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We live in an age in which advertising is part of the fabric of our lives. Advertising in its modern form largely has its origins in the later nineteenth century. This book is the first to provide a historical survey of images of black people in advertising during the colonial period. It highlights the way in which racist representations continually developed and shifted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, depending on the particular political and economic interests of the producers of these images. The book analyses the various conflicting, and changing ideologies of colonialism and racism in British advertising, revealing reveal the purposes to which these images of dehumanisation and exploitation were employed. The first part deals with images of Africa, the second deals with images of black people in the West, and the third considers questions relating to issues about images and social representations in general. The Eurocentric image of the 'savage' and 'heathen', the period of slavery, European exploration and missionary activity, as well as the colonisation of Africa in the nineteenth century are explored. Representations of the servant, the entertainer, and the exotic man or woman with a rampant sexuality are also presented. The key strategy with which images of black people from the colonial period have been considered is that of stereotyping. The material interests of soap manufacturers, cocoa manufacturers, tea advertising, and tobacco advertising are discussed. The book explains the four particular types of imagery dominate corporate advertising during the 1950s and early 1960s.
This chapter will explore the effect of the specific material interests of soap manufacturers, their consumers, and the general political climate of the period on the representation of black people. While soap was by no means the only product which represented Empire and black people in late nineteenth-century advertising, soap companies made the most extensive use of
that time, many English industrialists, paternalists and philanthropists laid out, usually on a higher tract of land by the side of their factories, cottages for their employees. These were aimed at providing more pleasant living conditions. Port Sunlight, established in 1895 by a soap manufacturer near Liverpool, and Bournville, near Birmingham, built by a chocolate factory
-month custodial sentence for illegal window-breaking had infuriated her. She brusquely advised her brother that his militancy might instead be spent on bettering conditions for the working class.66 The radical American millionaire Joseph Fels, a naptha soap manufacturer who funded various Lansbury ventures, including the poor law and farm colonies, complained about Dorothy’s censorious article on suffragette belligerency. He observed sharply: ‘It is a pity that 63 Thurtle, Time’s Winged Chariot, pp. 81, 93, 106–77, 110–11. 64 The Times, 23 August 1954. 65 Fenner Brockway
asserted their significance for the public welfare. Liverpool soap manufacturers were particularly imaginative in 1831. Reducing duties, they claimed, would promote the ‘comfort and cleanliness of the people’.28 Not all public welfare claims were trade-related. By continuing to impose the death penalty for forgery, one 1818 Liverpool public meeting proclaimed, ‘our national character suffers in the estimation of other countries’.29 Appeals to equity tended to be more defensive, often being employed when public welfare claims failed. Like the Liverpool retailers who
illustrations as decorations – invoking the aesthetic trend associated in the public mind with Morris, Crane, and Studio magazine but also with some elements of turn-of-the-century painting and literature. It can be hazarded that their work was received by readers as a little Arthurian, a little Shakespearean – and thoroughly English. Although the somewhat pejorative label ‘nouveau riche’ does not describe all Country Life 's and The Ladies’ Field 's readers, many were certainly related to the ‘new titles springing up among soap manufacturers like the
this book. But it is also clear that the “common sense” assumptions about BBC television from this time (“stuffy”, “paternalist”, elitist) (Thumim, 2004: 27) have influenced – even clouded – how the programme has been perceived. Furthermore, because soap opera is often perceived to be an intrinsically commercial genre (originally designed by US soap manufacturers to sell products to women in the home), this generic framework primes us to expect that what is now perceived as the BBC’s “first television soap” is likely to be tempered, even spoiled, by instruction and
) could be made from common salt, greatly increasing the supply. The other, Michel Eugène Chevreul, laid the basis for the scientific analysis of fats and soaps with his investigations into the chemical nature of fats, glycerine and fatty acids. Soft soap and soap operas 61 At the Great Exhibition of 1851, the year of Lever’s birth, 103 soap manufacturers displayed their wares, including a wide variety of soaps with names like honey, mottled, Castile, Windsor, potash or white curd. Some of the big names in the field – A. and F. Pears and John Knight of London, Joseph
prominent Whitmanite) and the wealthy socialist soap manufacturer Joseph Fels, who paid a visit to the Bolton group early in 1894.41 John Burroughs, another of Whitman’s well-known disciples, came in for criticism for not defending him strongly enough against the charge of self-puffery published in the influential Christian Register.42 Traubel agreed with Burroughs, however, about Herbert Gilchrist, who was ‘such Whitman and the Bolton Whitman Fellowship 121 a good fellow I wish he painted better pictures’.43 To mention Herbert Gilchrist is, incidentally, to evoke a
attracting support from across partisan divides. Its leading patrons included John Wilson-Patten, Conservative MP for North Lancashire; Peter Rylands, the Liberal MP for Burnley; Gilbert Greenall, a prominent Liberal soap manufacturer and Warrington’s own MP; and William Beaumont, a Conservative. Peter Rylands remarked, on opening the museum extension in 1877, ‘while at times they [the Liberals] might be found in hostile camps, it was a source of the deepest satisfaction … that there were now and again occasions when they could be found upon the same platform’.130