Empire Marketing Board Research Articles

An Empire of ‘Growth and Nurture’: Agriculture, Documentary Film, and Development in Britain's Empire Marketing Board, 1926–1933

Writing in the mid-1940s, the British civil servant Sir Stephen Tallents would reflect that the interwar period saw a shift in terms of how ‘thoughtful Britons’ viewed their empire: less in terms of ‘machinery and organisation’ and more in terms of ‘growth and nurture’. This essay interprets Tallents’ remarkable observation in light of the history of an organisation with which his career was closely associated: the Empire Marketing Board (1926–33). By examining together the diverse activities of this organisation, which ranged from funding agricultural, ecological, and economic research to producing documentary films, this essay contextualises the emergence of Tallents’ view of imperial growth and development.

Britain’s Empire Marketing Board and the failure of soft trade policy, 1926–33

Abstract Before 1932, Britain’s essentially free-trade policy left barely any scope for reciprocating the preferential tariffs that the Dominions applied to Britain’s exports. Thus, Britain attempted to reciprocate by means of a “soft” trade policy aimed at increasing Britain’s imports from the empire through wide-reaching publicity coordinated by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB). This article, the first econometric assessment of the EMB, argues that there was not a differential increase in the volume of those imports advertised by the EMB. Principal arguments for this failure are that British consumers were frequently unaware of the geographic origin of many commodities and that they tended to identify company brand more than country of origin.

Visualizing Empire: Cyprus and the Colonial Travelogue Film in the 1920s

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which the British colonial government used cinema to represent Cyprus to audiences in Britain during the 1920s and early 1930s. The primary focus is the troubled production and exhibition history of the 1929 film Cyprus, but the article also considers the earlier production Cyprus Cinematograph Film (1924), plus two later sound films derived from material in the Cyprus film: Almost Arcady (1930) and A Mediterranean Island (1932). I argue that these films reflect the Cyprus government’s filmmaking inexperience, as well as their difficulty in determining how best to showcase their colonial project to domestic audiences. As a result, the films reveal conflicting impulses in their representation of the island, soberly cataloguing the historical and geographical features of the island on the one hand, but also seeking to exoticise an unfamiliar environment and population for western consumption. The article concludes by comparing the filmmaking efforts of the Cyprus government with contemporaneous films produced by the Italian government in the nearby Dodecanese islands and by the British government through the Empire Marketing Board.

Selling the Empire?: Marketing and the Demise of the British World, c.1920–1960

ABSTRACT This article uses a study of the politics of marketing and advertising to consider the role that British World collaboration played in consumer politics in the UK and the Dominions between the 1920s and 1950s. We will assess how politicians and businesspeople in the Dominions responded to the Empire Marketing Board’s efforts to encourage the habit of ‘Buying British’ in the inter-war years, as well as exploring the activities of the leading American marketing agency, J. Walter Thompson. The article concludes with a discussion of how the politics of patriotic trade was recast in the 1950s. While this was a cause which had taken on different forms in Australia, Canada and South Africa during the 1930s, in each country its advocates shared a wider concern with imperial development. And yet, changes in the advertising and marketing industries, and the growth of market research, cut across efforts to promote the consumer habit of buying imperially. By the early 1960s patriotic trade campaigns in the ‘old’ Dominions were nationally focused and shorn of their earlier ‘Britannic’ identity.

Design in a changing world: MacDonald Gill’s large-scale decorative North Atlantic Map in the Queen Mary’s 1st class dining saloon, 1936

British architect, commercial artist, mural painter, and lettering designer MacDonald Gill (1884-1947) is regarded as one of the leading British graphic designers of the early 20th century but, after a period of comparative neglect, has re-emerged a century later as a major figure in British graphic design history. Well known to many millions of viewers in the earlier decades of the 20th century, his visually sumptuous and striking poster work was widely experienced in Britain through his Wonderground Map of London Town (1914) [Figure 1], an above the surface pictorial map covering the geographical spread of the London Underground system. Other MacDonald Gill work was known all around the world through posters and other publicity for Britain’s Empire Marketing Board (EMB, 1926-1933) and other state organisations; at its height, the British Empire covered about 25% of the world’s land surface. He was also widely commissioned for mural paintings including the imposing large-scale pictorial map of the North Atlantic for the First Class Dining Room of the celebrated Cunard Ocean transatlantic ocean liner, the RMS Queen Mary, whose maiden voyage took place in 1936. It is this large-scale visualisation of the North Atlantic Map of the sea voyage between the two capital cities of London and New York, epitomising what were in essence seen as representative of the old and the new worlds, that provides the major focus of this article.

