A temporary market or commercial enterprise organized to promote trade, where buyers and sellers gather, that has assumed an increasingly important role in international trade during the twentieth century.
Trade fairs are organized at regular intervals, generally at the same location and time of year, and usually last for several weeks. In Europe and in Asia, especially, they are popular, but almost every country has at least one major annual international exposition, from one industry or branch of industrial production to general exhibits of goods and merchandise.
By definition, fairs are large organized gatherings, occurring at regularly spaced intervals, to which merchants come from distant regions. The modern fair stems from the periodic gatherings of merchants that were a prominent economic institution of Europe in the Middle Ages. To wit, the word “fair” (foire in French) is derived from the Latin feriae, meaning “feast,” indicating the close relation between medieval fairs and feasts of the early Christian church, while the German word for fair, Messe, is derived from the Latin missa, meaning “mass.”
Exhibitions, which can encompass a variety of uses, are sometimes called expositions; these are large extravaganzas sometimes called “world fairs” or “international expositions,” a term frequently applied to an organized public fair or display of industrial and artistic productions that is designed to promote trade and to reflect cultural progress. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some fairs have been called expositions and some expositions have been called fairs, but the general distinction is that fairs traditionally are gatherings for immediate trade, and expositions are a form of advertisement.
Expositions are usually considered a product of the nineteenth century and are held at greater intervals than fairs or only on certain occasions, such as the Genoa and Seville Expositions of 1992 that celebrated the discovery of the New World; Christopher Columbus was born in Genoa, and he left for his great voyage in 1492 from the Spanish seaport.
While expositions are not trade fairs per se, where goods or services are sold directly, one of the major functions is the promotion of tourism and trade among countries. They last longer than fairs, usually no more than six months, and serve primarily to introduce businesspeople and interested spectators to new technical and industrial developments and to the arts. International expositions began in 1851 with the Crystal Palace in London.
Evidence of the existence of fairs is sparse until the Middle Ages, which suggests that fairs historically have been a European phenomenon. In the preclassical world, it seems likely that gatherings similar to fairs were held in connection with religious feasts in the Mesopotamian valley, Syria, Palestine, and Arabia. Caravans of Phoenicians whose trade contacts extended westward around the Mediterranean visited some of these primitive fairs.
In ancient China, fairs were held only in periods of political disunity, for example, the Market of the Currents of the Four Cardinal Points held about 500 C.E. at Luoyang and the periodic fairs for medicines and silkworms held at Sichuan between the ninth and twelfth centuries.
In classical Greece, besides markets held along the boundaries of the city-states and protected by special market gods, annual fairs were held in conjunction with feasts of principal gods. Spring and autumn fairs were held at Tithorea during the feasts honoring Isis; at dawn of the second day, merchants opened their stalls for trade in slaves, cattle, clothes, silver, and gold. Similar fairs were held along with the Olympian and Isthmian feasts, with special protection granted to merchants.
Roman commerce was not centralized enough to be conducive to fairs, but some were held on the eastern frontiers of the Roman empire along the caravan routes. The fall of the empire during the third century was due, partly, to the decline of trade, industry, and towns and of the merchants and artisans.
The only reliable evidence regarding the existence of fairs in western Europe before the eleventh century pertains to one at the abbey of Saint Denis near Paris. Four documents, written between 629 and 759, describe a fair granted in 629 to the monks of this abbey by Dagobert I, the Merovingian king of the Franks. Held annually to honor Saint Denis, the fair began on October 9 and lasted four weeks.
When the fair was in session, all trade in the area had to be transacted there, and the monks received all the tolls and dues levied on the trade. Well located along a route to Paris, the Saint Denis fair was the only one to flourish in this period. It became a noted center for trade in wine, honey, grain, wood, salt, and dyes. English, Spanish, Provençal, Saxon, Frisian, Lombard, and Frankish traders frequented it. But during a period when Europe was filled with large agrarian estates, this fair served mostly as a periodic exchange center for natural products.
