Selling Britishness: Commodity Culture, The Dominions, and Empire, 2022

In reading Felicity Barnes’ thoroughly researched and carefully crafted study of how the Dominions––specifically Australia, Canada, and New Zealand––created and sold Britishness through commodity marketing campaigns in Britain in the interwar period, I was reminded of a story my Canadian aunt once recalled about a particularly lavish campaign for New Zealand lamb in postwar England. Living amidst bleak austerity, she was captivated by an elaborate butcher storefront window display that advertised it. The butcher featured large posters of the vibrant green, rolling, and sheep-filled landscape alongside impressive racks of lamb and signs extolling New Zealand lamb as the best in the world. She was wholly convinced and thenceforth purchased only New Zealand lamb when able, ignoring the domestic lamb also available. 

A new dimension of empire marketing began in the 1920s and 1930s when the rise of mass advertising and economic change shifted commodity spectacles from the crystal palaces and plaster pavilions of imperial exhibition grounds to billboards, shop windows, cinema screens, and magazine pages. Barnes chronicles how Dominion commodity advertising campaigns during this period not only showcased important produce such as meat, dairy, fruit, grains, and other foodstuff directed to the British market, but also played a critical role in both representing and crafting a shared British identity.

Barnes joins other scholars studying the cultural construction of empire through the consumption of commodities. But she upends some classic tropes when she shows that “empire marketing’s greatest enthusiasts were the Dominions, not the dependent empire, and they reached the peak of their activity in the twentieth century, not the nineteenth; their produce was familiar, not exotic…” (p. 7). The items marketed in these campaigns were not mysterious but recognizable ones; foods well-known by the British consumer and, as advertising posters attempted to portray, produced in lands reminiscent of rural British landscapes. Indeed, the central thesis of Barnes’ book is that Dominion empire marketing sustained and supported empire more broadly by harnessing “consumer marketing’s image-making possibilities to transform [former colonial frontiers] into modern white Dominions” (p. 7). 

Barnes highlights the importance of sentiment in the economic relations between these Commonwealth countries, as imperial trade networks and consumption benefitted from ideas of Britishness and helped foster the idea of “neo-Britains” (p. 8). However, the cultural economy that was created through co-ethnic networks was not a one-way street; the Dominions created imperial spirit as much as they benefitted from it. This is illustrated in Chapter 2 by the various efforts of marketing organizations, including promotional campaigns directed at British housewives through in-store demonstrations, cooking displays, and film shows. These campaigns highlighted recipes and foodstuffs that emphasized a shared heritage and the idea of an imperial community that “gave substance to the sentimental idea of a broader British world of kith and kin” (p. 61), cementing British consumers and Dominion producers. As Barnes notes, such activities demonstrated how the Dominions worked to build, not just imitate “a cultural economy of empire” (p. 65). 

Both inclusive and exclusive strategies were at work in such marketing pronouncements such as ‘All-British food produced by All-British people’ in ‘All-British lands.’ Where inclusion aimed to foster interdependence, exclusion eliminated from view the non-British elements of the Dominions. For example, often Dominion commodity campaigns focused on images of yeoman settlers and colonial foodstuffs while erasing any evidence of Indigenous peoples and native flora and fauna that would have challenged the neo-Britain images portrayed.

Marketers did not completely expunge the otherness of Dominion landscapes––for example, Australia often employed the Kangaroo as a symbol of distinctiveness in advertising campaigns––but publicity often downplayed it so as to create a consistent message that Dominion commodities, like the people that produced them, were British––i.e. “modern, masculine, rural, and white” (p. 13). Chapters 4 and 5 provide further evidence of the importance of discourses of kinship and belonging in these marketing efforts; Barnes’ analysis and colourful description of Dominion trade films and use of illustrations from the Empire Marketing Board’s (EMB) poster campaigns showcase how these mediums served as successful tools for reflecting, creating, and sustaining visions of empire that conveyed the “modern, British nature of the Dominions” (p. 104). 

The book does an excellent job of highlighting testimonials from the marketers and others involved in designing and implementing promotional campaigns, but more testimonials from British consumers and Dominion producers regarding these campaigns would have been helpful for assessing their effect. Additionally, Barnes glides too lightly over competition and conflicts amongst the Dominions that challenged the sense of common interest.  Still, scholars interested in commodity production and marketing will find a great deal of useful information regarding the evolution in the production and trade of popular Dominion commodities, the shifting value of these goods, and the marketing systems, especially the orderly marketing schemes and marketing boards, instituted to help support producers during this period. Her work also provides an important corrective to the narrative of decline in Dominion commodity marketing caused by the end of the EMB in 1933. 

The book’s themes are consistent and the thesis is convincing: traded commodities crafted and sustained Britishness and Dominion marketing legitimatized white settler colonies and the empire more broadly. Barnes powerfully conveys advertising campaigns’ complicated and interesting connections with identity, and her work will undoubtedly stimulate further research regarding the long-lasting cultural effects of Dominion marketing beyond the interwar period.

Indeed, if my aunt’s experience with New Zealand lamb is any indication, Dominion marketing campaigns continued in a similar vein throughout the twentieth century and undoubtedly benefitted from Britishness as a shared, if not monolithic, identity that remained powerful well-beyond the heyday of empire.