Historians of consumerism have often neglected the people who produced the goods, assuming that they are already amply represented in the literature on the industrial revolution. Anandi Ramamurthy reminds us that considering the ideologies of producers does not necessarily signal crude economic determinism. By deconstructing images of black people in British advertisements between 1880 and 1960 she shows us the link between the interests of producers and commercial interpretations of “racist, colonial and imperialist ideologies” (1).

Inspired by her involvement in the exhibit “Black Markets: Images of Black People in British Advertising and Packaging from 1880–1990” (Manchester, 1990), Ramamurthy seeks to unravel the meaning of advertisements by placing them in historical and political context. The book is roughly divided into two parts. The first part examines the way in which the interests of private companies were reflected in advertisements for soap, tea, and cocoa. The second part considers both private and governmental interests in marketing tobacco, petrol, and electricity. Throughout, drawing on a range of prominent theorists from Edward Said to Homi Bhabha, Ramamurthy sees companies as constructing imperialistic characteristics in response to their own economic concerns.

For soap advertising Ramamurthy contends that images, such as the famous Pears’ Soap boy washing himself white with the assistance of a white child, have to be read against the backdrop of the commercial exploitation of Africa for palm oil by the soap companies themselves. The black boy washing himself white appeared in 1884, the year the Berlin Conference carved up Africa. It is no coincidence for Ramamurthy that the white boy in the advertisement was presented as a clothed civilizer and the bathroom as his laboratory. The advertisement functioned as a metaphorical support for white control of Africa. By the early 1900s Ramamurthy suggests that white anxiety about controlling plantation production translated into softer images of blacks as helpless babies or contented slaves. For example, illustrations of a disheveled black woman offering a tray of Plantol Soap “represent Lever's discontent with the emerging Colonial Office support for peasant control over production” (55). In the same vein, bondage images were not just about selling soap with sex. They should also be related to Lever's interest in indentured labor. Servile images, Ramamurthy argues, affirmed a desire for total control over production.

The servile image appeared in cocoa advertising in the form of the subservient “sambo.” The sambo figure, Ramamurthy argues, “represented an unsophisticated peasant producer serving Europe with his product. Such an image affirmed the developing policy of indirect rule” (69). Moreover, the imagery was connected to the controversy circa 1909 about Cadbury's purchase of cocoa from Portuguese estates off the coast of West Africa that used slave labor. Cadbury, as a member of the Anti-Slavery Society and a Quaker humanitarian, was anxious to clean up his image. Cocoa advertising reflected a paternalistic approach to Africa as well as the desire of one man to distance himself from the political issues surrounding production.

Tea advertisements, similarly, represented black workers as born to labor, thereby reflecting the owners’ support for vertical control over production and the economic and political interests of planters. Even when images of black male workers were replaced in the 1920s with the image of the Tamil woman picker “she symbolically maintained an affirmation in plantation production and imperial control through a gendered hierarchy” (129). The message was underscored by romanticized advertisements that exploited “imperial triumphalism,” complete with trumpeting elephants (199).

By the interwar years government propaganda joined private interests in constructing the image of black people in advertisements. The Empire Marketing Board (1926–33) endeavored to promote imperial products in the United Kingdom. Its poster campaigns to promote the flagging trade in Rhodesian tobacco showed Africans doing manual labor with white supervisors or dominant white men speaking to African children. Private enterprise tobacco advertisements favored sambo figures or idyllic ruralism until about 1919. After that, tobacco advertisements pursued the masculine image of the white, rugged planter/settler. The exploitation of the ostensible glamour of a white man in pith helmet smoking a pipe, argues Ramamurthy, was not simply a way for private enterprise to promote tobacco to white men in the United Kingdom; it was also an expression of support for a government policy that saw the empire as a solution for economic problems.

In the same way, corporate advertising in the 1950s and 1960s must be read within the framework of government interest in decolonization and modernization theory. Advertisements did not employ black people to sell products. Instead, advertisements portrayed corporations as catalysts to move developing countries along the road to wealth. While Africa was no longer seen as merely a supplier of raw materials, modernization and industrialization were presented as being only possible because of the intervention of European firms. By passing down their knowledge and expertise, they “enable[d] the ideology of neo-colonialism to continue to appear benign and almost altruistic” (212). Ramamurthy ends her study in the 1960s. After that decade, she contends, advertisements were influenced by the civil rights movement in America and anticolonial struggles. Nevertheless, in her conclusion she does consider some more recent debates about the contemporary role of Islam, global inequality, and American imperialism.

Ramamurthy has plenty of evidence of corporate interests and can find them in advertisements. She does not, however, examine the role of the advertising agent, who, by the late 1880s and certainly in the twentieth century, played an essential role in producing advertisements. Advertising agents might have suggested, for example, sexy images for soap as a successful commercial gambit with a track record. A consideration of the advertising trade journals might have added nuance to some interpretations.

With eighty illustrations, Imperial Persuaders offers material about tea, cocoa, and tobacco, in particular, which despite their prominence in people's everyday lives are still relatively underrepresented in the literature. But centrally, it offers interpretations of the advertisements for these products within the well-researched context of the concerns of their producers. Readers interested in the imperial project and the material world should find this a stimulating and provocative book.