In recent years there has been a significant growth of interest in the key role that imperial networks played in the world system of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 1 Much of this work is connected to a ‘British World’ literature, which explores how people in Britain and its settler colonies came to think of themselves as sharing common identities and interests, sustained through links of trade, communication, and culture.Footnote 2 In an important intervention, Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson argue that the growth of such British World networks promoted globalization, albeit in a partial and uneven fashion. Imperial globalization encouraged forms of regionalized integration ‘focused on particular [white] ethnic groups and exhibited a strong bias towards the empire’s Anglophone societies’.Footnote 3
This work is valuable in demonstrating the importance of ethnically based networks to the development of trade and the creation of asymmetries of power. However, looking at the emergence of British World networks in isolation runs the risk of offering a distorted view of historical processes of globalization and one which privileges the authority of the imperial centre.Footnote 4 The development of British World networks was never cut off from wider processes of globalization. James Belich traces how the massive expansion of migration in the nineteenth century fostered trade connections across the English-speaking world, with the eastern United States, as well as Britain, playing a central role in these processes. Importantly, Belich’s work considers how the development of British World networks interacted with a wider settler revolution, stimulated by the expansion of the American frontier and broader migratory movements in East Asia, Siberia, and the Atlantic World.Footnote 5
The value of the ‘British World’ as a historical term has recently come under question given that it runs the risk of eliding citizens’ varied experiences of empire, and particularly the distinct identities of those of English or ‘Celtic’ descent.Footnote 6 More broadly, we still know little about how the vast majority of imperial citizens who were not ethnically or culturally ‘British’ – be they Chinese, Indian, Afrikaner, or Québecois – responded to the development of efforts to promote trade on the basis of ethnic connections. The British World approach also fails to engage sufficiently with recent work which has demonstrated the importance of regions which contained multiple sovereignties to processes of economic globalization, such as the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.Footnote 7 As such, there is a need to understand how attempts to promote a British World of trade were contested, and how they competed with alternative efforts to develop patriotic trade communities which could utilize, but also transcend, imperial space.
This article seeks to gain a clearer understanding of the language, reach, and limits of competing patriotic trade campaigns in the British empire during the 1930s, focusing on efforts to promote the purchase of Indian, Chinese, and ‘British’ products (a term which was used to refer to goods from both the UK and the Dominions). Such campaigns emerged in response to the decline in world trade after 1929 as the growth of tariff barriers diverted trade into regional blocs.Footnote 8 Building on the pioneering work of W. K. Hancock, the economic history of UK–Dominion relations during the 1930s is usually written from the perspective of elite political and business actors. While the Ottawa economic conference of 1932 is generally seen as having limited effects in promoting intra-imperial trade, Dominion leaders benefitted from membership of the Sterling Area and continued access to British capital, and they assumed that the UK would be a key supply of future migrants with the return to normal trading conditions. Moreover, the preferential concessions gained from Britain were a valuable bargaining tool in their trade negotiations with other countries.Footnote 9 However, the evidence of patriotic trade campaigns, which relied on a broader support base of civil society organizations, suggests that there was widespread unease with aspects of British World cooperation in the 1930s. Despite the prevalence of a ‘Buy British’ rhetoric in the Dominions, patriotic trade drives there quickly came to focus chiefly on national protectionism rather than wider themes of imperial cooperation, which proved less palatable to manufacturing organizations and Québecois and Afrikaner communities.
Debates about patriotic trade within the interwar British empire/Commonwealth were shaped by Bombay and Singapore, as well as Cape Town and Sydney. Efforts to promote the concept of ‘Buying British’ served to highlight the marginality of Indian and Chinese businesspeople within the imperial economic community. In turn, this stimulated the development of competing patriotic trade campaigns, in which non-white imperial subjects challenged British economic leadership by presenting themselves as part of alternative economic communities connected across and beyond imperial spaces.
