From Advertising to Public Relations: Sugar and the Case for Capitalism at the End of Empire

This talk examines how and why the British sugar refining industry turned to public relations during the economic and political crises that followed the Second World War. While previous scholars have focused on how advertising served as form of imperial propaganda that shaped consumers' understandings of imperial commodities, global markets, and racialized labor systems, this paper emphasizes how public relations became a tool of empire during the era of decolonization. Using advertising, but also less visible techniques, corporate public relations often suppressed the very ideals of empire companies had promoted for decades. Instead of empire, global industries like sugar promoted neoliberal ideals of development and partnership to maintain the power and profits that empire had afforded in the past.

Erika Rappaport is a Professor of History at University of California Santa Barbara. She works on the history of gender and consumer cultures in Modern Britain and its Empire. Her work examines how the history of consumption and commodities were integral to the construction of identities, politics, and economies in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End (Princeton 2000); A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton 2017) and co-edited Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain. Her current book project, tentatively titled Anonymous Empire: Public Relations at the End of Empire, explores how the relatively new field of public relations managed the process and memory of decolonization between the late 1940s and 1970s. During these years international public relations campaigns shaped capital investments, promoted capitalist values, and secured colonial relationships decades after political imperial ties were severed. The project reveals the global power of PR and demonstrates how global forces shaped the history of public relations. It offers a genealogy of the political power of business in the postwar world.

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