With the economic revival of western Europe, fairs became a prominent economic institution. The revival, in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, produced a merchant class, towns, trade, and industry. Fairs appeared at strategically located sites along overland routes that connected southern and northern Europe, along rivers, and at some maritime ports. Every area of Europe af fected by the economic revival had fairs, but the most significant were those of Champagne, located halfway between Italy and Provence in the south and Flanders. Other important fairs included Provins and Troyes, each of which lasted about six weeks.
The success of the Champagne fairs was because of their excellent location and the enlightened economic policies of the counts of Champagne. Aware of the potential economic benefits, the counts gave protection, assessed minimal taxes, and prescribed regulations for the collection of debts and the fulfillment of contracts. They also established special courts, where merchants could have their differences settled rapidly and equitably according to a sort of international “law of merchants” (jus mercatorum), and initiated an efficient system of administration of the law.
At the peak of the Champagne fairs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, merchants came from the Middle East and Africa as well as from all over Europe. The most prominent merchants were the Flemish, who dealt in wool cloth; the Italians, who introduced advanced financial techniques into northern Europe; and those from the Hanseatic League in Germany. A thirteenth-century document lists all the products sold and the place of origin. Among these products, from over forty areas and towns, were several varieties of wool cloth, silk, linen, cotton, gold, and silver-threaded cloths, along with leather goods, medicines, condiments, dyes, cereals, vegetables, livestock, fish, fruit, oils, cheese, beer, wine, precious metals and stones, jewelry, and raw materials such as wood.
To facilitate credit, the Italian merchants in the twelfth century introduced what became the bill of exchange (letter of fair), a written promise to pay a sum of money in a place other than that in which the debt was contracted. By the thirteenth century, the fairs became a place where debts were settled and loans were contracted—the financial practices that facilitated the economic development of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—and the great age of the fairs took form.
Fairs began to decline at the beginning of the fourteenth century as merchants ceased to travel and concentrated their efforts at one site and transportation was turned over to specialists. When direct shipping opened up between Italy, southern France, and the Flemish and English ports in the fourteenth century, overland trade slumped and there was no need for a midway meeting place. In 1285, after Champagne was annexed to France, increased taxation drove trade to other fairs, which were disrupted further by the Franco-Flemish wars at the beginning of the fourteenth century and later by the Hundred Years’ War. But as fairs declined, the French kings granted special trading privileges to other areas of France to stimulate the economy of the surrounding regions, most notably Lyon, which emerged in the fifteenth century as a most important French fair.
Although the fair remained an essential economic institution as late as the nineteenth century, changes in the techniques of trade and industry contributed to its decline in the intervening centuries. Permanent trading centers developed as the result of the construction of canals, the improvement of roads, and the initiation of regular posts. In the eighteenth century, the fair suffered further when business competed with wandering peddlers in the countryside and with commercial travelers who exhibited sample wares to merchants in villages and towns and took orders for future delivery, an early type of mail-order catalog. By the end of the nineteenth century, the traditional fair was mostly found in countries such as Russia, India, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
The fairs that continued into the second half of the nineteenth century provided the opportunity for merchants to inspect sample products and to order in bulk for subsequent distribution at retail outlets. The best known of such fairs was that at Leipzig, which became a showplace for the products of imperial Germany in the pre–World War I era. After the war, the Leipzig fair was revived and joined by another at Königsberg, whose primary purpose was to stimulate German trade in eastern Europe.
More than 700 trade fairs are held each year, especially in Europe, and provide American corporations access to a market of over $3 trillion that buys roughly over $80 billion in U.S. goods and services annually. Among the most familiar are the Paris Air Show, which displays the latest in aviation technology; the Hannover Fair (Germany), perhaps the world’s largest industrial show; and the International Spring Gift Fair at Birmingham, England, which is England’s largest consumer products trade show. Other well-known commercial fairs, along with the Leipzig Fair, are the Swiss Industries Fair, the Pakistan International Fair, the International Trade Fair of Thessaloníki (Greece), the Zagreb International Trade Fair (Croatia), and the Paris International Fair. Some popular specialized fairs include the International Textile and Clothing Industry Exhibition (Ghent, Belgium), the Canadian Chemical and Process Equipment Exhibition (Toronto, Canada), the International Furniture Fair (Cologne, Germany), as well as fairs in Frankfurt (books), in Nuremberg (toys), and in Berlin (tourism and travel). The most recent addition took place in Havana, Cuba, in September 2002, at the first trade show of U.S. food and agricultural products since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, an event made possible only after President Bill Clinton approved the easing of the forty-year trade embargo against Cuba in 2000. This development allowed American food to be sold to Cuba for humanitarian purposes, providing the country with paid cash up front.