While various works have explored the politics of interwar patriotic consumption movements, they are largely viewed from the perspective of national histories, rather than as campaigns which had a wider global influence.Footnote 10 For example, territories where the US had strong commercial ties, such as the Philippines, ran their own ‘Buy American’ campaigns in an attempt to strengthen economic relations.Footnote 11 Similarly, efforts to promote Chinese national products transcended mainland China and were taken up enthusiastically by ethnic Chinese businesspeople living in the British and Dutch empires in Southeast Asia via chambers of commerce networks. Indian business organizations also attempted to encourage diaspora populations to buy goods from their homelands and sought to highlight how full participation in imperial trade communities was circumscribed by race. By engaging with new economic bodies connected with the League of Nations they sought to foster an alternative internationalism, challenging the authority of British business networks in India.
However, each of these efforts to encourage people to trade with each other based on ties of ethnicity was only partly successful. Popular participation in all of the campaigns was affected by class, with the leadership of business organizations and the wealthy being more likely to support patriotic trade drives than other members of the public. For many, concerns to maintain access to cheap products, such as Japanese cloth, often overrode the appeal of efforts to promote the preferential purchase of national or imperial goods. Furthermore, communal and linguistic divisions, along with the differing sources of trade of merchant networks, also hampered the ability of chambers of commerce to inculcate the habit of buying national products among Indian and Chinese communities.
Patriotic trade networks had to contend with the hybridity of colonial subjects’ identities, which meant that the content, character, and popular appeal of their campaigns shifted across spaces. As much recent work has demonstrated, the early twentieth century was a time when languages of British loyalism were layered, diffuse, and shaped by national considerations.Footnote 12 Efforts to promote patriotic buying in the Dominions were heavily inflected by national concerns with immigration, the position of white populations, and the national development of industrial labour. While Indian populations in Malaya and East Africa sought to encourage the purchase of goods from their homelands, they also sought to gain a larger say in the running of affairs in the colonies where they lived through defending their rights as British subjects. This meant that their engagement with the ‘Buy Indian’ cause lacked the anti-imperial focus common in India. Ultimately, by seeking to define trade communities and loyalties more clearly, these campaigns divided imperial subjects as much as they brought them together.
Selling India, from Geneva to Malaya
Speaking at the 1933 All-India Exhibition in Poona, Sir Rustom Vakil, the Minister for Local Self-Government in the Bombay Presidency, praised efforts made in the UK to promote the idea of ‘Buying British’: ‘The movement is not conceived in a spirit of narrow insularity but stands for the purchase of goods throughout the entire Empire in preference to foreign products’. By contrast, Vakil criticized the ‘Buy Indian’ campaign, which was closely associated with the business leaders of the Indian Merchants’ Chamber and other supporters of the Indian National Congress, claiming that it risked degenerating into a boycott of goods from other parts of the British empire. Seeking to rebuke Vakil, the Indian Merchants’ Chamber passed a resolution claiming that ‘Buy British’ was chiefly focused on aiding the industrial strength of the UK and the only way for Indians to combat the industrial backwardness of their country was likewise to buy national goods in preference to foreign imports.Footnote 13
Patriotic trade campaigns received widespread coverage in the Indian Merchants’ Chamber’s publications around this time. The most high profile of these, and the most familiar to historians, were the efforts of successive British governments to foster a voluntary preference for imperial goods among consumers. From 1926 onwards, the government-sponsored Empire Marketing Board (EMB) championed the cause of buying British and empire goods.Footnote 14 Among its most significant publicity drives (and presumably the one referred to by Vakil) was an autumn 1931 offensive encouraging shoppers to ‘Buy British’, in which over a million posters were issued. More than 400 organizations participated in this trade push in the UK, ranging from business groups such as the Federation of British Industries to civic organizations including the British Legion and the Women’s Institute. The cause of imperial trade was promoted by a series of ‘empire shops’ in various cities, trade posters, and empire shopping weeks.Footnote 15 Aside from informing readers about the progress of the ‘Buy British’ cause, the Indian Merchants’ Chamber discussed the protectionist policies that were introduced in other imperial countries, such as Australia, as a way to justify their own ‘Buy Indian’ campaign. Attention was also drawn to wider global efforts to promote patriotic trade such as contemporaneous ‘Buy American’ and Chinese national products movements.Footnote 16
