The British Empire Exhibition was first conceived in 1902 by the British Empire League. Their inaugural meeting in January 1896 was full of nationalistic pomp with notions such as ‘No nation has a purer or nobler literature’ and thus ‘our mother tongue...bids fair to be the general language of the human race’. Their principal goals were promoting British trade and ‘to modify any laws or treaties which impede freedom of action’ on that front.
The idea was raised again in 1913 by one of the League’s founding members, the Scottish Canadian industrialist, Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona (1820-1914). He had been governor and principal shareholder of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Established by King Charles II in 1670, the royal charter stated that the British Empire would not claim land in the Americas settled by ‘British subjects, or “the Subjects of any other Christian Prince or State” meaning it did not consider the rights or sovereignty of Indigenous people at all. By the 18th century, the Canadian colonists’ attitude had grown yet more authoritarian as they sought to cling on to their monopoly in exploiting the people and natural resources of these lands. Sir George Simpson, administrator at the peak of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s power between 1820 and 1860 made his plans chillingly clear when he wrote shortly after his appointment that Indigenous Peoples “must be ruled with a rod of iron, to bring and to keep them in a proper state of subordination”.

Colonial exhibitions such as this propagated the myth of imperial European empires as a ‘civilising’ influence on the rest of the world whilst showing off the riches generated by colonised lands. Identified by ACHAC (a French decolonisation research group) as part of the third and final wave (1920-1940) of such exhibitions, they ultimately acted as a form of propaganda to promote a white supremacist racial hierarchy: ‘The British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in 1924-1925 and Glasgow in 1938 and the International Colonial Exhibition in Vincennes, France, in 1931 were the most emblematic of these during the interwar years.’
Human zoos were a large feature, with mocked up villages populated by 273 people on display from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, kept in compounds on the Wembley site for several months of the exhibition. The event programme claimed the Empire had ‘tamed these savages’ and brought widespread improvement to their lives. Postcards of the Nigerian, Sierra Leonean, and Ghanian villages were sold, with one of the most popular being ‘Princess Baa of Ashanti and her husband’ in front of the Gold Coast pavilion.

With 27 million visitors to Wembley over the two years of the exhibition, the cost of the event considerably overran, and the entire undertaking was considered a financial failure. The official follow-up report by the Commissioner for India for the British Empire Exhibition (published in 1925 by Government India Press, Calcutta) reveals that decolonisation criticisms of the exhibition were also widespread in the 1920s- criticisms the report weakly attempted to dispel as follows:
‘Considerable misapprehensions existed about the objects of the Exhibition. Reports were about that the object of the Exhibition was the exploitation of Indian resources for the benefit of foreign manufacturers and capitalists, that India was being already exploited, and that…as a result of the Exhibition, that there was a still more intensive exploitation. There was a general trade depression which lent colour to this sinister suggestion.’