In the mid-nineteenth century, when few Europeans had traveled overseas, anyone with a shilling or a franc could step into the cultures of other continents in their nation’s empire, at the London Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851) or in Paris at the Exposition Universelle (1855), where exhibits and other materials glorified and promoted the benefits of their empires. In the decades that followed, as the French Empire rapidly expanded, world’s fairs increasingly focused on the colonies and displayed economic and social concerns, products, and overseas infrastructure, as well as eugenics and racial violence in pavilions populated by flora, fauna, and, eventually, people. France’s colonial expansion and dissemination of propaganda were similar to those of Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, and Great Britain. By the end of World War I, France had entered what French historian Jean Suret-Canale has called the “golden age of colonialism”, having fortified their colonial holdings in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia, the French could rightly claim to have expanded their dominion to the four corners of the earth.

This point was celebrated in the summer of 1931 at the Paris Exposition Coloniale Internationale. In that world’s fair, imperialism was not a subtheme, but rather the explicit purpose; visitors could, as the government’s slogan advertised, have a “tour of the world in a day” touching down on continents and oceans that represented the breadth of France Overseas. The essays in this volume focus on the role of visual culture in these processes of national self-construction, using a collection of materials held in the Getty Research Institute (GRI) acquired from the Paris-based Achac Research Group archives. With contributions by art historians, curators, literary scholars, and historians - Pascal Blanchard, Peter J. Bloom, Michelle H. Craig, Charles Forsdick, Patricia A. Morton, David Murphy, Steven Nelson, Rebecca Peabody, Lauren Taylor, Frances Terpak, and Dominic Thomas - Visualizing Empire is a truly transdisciplinary work that aims to improve our contextualization and understanding as to how an official French visual culture served to display, define, and represent their empire, thereby normalizing the country’s colonial project and exposing citizens and subjects alike to racialized ideas of life in the empire. Contributors demonstrate how these archival holdings can be instrumentalized in order to foster broad interdisciplinary research.