Advocates of the ‘Buy Indian’ cause were not content with merely encouraging consumers to buy national goods. Rather, they sought to challenge the authority of British-led trade networks within the subcontinent and to establish a voice for Indian business on a world stage through taking an active role in new forms of organization connected with the League of Nations. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Indian businessmen were effectively excluded from meaningful participation in ‘British World’-centred networks such as the Federation of Chambers of Commerce of the British Empire (FCCBE).Footnote 17 Although several chambers of commerce had been founded in India by the late nineteenth century, their membership was largely confined to Europeans. These organizations formed the core leadership of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), which was established in 1920 and retained a distinct British identity even after the end of the Raj.Footnote 18 While chambers for Asian business communities began to be formed from the 1880s onwards, and an Indian Merchants’ Chamber was created in Bombay in 1907, Indians’ participation in wider imperial trade networks was resisted, especially in South Africa.Footnote 19 The FCCBE proved unwilling to give Indian-led chambers full status, and in 1910 it was even mooted that for the purpose of calculating India’s voting rights the Asian population of the subcontinent should not be counted, although this measure was never passed.Footnote 20 Following its formation, the British-led ASSOCHAM came to dominate Indian participation in the imperial chambers of commerce network, although it avoided participating in votes on tariff issues likely to produce controversy among Asian merchants.Footnote 21
Asian businessmen’s frustrations with the limited voice that they held within Indian government circles, by comparison with British-led chambers, led to the establishment of the Federated Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) in 1927. By the early 1930s its membership included most of the Indian-controlled insurance, shipping, tea, jute, and banking industries.Footnote 22 The FICCI saw participation in League of Nations business organizations as vital to promoting the interests of India on global trade matters, establishing only the second Asian-led national committee of the International Chamber of Commerce, after Japan.Footnote 23 It also became a member of the International Organization of Employers, which worked closely with the International Labour Organization (ILO).Footnote 24
In 1927 G. D. Birla, a Marwari businessman from Calcutta and one of the Indian National Congresses’ largest benefactors, was nominated by the FICCI to attend the International Labour Conference at Geneva. Birla’s conduct at the conference was emblematic of how Indian business leaders sought to use the League of Nations to promote the Congress cause to a global audience.Footnote 25 In response to a conference proposal that the ILO set up offices for national correspondents in each member country, Birla called for the Indian office to be based in an industrial city like Bombay or Calcutta, rather than confining its activities to the site of government in Delhi. Birla insisted that the correspondent should be an Indian and that ILO literature issued in the country should be prepared in a widely spoken vernacular language, preferably Hindi.Footnote 26 This intervention was a clear challenge to the idea that British-led business organizations could represent India on a world stage, and, in common with other business leaders, Birla protested at the lack of Indian government consultation with Asian businessmen in the appointment of delegations to imperial conferences and to meetings held by the League of Nations.Footnote 27
