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.