International exhibitions were – supposedly – universal displays of human achievement. From the Great Exhibition onwards, the language used in many official publications grandly reinforced themes of universalism, cosmopolitanism, and monogenism. It was Prince Albert's speech at a Mansion House banquet in 1850 that first codified this narrative. Albert espoused a ‘confident brand of internationalism’, that saw ‘the distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe … gradually vanishing before the achievements of modern invention’. According to Albert, the Great Exhibition would provide ‘a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived’. Yet within the structures of the Great Exhibition and those that followed, was an inherent paradox: universalism might have been the aim, but objects were displayed in explicitly national terms.

Despite the official narratives, exhibitions were intrinsically nationalistic. With almost total control over the content, layout, and programme of an exhibition, the host nation unfailingly curated the presentation of different cultures in a hierarchy for its own benefit. The competitive aspects similarly contrasted art, technological developments, and manufactured products by country in a way that highlighted the achievements of the host. Thus, while exhibitions were presented as ‘microcosms that would summarize the entire human experience’, their hierarchies of display were ‘carefully articulated’ to portray different nations as occupying fixed places in a supposed global order. These nationalistic tendencies in representation are equally present in the British and colonial exhibitions studied here. In Britain, avowals of peace, progress, and universalism came only alongside the assertion of Britain's position as ‘the first industrialized nation’ and ‘most powerful and advanced state’. In Australia, commissioners consciously constructed self-promotional narratives about ‘striding forward on the world stage’, presenting an Australian national identity that conjured images of ‘a wealth of resources and progressive ideals’.

The age of exhibitions in the second half of the nineteenth century also coincided with the peak of European musical nationalism: a phenomenon often described as an attempt at ‘emancipation from the cultural hegemony of Teutonicism’, culminating in efforts to create individual, locally idiomatic, politically functional national musics. While this manifested in various ways – through the elevation of folk music, or the assertion that certain composers’ works were imbued with a ‘national spirit’ – many scholars argue that there is, in fact, rarely anything inherently national in music: that the discourse surrounding a work is often divorced from its creation.