At much the same time as appeals to ‘Buy British’ were becoming a common feature of trade publicity in the UK and the Dominions, the FICCI launched a ‘Buy Indian’ campaign in 1930 connected to Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts to encourage the substitution of foreign cloth imports with locally produced khadi cloth. With the growth of Indian cotton textile production over the previous decade, this was an industry where Asian business groups were increasingly competing directly with British capital. The homespun cloth displayed at khadi exhibitions was presented as a symbol of India’s national dignity and poverty. Advocates of ‘Buy Indian’ claimed that ‘swadeshi’, or economic self-sufficiency, was key to establishing independence and national prosperity, portraying the movement as part of a wider global effort to establish economic communities free from imperial aggression.Footnote 28 In 1932 the Indian Merchants’ Chamber appointed a board to produce certificates for genuine national goods, building upon a practice established by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Commerce four years earlier.Footnote 29
Perhaps the most visible connection between Asian business leaders and the khadi cause occurred at the Poona industrial exhibition, which took place most years after 1933. Designed as a showcase for national goods, by 1937 the exhibition was attracting 225,000 visitors over the course of six weeks. Manufacturers from across the nation were represented, with forty stalls devoted to demonstrations, displays, and sales of khadi cloth.Footnote 30 Khadi exhibitions highlighted the injustices of imperial rule. Scenes of national trial became a staple of exhibition lantern-slide shows, such as the local population’s subjection to ‘crawling orders’ following the Amritsar Massacre, or depictions of Gandhi’s struggles to gain equality for the Indian merchant community in South Africa.Footnote 31
Yet, while the khadi cause sought to challenge sectarian and regional divides within India by promoting a national dress, the progress of the ‘Buy Indian’ campaign was hindered by fractures within the business community and criticisms of Gandhi’s tactics. The majority of Indian cotton manufacture was machine-produced rather than khadi. During the early 1930s handlooms accounted for around one-third of domestic cotton cloth consumption.Footnote 32 Khadi was criticized by many within the Congress movement for being exploitative and encouraging low-wage labour and Gandhi himself expressed frustration at the apparent lack of enthusiasm for khadi production among Muslim communities.Footnote 33
More generally, Indian business was divided in how to respond to the Ottawa agreements of 1932, which promoted a system of intra-imperial trade preferences. Indian exporters were aided by the preferential terms in the British market after the Ottawa conference. In addition, increases in the general tariff created a more protected market for sections of Indian industry and this, in part, explains the initial reluctance of some leading firms, such as Tatas, to support Congress.Footnote 34 While small traders in Bombay undertook a boycott of British business in the early 1930s, they were opposed by large firms, led by G. D. Birla. Some Bombay cotton producers broke with Congress, seeing the Ottawa agreements as an opportunity to develop an alliance with British firms in opposition to the growing threat of Japanese textile manufacturers. This culminated in the signing of the Lees–Moody pact in 1933 by representatives of the Bombay and Lancashire cotton interests and the introduction of a Japanese import quota by the Government of India in January 1934. Eventually, divisions among Indian trade interests became less acute following the end of the civil disobedience campaign and the decision of Tatas, the largest Indian business group, to join the FICCI in 1937.Footnote 35
The idea of promoting patriotic buying to diaspora communities attracted widespread interest from Congress leaders. In 1937 alone, Jawaharlal Nehru met with Indians living in Burma and Malaya and promoted a boycott of Zanzibar cloves in protest at a British monopoly crowding out Asian growers.Footnote 36 Moreover, he called for a boycott of Japanese goods in sympathy with Chinese people living under occupation.Footnote 37 Despite its controversial position within India, the fashion for wearing khadi spread across diaspora populations who wished to show their support for the ‘Buy Indian’ cause. In October 1938 thousands of members of the Indian communities of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, several of them dressed in khadi, celebrated Gandhi’s seventieth birthday in the cities’ commercial centres. Many Indian shops also closed for the day as a sign of respect.Footnote 38 However, the celebrations masked wider divisions within Malaya’s Indian communities, which meant that they struggled to develop a common purpose in trade matters. Attempts to encourage the ‘Buy Indian’ habit in Malaya, and in other major diaspora communities such as East Africa, were obstructed by communal divisions, the varied trade interests of Indian merchants, and their concerns with promoting their interests as British subjects.
