This text challenges our understanding of the modern museum. Suggesting that we view the public museum not just as a place of instruction but as a reformatory of manners which provides for a wide range of regulated social routines and performances, Tony Bennett places the museum at the centre of modern relations of culture and government. Juxtaposing the museum's development alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition and interpreting these as interacting technologies of progress, Bennett throws new light on the relations between modern forms of official and popular culture. Case studies include a consideration of the role of evolutionary ideas in organizing the representations of 19th-century museums, fairs and exhibitions as well as the itineraries of their visitors. Bennett illustrates the ways in which these cultural institutions relegated women and colonized peoples to inferior positions through intensive studies of ethnographic and anatomical collections. He also examines contemporary museums - from England's Beamish Museum to the Australian War Memorial.