Marketing Modernity, Selling Hazeline: A Comparative Study of Indian and Chinese Markets, 1908–1957

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores how the experiences of colonial modernity were constituted through global advertising by examining the transnational marketing of Hazeline Snow in early twentieth-century India and China. Manufactured by London-based pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome Company (BWC), Hazeline Snow was a globally circulated medical-cosmetic commodity that showcased the advance of colonial modernity in Asia in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the convergences and divergences in the textual and visual representations of gender, beauty, and race in Chinese and Indian Hazeline Snow advertisements, this article illustrates the uneven ways in which capitalism created, disseminated, and adapted to different knowledge systems in distinct colonial contexts. It argues that modern beauty ideals promoted by cosmetics advertising were not simply the diffusion of a hegemonic Western modernity driven by the symbiotic expansion of capitalism and colonialism, but were shaped by the entanglement of global transformations and local conditions, including pre-colonial aesthetic value systems, inter-Asia exchanges, and competition from both local and other colonial actors. As ‘Snows’ became a specific kind of Asian commodity in their own right, the meanings of being modern and being beautiful was no longer the preserve of a specific company or a generalized ‘West’.