Selling empire: a historical perspective on selling foreign products in domestic markets

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Empire Marketing Board used enhanced marketing tools and approaches to reduce British consumer bias against foreign products. The paper asks: “How have marketers historically increased foreign exports to domestic markets?” Design/methodology/approach The paper comprises an historical account of the Empire Marketing Board during the 1920s and 1930s. Applying a qualitative approach, it relies on archival materials gathered by the author in the United Kingdom – including official and personal papers; newspaper and poster advertisements of the Board; and existing scholarship for its information. Findings The Board used three strategies in its advertisements: collaboration, showing how domestic and overseas markets were linked in mutually beneficial ways; globalization, emphasizing the expansive “home” market and the benefits of removing borders; and producer profiles, narrating the producers of imperial products to create the desire to benefit producers. Practical implications The strategies of the Board are not dissimilar to fair trade campaigns used by the private sector today, notably in coffee. Looking forward, these approaches could be valid ways for companies today to reduce consumer bias against foreign goods, and this paper hopes to be a stepping-stone for future research. Originality/value Analyzing under-used archival sources, the paper illuminates the complex processes and ideologies embedded within the Board’s campaigns. The Empire Marketing Board played an important role in the interwar British consumer conceptualization of the relationship between Britain and her Empire, construction of a global British “home” market and the familiarization of imperial producers.

Imagining Imperial Modernity in British Colonial West Africa: Gerald Spencer Pryse's Work for the Empire Marketing Board

This essay focuses upon images made by Gerald Spencer Pryse in 1927/28 that were the outcome of a commission from the British government's Empire Marketing Board for him to convey positively colonial West Africa as an integral element of a modern, economic empire. As this essay argues, though, his watercolours and lithographic posters fail to celebrate the region's imperially driven economic activity. Instead, they highlight West Africa's natural aesthetic appeal, and, what Spencer Pryse believed to be, the heightened aesthetic perception of its indigenous population, to suppress, or negatively position, industrialized process that had been introduced there. In valorizing West Africa's exoticism, Spencer Pryse, however, ignored imperial modernities then being independently forged by some West Africans and consequently, as this essay maintains, his images offer only a limited account of West Africa's imperial identity in the late 1920s.

Edible Histories. Cultural Politics. Towards a Canadian Food History

Table of Contents Preface Introduction I Cultural Exchanges and Cuisines in the Contact Zone 1. 'Fit for the table of the most fastidious epicure': Culinary Colonialism in the Upper Canadian Contact Zone 2. 'The snipe were good and the wine not bad': Enabling Public Life for Privileged Men 3. The Role of Food in Canadian Expressions of Christianity II Regional Food Identities and Traditions 4. Pine-clad hills and spindrift swirl: The Character, Persistence, and Significance of Rural Newfoundland Foodways 5. Stocking the Root Cellar: Foodscapes in the Peace River Region 6. Rational Meals for the Traditional Family: Nutrition in Quebec School Manuals, 1900-1960 III Foodways and Memories in Ethnic and Racial Communities 7. 'We Didn't Have A Lot of Money, But We Had Food': Ukrainians and Their Depression-Era Food Memories 8. Feeding the Dead: The Ukrainian Food Colossi of the Canadian Prairies 9. Toronto's Multicultured Tongues: Stories of South Asian Cuisines IV Gendering Food in Cookbooks and Family Spaces 10. More than 'just' Recipes: Mennonite Cookbooks in Mid-twentieth Century North America 11. Gefilte Fish and Roast Duck with Orange Slices: A Treasure for my Daughter and the Creation of a Jewish Cultural Orthodoxy in Postwar Montreal 12. 'Tutti a Tavola!' Feeding the Family in Two Generations of Italian Immigrant Households in Montreal V Single Food Commodities, Markets, and Cultural Debates 13. John Bull and Sons: The Empire Marketing Board and the Creation of a British Imperial Food System 14. Spreading Controversy: The Story of Margarine in Quebec VI Protests, Mindful Eating, and the Politics of Food 15. The Politics of Milk: Canadian Housewives Organize in the 1930s 16. 'Less Inefficiency, More Milk': The Politics of Food and the Culture of the English-Canadian University, 1900-1950 17. The Granola High: Eating Differently in the 1960s and 1970s 18. 'Meat Stinks/Eat Beef Dyke!': Coming out as a Vegetarian in the Prairies VII National Identities and Cultural Spectacles 19. Nationalism on the Menu: Three Banquets on the 1939 Royal Tour 20. Food Acts and Cultural Politics: Women and the Gendered Dialectics of Culinary Pluralism at the International Institute of Toronto, 1950s-1960s VIII Marketing and Imposing Nutritional Standards 21. Vim, Vigour and Vitality: 'Power' Foods for Kids in Canadian Popular Magazines, 1914-1954 22. Making and Breaking Canada's Food Rules: Science, the State, and the Government of Nutrition, 1942-1949 23. 'A National Priority': Nutrition Canada's Survey and the Disciplining of Aboriginal Bodies, 1964-75