As the largest centre of Indian population outside the subcontinent, Malaya might have been expected to be a centre of ‘Buy Indian’ activity.Footnote 39 However, the movement struggled to gain traction owing to weaknesses and divisions within the Indian diaspora’s business and community organizations. Indian communities were significantly slower than their British and Chinese rivals in establishing chambers of commerce in the leading Malayan centres.Footnote 40 In May 1935 the Government of India’s agent gave a speech at the annual meeting of Singapore’s Indian Merchants Association criticizing the lack of collaboration between Indian merchants and labourers in the city.Footnote 41 The Singapore Indian Merchants’ Chamber subsequently converted into an Indian Chamber of Commerce in August of that year, but it had to contend with the various divisions which existed among Indian traders based on communal ties. South Indian and Chettiar chambers of commerce already existed in the city, along with the aforementioned Indian Merchants Association, which was dominated by Bombay export merchants.Footnote 42 Tamil labourers, who made up the majority of Singapore’s Indian population, were frustrated by their exclusion from the leadership of such community associations. When Srinivasa Sastri was appointed by the Indian government to study the labour conditions of Indians in Malaya in 1936, Tamil groups claimed that the Singapore Indian Association had monopolized his time when he visited the island. According to the Tamil paper Forward, the Association was ‘something like a hereditary inheritance of the educated Indians’, dominated by a small coterie of families unrepresentative of the wider Indian community.Footnote 43
Despite a high-profile visit from Nehru in May 1937 (see Figure 1), and the development of links with the FICCI during the same year, the Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce remained a marginal body. It was not until after the Second World War that it received the same privileges as the Chinese and International chambers of commerce in being able to nominate members to the city’s Municipal Commission and Legislative Council. Indians were also underrepresented on other key trade commissions and associations.Footnote 44 Given the weaknesses of Indian community associations, it is perhaps unsurprising that ‘Buy Indian’ struggled to gain a foothold in Singapore. A patriotic boycott of Japanese goods was launched in India during 1938 following an appeal by Nehru. However, as large importers of Japanese cloth, Singapore’s Indian merchants proved reluctant to support the boycott, and price factors meant that many consumers continued to buy Japanese goods.Footnote 45 Singapore Indians may have worn khadi on ceremonial occasions like Gandhi’s birthday, but cheap Japanese machine-manufactured cloth was preferred by many for everyday use.
Visit of Nehru to the Indian Chamber of Commerce, Singapore, 27 May 1937. Source: reproduced in Singapore Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, The SICCI journey: 1924–2014, Singapore: SICCI, 2014, p. 12.
As Chua Ai Lin has noted, Indian patriotism in Singapore during the 1930s was usually shorn of the anti-imperial focus that it had for many Congress supporters on the subcontinent. As such, wearing khadi in Malaya was about ethnic pride rather than a wider challenge to British economic authority in India.Footnote 46 Indian business leaders sought to gain a greater say in the running of the colony’s affairs through their position as permanently settled, British subjects. Subsequently, the Malaya Tribune, which was the largest selling newspaper in the country and a key forum for English-speaking Indians in Malaya, was reluctant to publish letters on Indian politics owing to the potential for stirring anti-British sentiment.Footnote 47
Although there is evidence of the adoption of khadi by some East African Indians, the region does not appear to have experienced a significant ‘Buy Indian’ drive, despite the establishment of links between the East Indian African National Congress and the FICCI in 1932. Much like their counterparts in Malaya, the Indian community in Kenya focused on maintaining their rights as British subjects. Indian political activity in the colony was dominated by resistance to white settlers’ attempts to limit Asian migration to East Africa after 1919. Key community organizations such as the East African Indian National Congress were keen to present themselves as loyal to the crown, so engagement with the more overtly anti-imperial aspects of the ‘Buy Indian’ campaign would have been problematic for their cause of defending Indians’ rights to settle in East Africa.Footnote 48 While Indian business interests were able to gain a foothold within the internationalist networks of Geneva during the interwar years and to develop a popular ‘Buy Indian’ campaign, attempts to establish patriotic trade networks that connected India with diaspora populations overseas proved more difficult and achieved few results at this time.
