Seen From a Distance: Malayan Reporting on the 
Empire Exhibition Scotland 1938

In its design, the Empire Exhibition, Scotland of 1938 embraced a decidedly more modern image than its 1924 predecessor at Wembley. However, its narratives of inter-imperial community and inter-cultural understanding show that the two events were very similar, placing the nations of the British Empire on display and shaping their identity as imperial subjects. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as honorary president of the Empire Exhibition, Scotland, described its value as allowing the people of other countries to see and understand each other, and align themselves with British values in order to “strengthen their power of common effort.” But these matters of visibility raise questions of distance. How were the peoples of the many countries of the British Empire – who were supposedly to benefit from it – expected to see this exhibition when few had the luxury to visit Glasgow and enter it themselves? From a colonial perspective, could one ever engage with an imperial exhibition located in Britain?

This paper takes the Empire Exhibition’s Malayan Exhibit, which formed part of the Colonial Pavilion, as a case study to consider how people in British Malaya were encouraged to view the exhibition at a distance. Using archival and promotional material I discuss the exhibition’s design, which was initially displayed for local audiences in Kuala Lumpur, before being shipped to Scotland (and later to New York for the 1939 World’s Fair). I then focus on popular media sources from the period to understand how impressions of the Malayan Exhibit and the Colonial Pavilion were transmitted back to Southeast Asia to provide people in British Malaya with a way of seeing the Glasgow exhibition from afar. I show that from the viewpoint of the British colonies of Southeast Asia, the Empire Exhibition, Scotland was visible as a mediated event, a ‘second space’ in Edward Soja’s terminology. It was selectively represented through the colonial press, which extended the broader exhibition narrative to offer local audiences a mental image of their position within the British Empire and within the pageantry of Glasgow. Through this case study, the paper contributes to more detailed understanding of colonial displays at the Empire Exhibition, Scotland. The paper also develops an expanded idea of the ‘visitorship’ of imperial exhibitions, through its understanding of the exhibition as a media event that was relayed back to the colonial contexts that it put on display.