The Empire and 'Human Interest': Popular Empire Films, the Colonial Villain, and the British Documentary Movement 1926-39

This article examines representations of colonial subjects within two forms of ‘empire films’ of the 1930s: popular ‘entertainment’ empire films widely consumed by audiences in Britain and the colonies, and documentary films about empire produced by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) and the General Post Office (GPO) film units. These two types of film at first glance seem markedly different, with the one featuring the sensational colonial villain, and the other emphasising a docile and peaceful workforce in the colonies. Yet if we consider these two types of film within a large media landscape intent on courting the ‘human interest’ of audiences between the wars, the particularly racialised boundaries of this term comes into focus. This article examines the seemingly divergent portrayals of colonial subjects across these films and in conjunction with responses of audiences in both England and the colonies, and early discussions at the EMB about the appeal of empire narratives. The appeal and endurance of the figure of the colonial villain in entertainment films and the perspective of documentary producer John Grierson on film, human interest, and empire asks us to consider the state’s role in refashioning empire in this period. This article asks whether the state was truly invested in refashioning a modern empire in the interwar period, as some historians have argued, or if it was content to affirm the limited portrayal of colonial subjects on screen.

Trade, consumption and development alliances: the historical legacy of the Empire Marketing Board poster campaign

This article examines the historical legacy of contemporary development alliances through an analysis of the British government’s Empire Marketing Board poster campaign from 1926 to 1933. The primary aim of these posters was to instil in the British public a preference for buying empire-grown goods and the significance of their role as consumers in maintaining the Empire. By conveying messages of a common humanity and invoking a visual language of interdependence between Britain and its colonies, the posters attempted to open up new connections and create new moral communities across distance in ways that are not dissimilar to fair trade campaigns today.

Bringing Another Empire Alive? The Empire Marketing Board and the Construction of Dominion Identity, 1926–33

In 1926, the Empire Marketing Board (EMB) was established to foster empire trade without the use of tariffs. It was to simulate imperial preference by redirecting consumer choice away from ‘foreign’ goods and towards the produce of ‘home and empire’. Using newspapers, pamphlets, film, exhibitions and poster displays, the EMB aimed to ‘bring the empire alive’ to British consumers. This paper analyses the presentation of three settler dominions—Australia, New Zealand and Canada—in the EMB's advertising campaigns. The EMB's large visual archive has been the subject of only limited study, most of which has focused on a homogeneous reading of empire. This article argues that the work of the EMB reveals the presence of a separate discourse of empire—a ‘dominion discourse’—that has not been recognised in cultural histories of empire, which, with the recent exception of ‘British world’ studies, have been more interested in mapping and conceptualising the formation of identities in other colonial settings. The ‘dominion discourse’ emphasised the familiar, white and ‘British’ nature of the former colonies of settlement, attributes that are clearly displayed in the campaigns of the EMB, but can also be found in settler culture much more widely. In doing so, the white dominions stressed not only their difference from the dependent colonies, but their similarity to Britain. Though the inter-war period is often associated with the rise of distinctive national identities and the loosening of imperial bonds, the production of these attributes in an imperial and metropolitan context draws attention to both the transnational nature of identity formation and the continuing importance of Britain and empire in the construction of settler culture in this period.

‘Remember the empire, filled with your cousins’: Poetic exposition in the documentaries of the empire Marketing Board

ABSTRACTThrough an analysis of Basil Wright's Windmill in Barbados (1933) and Song of Ceylon (1934), this article observes how the use of distinct formal and aesthetic modes resonates with particular policies in the management and marketing of empire during the British documentary film movement of the 1930s. It argues that the production of a distinctive brand of poetic and expository documentaries were symptomatic of the Empire Marketing Board (EMB)'s project to change the connotation of ‘empire’ from one of exploitation to one that suggested a cooperative familial relationship between metropole and colony. A closer study of these films, however, reveal a deeper tension between the Board's new attempt to market the empire as ‘one family’ and the existing nature of economic exploitation between colony and metropole.