‘Overseas Chinese should stand together to buy national products’
Thanks to the work of Karl Gerth, we now have a detailed knowledge of the national products movement which gained widespread support among consumers in Republican China during the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 49 Despite this, wider attempts to promote the purchase of Chinese goods among diaspora communities have received little attention. And yet, Chinese-led trade exhibitions provided arguably the most visible and successful patriotic-buying campaign in interwar Southeast Asia. These trade promotions benefited from close connections between Chinese chambers of commerce in Republican China and overseas, enabling Chinese diaspora communities within the British and Dutch empires to present themselves as united in interests with their ancestral homelands. However, while their efforts to promote patriotic trade networks had more success than ‘Buy Indian’ campaigns, overseas Chinese participation in patriotic trade drives was impeded by linguistic divisions and Chinese merchants’ close connections with Japanese trade in Southeast Asia.
At a June 1932 exhibition at Singapore’s Great World showground, stalls were decorated with slogans such as ‘Overseas Chinese should stand together to promote national products, to develop industry and forge a strong and wealthy China’ and ‘the development of Chinese industry determines the survival of China’. The exhibition was a major success, attracting around 10,000 visitors daily during its nineteen-day duration.Footnote 50 Participation in the Great World exhibition was fuelled by a mixture of patriotism, self-interest, and consumers looking for entertainment and a bargain. The exhibition took place in the shadow of the establishment of a Japanese puppet state in Manchuria four months earlier, fuelling anxieties about the territorial integrity of China and its future survival. Diaspora communities’ trade ties to their homeland had been obstructed by the Republican government’s establishment of tariff autonomy in 1929 and claims that goods had to be produced in mainland China to be classified as Chinese national products.Footnote 51 By presenting themselves as united in trade interests with their homelands, Chinese diaspora communities sought to make a case to the Republican government for low tariffs in their own self-interest.Footnote 52 Singapore businesses used Chinese product exhibitions to present their Malaya-made goods as ‘Chinese’, appealing to patriotic consumers and challenging the narrower definition of national products prevalent in mainland China.Footnote 53 Finally, beyond these concerns with projecting a ‘Chinese’ identity for Singapore businesses, the success of the exhibition relied on around three-quarters of patrons receiving free entry and the wide range of festivities and low-price goods.Footnote 54
The Chinese products movement clearly had a much wider following in Singapore than efforts to promote ‘Buy British’. A month before the Great World exhibition, the British-led Overseas League held an empire shopping week in the rival New World grounds. Some of the city’s majority ethnic Chinese community participated in both the British and Chinese goods exhibitions, such as Yang Kuo Hua, owner of Anna Preparations, a cosmetics company.Footnote 55 However, the empire shopping week was a muted affair, with only thirty-nine exhibitors and few Chinese or Malay participants.Footnote 56 Efforts to promote empire shopping weeks in Singapore were not aided by the minor scandal which embroiled Robert Boulter, the British Trade Commissioner for Malaya, in January 1933. According to newspaper reports, Boulter had expressed dissatisfaction with the facilities available at the city’s showgrounds during a meeting designed to organize a follow-up empire shopping week. Moreover, he was said to have claimed that European women found it difficult to attend the shopping week the previous year owing to ‘the preponderance of the coolie type who congested the place’. Unsurprisingly, the owners of the exhibition site were not best pleased and filed a suit for slander, which was subsequently dropped.Footnote 57 Singapore empire shopping week appears to have folded the following year.
