Reorienting identities at the imperial fairground: British Malaya and North Borneo

Grand exhibitions of commerce and manufacture were key events for the British Empire’s economy. The British Empire Exhibition of 1924–1925, for example, was expressly intended to reinvigorate British and colonial markets after the First World War by encouraging inter-colonial trade. This exhibition shaped appearances of wealth, industry and development throughout the empire with its regionally styled pavilion architecture, model villages, craft and industry displays, and ephemera. However, this event, and others like it, also drew prominent attention to the relationships between the peoples within the empire, shaping imperial subjecthood and proto-nationalism, and revealing conflicting ideas of identity construction. This paper examines the representations of British Malaya and North Borneo at the British Empire Exhibition, comparing them to those of the Malaya-Borneo Exhibition, a lesser-known event held in Singapore in 1922. It discusses how British administrators portrayed the material and cultural values of the region in relation to their wider economic and developmental programmes.

The British Empire Exhibition’s Malaya and Sarawak pavilions collected a number of separate colonies, states and companies together as two distinct entities, beginning a process of unifying the region and defining the identity of its peoples. In placing this exhibition alongside the localised Malaya-Borneo Exhibition, we see how these territories adapted their economic and cultural identities between different regional and global scales. These events show the shaping of a Malay identity alongside the effects of British modernisation, and how raw materials, regional crafts, and inter-colonial relations were re-cast for an international stage. The paper contributes to our understanding of how early twentieth century exhibitions sought to transform regional economies and identities, and how value was ascribed to the material culture of British Southeast Asia.