Introduction: The Documentary Film Movement and the Spaces of British Identity

The emergence of the British documentary film movement marked a seminal moment, not only in the history of film, but also in modern British history. As well as providing Britain with its first self-consciously national cinema, the story of the documentary film movement illustrates some of the hardier debates in the historiography of twentieth-century Britain, including new developments in the conceptualization of citizenship, the growth of mass communications and the path of modernism. The cinematic output of the public bodies which sponsored the movement, such as the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), the General Post Office (GPO), and the wartime Ministry of Information, as well as commercial companies such as the Realist Film Unit and Strand Films, played a fundamental role in visualizing a modern British identity and providing its soundtrack. By celebrating the markers of modern life, propagating new technologies and social reform, and in providing an imaginative backbone for the projection of a modern nation, documentary films of the 1930s and 1940s made a sizeable and lasting contribution to the British national imaginary.

GPO Films: American and European models of Advertising in the Projection of Nation

The article seeks to reappraise the ‘documentary’ output of the General Post Office Film Unit in the 1930s with reference to a broader context of historical and contemporaneous debate concerning appropriate sites, media, and subjects for advertisement. Film, alongside other advertising media, was harnessed to a general objective to ‘project the nation’ at home and abroad. The employment of artists in industry served to enhance an image of Britain as a progressive manufacturing nation, fit and able to compete effectively in international markets. The modernizing influence of American and European precedents in promoting public and private institutions is traced in both production and commentary in this period. Films and filmmakers, it is argued, were aided and abetted, rather than compromised, by received attitudes towards advertising. The article explores promotion of the GPO as an exemplary model of patronage in commercial art and design in subsequent decades. The legacy of certain personnel responsible for the administration of GPO merchandizing and advertising activity is duly followed, from the Empire Marketing Board, through wartime propaganda, to the introduction of commercial television (a subsequently more familiar placement for screen advertisements) in the 1950s. The designation and appraisal of affiliated material as documentary, advertisement, propaganda, or plain fiction has often proven slippery and contestable.

Adult education between the wars: the curious case of the Selborne Lecture Bureau

‘Independent’ lecture agencies are a neglected element in the history of education. Between 1918 and 1939, the Selborne Lecture Bureau was a significant national provider of adult education in Britain, both in its own right and as a supplier of lecture(r)s to Women's Institutes and other bodies, and it pioneered the use of films in schools. For a brief period, it was an ‘educational’ vehicle for the Empire Marketing Board with a programme of over 2400 lectures in 1929. The Bureau originated in the early twentieth century split between the conservative (and male) traditions of natural history and the radical (and female) campaigning (anti‐) plumage movement that produced the RSPB. The interwar history of the Selborne Lecture Bureau provides a counterpoint to conventional accounts of adult education between the two world wars, part of an influential ‘third stream’ alongside the ‘liberal tradition’ and growing state and local authority provision.

Sixty Years of Shell Film Sponsorship, 1934–94

Eighty-seven film libraries, every film made in thirty languages – it’s the biggest single core of films made from a single-minded point of view that there is in the world, I think, the National Film Board of Canada excepted. Empire Marketing Board gone, GPO gone, Ministry of Information gone – Shell stuck to it. That’s their importance: a theory, a consistency, an attitude that has never varied. (Sir Arthur Elton, quoted in Sussex 1975: 177)

Implicit boycott: The call for patriotic consumption in interwar Austria

In 1927 entrepreneurs’ associations and the Ministry ofTrade started the ‘Buy Austrian Goods’ working group, which deployed a broad array of propaganda activities. It was moulded after similar initiatives in other countries, above all the SwissWeek and the British Empire Marketing Board. As with Switzerland and the UK, Austria pursued a free trade policy. Protectionist measures seemed out of question, but an effort at educating consumers should help to overcome the endemic trade deficit. The working group emphasized the defensive nature of its propaganda, claiming not to instigate a boycott of foreign products. But neither the rhetoric nor the administrative measures promoted by the working group were always devoid of aggressiveness. Consumers were told to act as responsible citizens, to contribute to the reduction of unemployment by shopping Austrian.Yet, the appeal to state consciousness was thwarted by the ambivalent feelings towards a state that in the eyes of many Austrians was no viable alternative to unification with Germany.