The first manufacturers’ fair was held in the Masonic Hall in New York City in the late 1820s under the auspices of the American Institute in the City of New York to encourage and to promote domestic industry in agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, and the arts in the United States. There are, however, rudiments of fairs in ancient times with biblical references to great feasts held at important population centers that included markets, athletic games, and visiting dignitaries. During medieval times, great fairs were held at major crossroads of trade as a mixture of commerce, entertainment, and theater. They were basically international to the extent that they involved several regions, principalities, and kingdoms. In England, the fairs were national and a blend of trade show and public entertainment. From these fairs, the industrial exhibitions were developed in France and then spread to England, where they were sponsored by mechanics institutes to teach scientific principles to the working class. The mechanics institute exhibitions included scientific, mechanical, as well as exotic and fine arts sections that merged into the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition and then into the international expositions that followed.
These fairs moved beyond being mere showcases of industrial progress to involve such things as the inclusion of special themes and more nonindustrial features, such as fine art and amusements. All demonstrated a strong streak of nationalism, boasting the national image and the people’s pride in it. Fair managers, often with strong government support, strived to heighten nationalistic features on behalf of the host country to make it look better than its rivals. In the United States, the Smithsonian Institution and its National Museum had major responsibility for American participation in mid-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expositions. Congress appropriated funds, sometimes right before the exposition was to open, which was a standard procedure until World War I. With no control or regulation of fairs, the latter part of the 1800s and the early 1900s saw several expositions, some major events, like Chicago’s 1893 extravaganza. Others were celebrations of colonial empire, for example, those fairs held in Australia and in New Zealand.
In other countries, there was more substantive support from the federal government. In 1928, the Bureau of International Exhibitions (BIE) was established to regulate the fairs industry, including the number of fairs to be held at a given time and the levels of participation (universal or specialized). The BIE has been consistent in certifying expositions and fairs, with the result that these events are better planned and held at more regular intervals.
The first international exposition was held in London in 1851 at the urging of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, who believed that such a function would introduce the world to British goods and manufacturing processes, stimulating demand as visitors from the Continent and the rest of the world became acutely aware of the superiority of British goods, machinery, and production techniques. Immediately, orders for British goods showed a sharp increase. The exposition was a tremendous success, housed in the magnificent Crystal Palace, which had been built for the occasion in Hyde Park. The United States was represented by over 500 of its products, among which were such industrial innovations as the McCormick reaper, the Colt revolver, and Goodyear India rubber products, as well as a display of chewing tobacco.
Not to be outdone by the British, the French sponsored a number of international expositions in the nineteenth century. Napoléon III, like Prince Albert, was determined for Paris to present an even more beautiful and amazing spectacle than the one at the Crystal Palace. In 1855, the Paris exposition was unfolded in a huge building, the Palais de l’Industrie, generally called the “cathedral of commerce” on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. Its model was the Crystal Palace.
Belgium has consistently excelled in expositions. Because the nation had been a center of international trade and finance since the Middle Ages, the presentation of expositions has come naturally to Belgian businessmen and industrialists, as indicated by such successful expositions at Liege (1930), Brussels (1935), and the controversial Brussels Universal and International Exhibition of 1958, which presented the vast panorama of international humanistic development and hosted the Cold War propaganda rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The first American exposition to draw large numbers of people and promote American goods, although it did not generate a profit, was the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, which was planned to celebrate a century of American independence and to promote national unity after the Civil War. The 8 million visitors not only saw the products and arts of the world, but also recognized that the United States had become a powerful industrial nation with a genius for invention and production, as indicated by Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, Thomas A. Edison’s duplex telegraph, Isaac Singer’s sewing machine, and the typewriter. Then the twentieth century began with the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo (1901), which promoted the social and commercial interests of the states of the Western Hemisphere.
