In the 1920s, Britain created the Empire Marketing Board to sell imperial economic integration as a modern public good. Owen Hatherley traces how a government agency turned colonial extraction into polished consumer culture.
The board combined American advertising with lessons borrowed from Soviet propaganda:
- Sir Stephen Tallents recognized the persuasive power of Soviet posters and film while serving Britain’s anti-Bolshevik intervention.
- London Underground executive Frank Pick recruited modernist artists to promote imperial trade.
- Posters framed colonized people as junior members of a benevolent imperial “family.”
- E. McKnight Kauffer’s “Jungles Today Are Gold Mines Tomorrow” converted the Scramble for Africa into bright graphics and trade figures.
- John Grierson’s film unit produced Drifters, Industrial Britain, and Song of Ceylon, helping found the British documentary tradition.
That cinematic legacy is the sharpest part of the story. Films still admired for their craft were commissioned to make plantation labor and colonial commerce appear graceful, orderly, and mutually beneficial.
The board disappeared when London’s banks rejected an imperial tariff bloc that threatened profitable informal markets. Its larger lesson survived: empire is easiest to accept when coercion arrives disguised as culture, modernity, and ordinary consumption.