and maintenance of difference which, as argued by Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, “justified different intensities of violence” in an imperial world (1997, 4). A rich literature demonstrates how World's Fairs were profound cultural sites that contributed to the Euro-American control of others in the pursuit of empire.

Historically, there was perhaps no more readily available platform upon which to construct stark racial difference than peoples of African descent. The construction of the savage against the backdrop of the civilized provided a rationale for both pronounced and everyday Euro-American violence against peoples of African descent. This violence occurred throughout the long sweep of slavery and continued post-emancipation into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with, for example, the proliferation of lynching in the American South. Further, this creation of difference provided an apologetic for the ongoing denial of equality and rights to peoples of African descent subject to Euro-American control. peoples of African descent subject to Euro-American control.

However, a continuum of difference always accompanied dichotomies of savage and civilized. In the imperial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the most notable “complement” was the progressive zeal for uplift. The imperial mission of uplift relied upon both the positioning of colonized people as inferior and the belief that this inferior status could be corrected. Hence, while World's Fairs invariably depicted people of color in subordinate positions, the very nature of a progressive scale implied that racial difference was not inherent or stable. Of course, this imperial progressivism rarely escaped its paternalist moorings long enough to consider this implication in terms of racial equality.