Advertising Empire: Consumerism and the Spatial Imaginary of the British Empire

Advertising Empire:Consumerism and the Spatial Imaginary of the British Empire Daniel P. Graham In the wake of the First World War, many in Britain feared the economy was flagging. War entailed high costs, unemployment was rising and international competition, particularly from the United States, threatened Britain's position in maritime trade. In this climate of uncertainty "many businessmen… and politicians of all persuasions… looked to the British Empire overseas for salvation."2 The war had expanded Britain's imperial dominion, and many viewed it as "a route to Britain's long-term economic survival, to her political security in the wider world, to higher standards of living in Britain and perhaps, some hoped, to social harmony, social stability, and political quiescence at home."3 For Britain, the economic support of the empire could only be realized by imperial consumers purchasing British manufactured goods, and British consumers purchasing goods from within the empire to support those protected markets. However, this increased reliance on colonial markets arose while empire as an institution was being drawn into question across Europe. Movements for national independence were successful in parts of the former Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires, and demands for independence were being voiced by representatives from Egypt, India, China, Korea and Vietnam. Empire seemed under threat at the exact moment that many in Britain believed they needed it most.4 To combat these anticolonial sentiments and rebrand the British empire in more mutually beneficial and voluntary terms, the British government supported a concerted propaganda campaign overseen by the Empire Marketing Board. This propaganda often took the form of advertisements of colonial products available in Britain, with the implied or direct message that purchasing imperial goods was a patriotic act which would strengthen the economies of the empire and Britain itself. These campaigns of advertisement-as-propaganda deployed a specific semiotic vocabulary to reference the colonial contexts from which commodities were extracted, and connected those colonial contexts to sites of product consumption in Britain, especially the British home. By creating an imagined spatial closeness between Britain and the empire, linked by consumption, these advertisements served to strengthen an imagined community of empire. This imagined community was predicated on mutually beneficial economic relationships, rather than a sense of nationality or cultural sameness, thereby counteracting the rhetoric of anticolonial nationalisms which were on the rise elsewhere. Some products, especially food products, were both imported from the empire and produced in Britain. Competition between domestic products and imperial imports was heated, leading to the adoption of the marketing slogan "Buy Empire Goods from Home and Overseas" as a compromise between protectionist factions in Britain and the dominions.5 By analyzing a series of commodity-focused propaganda campaigns, both in print and in film, this article will show that government propagandists consciously connected British consumers to British colonialism by highlighting the colonial origins of familiar British goods. In so doing, these propagandists and advertisers created an imagined space of empire in which colonial contexts of commodity extraction were portrayed as part of the British home. Commercial advertisers adopted many of the same methods and symbolism employed in government propaganda to link colonial commodities to consumer goods and marketed these simultaneously through cinemagazines. The idea of an imperial spatial imaginary has been used previously to discuss boundaries,6 and the sense of imperial dominion felt by visitors from the metropole to the colonial territory have been addressed in the context of other empires,7 but the spatial imaginary has not been previously addressed through the economic relationship between home and empire. This article deploys the concept of the spatial imaginary to address perceptions of colonial connection, offers a novel method for considering advertising in a colonial framework, and connects larger trends in the history of the British empire between the World Wars to the histories of advertising and consumption. The creation of this spatial imaginary is also intertwined with the idea of an imagined community of empire predicated on consumption and consumerism. This work will analyze a series of posters produced by the Empire Marketing Board Publicity Committee between 1926 and 1933, as well as films and a series of cinemagazines focused on consumer goods and the...