Moving Frontiers of Empire: Production, Travel and Transformation through Technologies of Display

Over the past two decades there has been a growing interest in the exploration of "transnational history". This work has focused in general on understanding the "movement, ebb and circulation" of ideas across borders and in particular on the introduction, transmission, reception and appropriation of ideas through the process of cultural transfer. This interest in the transnational and cultural transfer at the same time has been paralleled by an increasing use of spatialised approaches to understand the making and maintenance of knowledge and the influence in particular of geographies of texts, talk and testimony. Historians in recent years, whether operating within a "transnational" or a "spatial" paradigm, have given increasing attention to the role of exhibitions in the circulation of ideas and practices and to the power of the visual in carrying knowledge across borders. This article is an attempt to engage with methodological questions associated with adopting a transnational or spatial approach by exploring two case studies involving texts, travel, and translation. The first case study, from the late nineteenth century to the period up to the Second World War, considers the transmission role of annual reports of a charitable institution dedicated to projects of social reform which linked England, Canada and Australia. In particular, attention is focused on the construction, function and reception of photographic evidence "displayed" in the reports. The second case study is from the latter half of the twentieth century and analyses campaigns for textbook revisions that drew inspiration and resources from people and ideas that journeyed across national boundaries. The analysis here focuses on the formation of communities of interpretation whose coming together enabled the production of new kinds of ideas and their representation in new educational spaces and technologies. In choosing what appear to be thematically distinct topics from different periods, the article is concerned with the publication of different kinds of educational texts--some directly didactic, others more informally so; it considers mechanisms for travel in two different periods and explores the ways in which "reliable knowledge" travels.