Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
Selling Britishness : Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire, Paperback / softback Book

Selling Britishness : Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire Paperback / softback

Paperback / softback

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours

Description

From the 1920s until the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand filled British shop windows, newspaper columns, and cinema screens with “British to the core” Canadian apples, “British to the backbone” New Zealand lamb, and “All British” Australian butter.

In remarkable yet forgotten advertising campaigns, prime ministers, touring cricketers, “lady demonstrators,” and even boxing kangaroos were pressed into service to sell more Dominion produce to British shoppers.

But as they sold apples and butter, these campaigns also sold a Dominion-styled British identity. Selling Britishness explores the role of commodity marketing in creating Britishness.

Dominion settlers considered themselves British and marketed their commodities accordingly.

Meanwhile, ambitious Dominion advertising agencies set up shop in London to bring British goods, like Ovaltine, back to the dominions and persuade their fellow citizens to buy British.

Conventionally nationalist narratives have posited the growth of independent national identities during the interwar period, though some have suggested imperial sentiment endured.

Felicity Barnes takes a new approach, arguing that far from shaking off or relying on any lasting sense of Britishness, Dominion marketing produced it.

Selling Britishness shows that when constructing Britishness, advertisers employed imperial hierarchies of race, class, and gender.

Consumption worked to bolster colonialism, and advertising extended imperial power into the everyday. Drawing on extensive new archives, Selling Britishness explores a shared British identity constructed by marketers and advertisers during advertising’s golden age.

Information

Other Formats

Save 17%

£28.99

£23.85

Only a few left - usually despatched within 24 hours
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information