In the United States, two agencies took over responsibility from the Smithsonian Institution for expositions: the U.S. Department of Commerce for fairs held in the United States and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) for those held outside the country. The USIA derives this authority from the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, which was popularly known as the Fulbright-Hays Act (Public Law 87–256).
Between 1958, when the first major post–World War II exposition was held, to the present date, several expositions have been held with mixed success. One of the most controversial was the Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles (Brussels, Expo ’58), the first universal exposition held after the war, which is best remembered for the standoff in Cold War propaganda between the American and Soviet pavilions as they promoted their ideologies and products amid international tension.
In 1962, the Century 21 Exposition, or Seattle World’s Fair, drew 48 countries as exhibitors and 9.7 million visitors, and was considered the first financially successful U.S. fair. It presented a preview of the type of life promised for the twenty-first century through scientific advances. The main symbol was the 607-foot steel and glass Space Needle that was topped by a revolving, glass-enclosed restaurant. The Space Needle and other structures were retained for a new, permanent civic center.
The Universal and International Exhibition (Montreal, Expo ’67), held on two man-made islands in the Saint Lawrence River, boosted tourism and trade and commemorated Canada’s Centennial of Confederation in a six-month period that attracted over 50 million persons to its 166 pavilions (62 of them built by participating nations), more than 200 boutiques, and 76 restaurants. The general theme of “Man and His World” unified the displays.
The Okinawa Ocean Exposition (1975) was the first and largest forum of its kind devoted entirely to the seas, and it drew most Japanese government and private-sector managers of oceanic enterprises to Okinawa with conferences, trade shows, and conventions that concentrated on special aspects of oceanography.
The World Exposition held at Vancouver, British Columbia, under the theme “World in Motion, World in Touch” (Expo ’86), emphasized advances in transportation and communication. This fair was a commercial success; it enhanced U.S.-Canadian relations, and it benefited from the terrorism scare in Europe that caused many Americans to stay home that summer. Instead, they traveled to Vancouver to the world’s fair.
Australia’s World Exposition (Expo ’88), held in Brisbane, took place in the same year Australia celebrated its bicentennial. Despite its distance, it was another financial success with its theme of recreation and leisure. The U.S. Pavilion, with its artifacts from several American halls of fame and the continual demonstrations by athletes in the pavilion’s courtyard, was one of the most popular attractions at the fair, but other countries benefited as well. The theme and the presentations combined to bring visitors to a city that was not that easy to reach, and this, in turn, sparked big sales in the gift shops and restaurants. Most important, it strengthened trade relations between the host country and its participating countries, including the United States—one of its major trading partners.
The Columbus Quincentennial Exposition in Seville (Expo ’92) was supposed to be Spain’s international emergence as a democracy in its final year before full integration into the European Community, but it presented many problems for the United States, beginning with a presentation budget that the U.S. Congress slashed considerably, resulting in a limited American presence.
At Genoa (1992), the USIA worked with Amway officials, who provided some major funding, but the next year, at Taejon (1993), Amway administered American participation, this time with advice only from USIA officials. Even though this was the first time the private sector took responsibility for U.S. participation at an exposition, corporations were allowed to promote their brands and to stimulate sale of their products. This was to be the pattern at all future fairs in which the United States participated, but it ended at the next fair, Lisbon (1998). After this, the U.S. Department of State decided that the United States would no longer participate at international expositions. This was a blow to U.S. trade relations and caused ill will, which the United States experienced at Hannover, Germany (2000). The U.S. withdrawal from the exposition was considered an insult to U.S.-German relations. Ironically, the American withdrawal came after the designated U.S. commissioner general displayed the floor plans for the U.S. Pavilion.
Martin J. Manning
See also: Crystal Palace.
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Auger, Hugh A. Trade Fairs and Exhibitions. London: Business Publications, 1967.
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Findling, John E., and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds. Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851–1988. Westport: Greenwood, 1990.
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———. A Guide to World Fairs and Festivals. Westport: Green-wood, 1985.
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