During their hegemony in world affairs, the English exported persons, commodities, and texts to regions that they absorbed into a widening pale of influence. Discussion of these ventures has consumed a vast literature. What once seemed to be a simple matter of transporting Protestantism (or convicts) into an overseas wilderness or making distant lands safe for English farming and trade now seems a matter too complex to be captured in a metaphor or an alliterative catchphrase. Yet it remains a matter of historical fascination that a relatively small archipelago off the coast of Europe not only could become the first “modern” nation-state but could then transform itself into a vast global empire, ultimately making it seem as if the affairs of this proverbial workshop encompassed world history itself. For many years, such success seemed too evident for investigation, and scholarly attention turned toward explaining how this achievement unraveled or declined. The result has been a quest for detailed precision and microhistorical reconstruction on the part of those who have adopted an “empirical,” geopolitical approach to imperialism and an outpouring of criticism from those who, on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, have penned polemical classics whose evocative, if not evidentiary, power envisioned revolution as historical destiny and a means of filling the intellectual and political void left by imperial evacuation. Their disagreements notwithstanding, however, both categories of imperial commentary display relative innocence of the paradox that imperial power represented: that, despite voluble criticism, it enjoyed eclipsing success for a time and produced effects whose mysteries continue to survive postcolonial deconstruction.

The nineteenth century was the century of the penitentiary. Public and physical punishments (from whipping to the death penalty) were gradually replaced by the less visible, less corporal sanction of imprisonment. By the start of the Victorian era, imprisonment was the predominant penalty in the system of judicial punishments. For every 1,000 offenders sentenced at higher and summary courts in 1836 for serious (or indictable) offenses, 685 were punished by imprisonment in local prisons. By midcentury, moreover, sentences of penal servitude in convict prisons were plugging the gap left by the end of transportation to Australia. The three hundred or so local prisons in the 1830s, to which offenders were sent for anywhere between one day and two years (though typically for terms of less than three months), were locally controlled until 1877 and were less than uniform in regime. The separate system of prison discipline (or cellular isolation) increasingly prevailed over the silent system (or associated, silent labor), but it was subject to considerable local modification. Convict prisons were run by central government with less variability.

On April 30, 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the New York World's Fair open. Moments later a flood of eager humanity surged onto the one-and-a-quarter thousand acre former municipal dump in Flushing Meadow, Queens, now home to what the New York Herald Tribune termed “the mightiest exposition ever conceived and built by man.” While Europe shivered on the brink of a war, the United States focused its attention on the distinctive silhouette of a seven hundred foot spire and a globe two hundred feet wide: the “Trilon” and the “Perisphere,” centerpieces and emblems of the New York World's Fair. The fair stretched around their base in a teeming sprawl of concrete and electric lights. Its precincts embraced all manner of amusements, including a vast funfair with such thematic attractions as a Cuban village, an African jungle, and a Merrie England area. While most of the visitors seemed intent on enjoying themselves, the fair was intended by its organizers to serve a serious educative purpose. Its theme was “building the world of tomorrow,” with two-thirds of the fair ground given over to exhibitions by corporations, U.S. federal agencies, and foreign governments. The fair's corporate exhibitors vied with each other for the most spectacular vision of what this world might be. General Motors offered the “Futurama” exhibit designed by Norman Bel Geddes, in which 28,000 visitors a day traveled on a conveyor belt ride through a projection of the American landscape forward twenty-five years, to a Utopia liberated by the automobile. In a similar vein, inside the Perisphere visitors could view a diorama of a future metropolis, “Democracity.” But popular acclaim lay elsewhere.