The Landscapes & Material Culture of Empire

Abstract

Tobah Aukland-Peck’s essay offers a fascinating inquiry into empire through posters and seashells, seemingly mundane objects tied to a complex history of travel, advertising, oil, and empire. No longer solely the domain of Romantic painting wistfully imagining the expanses of empire under the guise of a serene landscape, this paper focuses on an aspect of material culture not often studied. Aukland-Peck argues that the “bucolic” domestic landscapes pictured throughout a number of posters advertising Shell’s enterprises neglected to depict the ravages wrought on the landscape by empire and capital in an effort to achieve material and corporate gain at a moment of Britain’s anxiety about its own status. Focusing on posters with their catchy phrases designed to foster interest in Britain, Aukland-Peck shifts our way of thinking about the proliferation of empire towards the innocuous nature of cost-effective, reproducible media. The “visual responses to war within the pastoral nostalgia”, as so poignantly articulated by the author, point towards the dialectical constructions laden within the imperial geography of empire and its visual culture. The presence of a peaceful landscape reveals a dialect of destruction; through visions of the countryside, the absence of imperial geography becomes present; and the relationship between the metropole and colony, as well as urban and rural, continue to be co-constitutive.