Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
The exhibition hall was called "Crystal Palace," the world's first prefabricated building. [1001 Days] "In fact the triumphant world of capitalism had its equivalent. The era of its global victory was initiated and punctuated by giant new rituals of self-congratulation, the Great International Exhibitions, each encased in a princely monument to wealth and technical progress--the Crystal Palace in London (1851), the Rotunda ('larger than St Peter's in Rome') in Vienna, each displaying the growing number and variety of manufactures, each attracting native and foreign tourists in astronomic quantities. . . . What were the reasons for this progress? Why did economic expansion accelerate so spectacularly in our period? . . . the railway. In the second place--and partly due to the railway, the steamer and the telegraph 'which finally represented the means of communication adequate to modern means of production'--the geographical size of the capitalist economy could suddenly multiply as the intensity of its business transactions increased. The entire globe became part of this economy." [Hobsbawm: Capital, p. 32-3]