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What Were World’s Fairs for? Catalysts for Trade-Based Urban Development in the Second Industrial Revolution

This essay proposes a new approach to world’s fairs. Local elites, representing manufacturing, banking, transportation, merchandizing, and commercial interests, organized pre–World War I expositions to create urban settings supporting trade and cultivating innovation on a long-term basis. These stimuli came in the form of systematized infrastructure and environmental improvements, resources for training technical workforce, educating public taste, and reputation building. Most historically important, the result was to constitute the public facet of the second industrial revolution, identified on the business side with new energy sources, integration of industrial production and consumption, transportation, and institutionalization of research allied with industry based on official reports and documents.