Graphic Design: A New History (review)

Reviewed by: Graphic Design: A New History Barry M. Katz (bio) Graphic Design: A New History. By Stephen J. Eskilson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. 464. $65. To people outside the field, the preoccupation of graphic designers with such arcane matters as serifs, ligatures, or full-page bleeds may seem charming, if slightly myopic. It is useful to take another perspective, however. We long ago became accustomed to the idea that we are living in a media-saturated, communications-driven “information age.” Insofar as graphic design—the interplay of text and image—often represents the final stage in the delivery of information, it can be thought of as lying close to the technological heart of our civilization. The growth of the field—from William Morris and the Kelmscott Press to motion graphics and Web 2.0— is the subject of Stephen J. Eskilson’s “new history” of graphic design. Eskilson’s weighty tome is clearly intended as an alternative to the late Philip B. Meggs’s standard textbook, A History of Graphic Design (1983; 3rd ed., 1998), and apart from some errors of fact and a few questionable judgments, it is surely a worthy successor. Whereas Meggs began, dubiously, with the Sumerians, Eskilson offers only a brief overview of the precursors and begins instead with the industrialization of information in the late [End Page 258] nineteenth century: “[T]he profession was established,” he proposes, “when the task of designing printed material was separated from the task of printing it” (p. 29), and that is almost by definition a modern phenomenon. Eskilson’s more condensed timeframe allows him to deal much more comprehensively with his subject matter and to develop a set of recurring themes that connect his chronology of people and artifacts. The largest of these is the oscillation of modern design between the poles of “functionality” (legibility, in the case of graphic design) and “expressivity.” The markers of these cyclical shifts are the familiar cultural trends of the twentieth century with such movements as Dadaism, Expressionism, and (more recently) Grunge belonging to the former, and the Bauhaus, Swiss typography, and corporate websites to the latter. Eskilson presents them (and many others) with a balance of formal analysis and contextual detail that is appropriate to a general survey of this sort, and he is attentive to technological factors: From the Linotype machine of the 1880s to bitmapping one hundred years later, new means of setting type and manufacturing images have influenced both the form and the content of graphical information. A second, related, theme is the shifting boundary between political engagement and the formal, technical, and commercial realities of professional practice. Although designers, their clients, and the ultimate consumers of their work might long for the assertive neutrality of the Swiss grid, Eskilson repeatedly and convincingly demonstrates that this is an ideal that can almost never be realized. This applies not just to patriotic recruiting posters of World War I or the brazen Constructivist assault on the capitalist class. For a German designer in the 1920s or 1950s to eschew the traditional “black letter” Gothic script, with its inescapable nationalist associations, in favor of the clean sans serif of the International Typographic Style was to announce a powerful and unmistakable political commitment. Eskilson is likewise sensitive to the asymmetries of gender both in the history and historiography of graphic design—as in his coy reference to “Varvara Stepanova and her husband” (p. 204) rather than the ritual “Aleksandr Rodchenko and his wife”—and he concludes with reflections on the uneasy relationship between the emerging DIY (design-it-yourself) movement and the public “citizen designer” and the mainstream profession. For just this reason, one singular omission is striking and, frankly, perplexing: The “new history” of graphic design, just like the old one, is the story of graphic design in the United States and three or four countries in Western Europe (Russia gets its fifteen minutes of fame on account of the Soviet Constructivists). Eskilson includes a sidebar on nineteenth-century Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, a very welcome discussion of the colonialist advertising campaigns sponsored by Britain’s Empire Marketing Board, and a handsome calligraphic poster by Mourad...

Ecology: A Science of Nation? The Utilization of Plant Ecology in New Zealand, 1896 - 1930

Following the creation of the Empire Marketing Board in 1926, Australia's development was influenced by an imperial science increasingly aware of ecology. The present paper traces similar New Zealand links in the ecological approach to pasture development promoted in the Dominion by Bruce Levy and fuelled by the vision of George Stapledon of the Welsh Plant Breeding Station, who visited New Zealand in 1926. However, plant ecology came much earlier to New Zealand by way of Leonard Cockayne, who in 1908 used ecological arguments to press for the extension of Tongariro National Park and who saw New Zealand's unique plant associations as emblems of nation rather than endowments of empire. By comparing the application of ecology, in New Zealand at different times, to the separate (though not necessarily opposed) goals of building a nation and supporting an empire, insight is gained into the changing ways in which any science may be drawn into the service of societal priorities and aspirations.

Selling Irish Bacon: The Empire Marketing Board and Artists of the Free State

Selling Irish Bacon: The Empire Marketing Board and Artists of the Free State