The rapid growth of the Singapore Chinese products movement can be seen as emblematic of the strength of ‘Chinese World’ business links in the 1930s, which extended into British and Dutch imperial territories. During the early twentieth century there was a rapid expansion of Chinese chambers of commerce, both within mainland China and across diaspora communities, creating new networks for trade promotion. In 1904 the Shanghai Chinese Chamber of Commerce became the first nongovernmental organization in Chinese history to be legitimized by state law.Footnote 58 Canton followed the next year and by 1911 a thousand chamber organizations had been established in China.Footnote 59 When it was founded in 1906, the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce was one of the first such organizations formed outside mainland China. It acted as the Chinese government’s representative in the city and took a key role in the welfare of its majority ethnic Chinese population.Footnote 60 While an International Chamber of Commerce had existed in Singapore since 1837, its Chinese membership dwindled in the later decades of the nineteenth century and the president was always a British man, a practice which continued until the 1970s.Footnote 61
Links with Republican China were vital to the development of the Chinese products movement in Singapore and across Southeast Asia. In 1933 the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce began planning the first of a series of industrial exhibitions with support from their colleagues in Shanghai, building on the success of similar exhibitions held across Republican China.Footnote 62 The efforts of Chinese business groups to promote national goods were already familiar to Singapore audiences, as journals such as National Products Monthly were distributed from China into Southeast Asia.Footnote 63 Following the practice of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce in Beijing, the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce issued Chinese products certificates in the 1930s. The credibility of such certificates was aided by the chamber’s close links with Chinese business. Prior to 1949 it sent delegates to key business conferences in Republican China, such as those organized by the All-China Federation of Chambers of Commerce, in Beijing.Footnote 64 Aside from the exhibitions staged in Singapore, the Shanghai-based China Industrial and Foreign Trade Association promoted a number of initiatives to encourage the purchase of ‘national’ goods by ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, including a 1936 trade mission which visited Manila, Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Saigon, and other leading cities. An estimated 290,000 people attended exhibitions organized by the trade mission.Footnote 65
However, as with the Indian diaspora, communal divisions within business communities meant that support for the national products cause varied among the overseas Chinese. In particular, the issue of boycotting Japanese goods remained controversial. Ethnic and linguistic divisions in the Chinese merchant community meant that support for Japanese boycotts did not gain a wide following in Singapore until after the invasion of Manchuria in 1931.Footnote 66 Despite the development of the boycott movement, Chinese merchant networks, along with their Indian counterparts, remained vital to the importation of Japanese cloth into Singapore. For example, in the last six months of 1934, Chinese merchants handled 38.4% of imports of Japanese cloth into Singapore and their Indian counterparts handled 26.3%.Footnote 67 Within the Dutch East Indies, support for patriotic boycotts of Japanese goods appears to have been strongest among the Cantonese, whereas sections of the Peranakan (Straits-born) and Hokkien communities refused to participate in these boycotts, given that they had long-standing trade links with Japan and Taiwan (then under Japanese rule).Footnote 68 Thus efforts to promote Chinese patriotic trade in Southeast Asia were ultimately hampered by the varied interests of the different Chinese communities in the region.
‘The splendid products of the British family overseas’
Of all the attempts that were made to promote patriotic trade networks in the British empire during the interwar years, the empire shopping week movement was the most truly global in ambition. The practice of running empire shopping weeks was started by the British Women’s Patriotic League in 1923, and subsequently endorsed in the UK by the government-sponsored EMB. It extended into Australia in 1925, and reached Canada and South Africa by 1928. While this was a movement largely associated with the UK and the Dominions, occasional empire shopping weeks were held in various colonies such as Malaya and British Guiana. Empire shopping campaigns drew heavily on the publicity efforts of the EMB and its ‘Buy British’ message, which has received significant attention from historians.Footnote 69 However, existing scholarship provides little sense of how popular audiences in the Dominions reacted to the EMB’s publicity efforts, or the cause of empire shopping more broadly.Footnote 70
By contrast, a substantial historiography has explored the attitudes of leading Dominion politicians and businessmen towards trade with Britain.Footnote 71 At the 1923 Imperial Conference, MacKenzie King and Stanley Bruce popularized the notion that imperial development was largely a matter of ‘men, money and markets’. Flows of emigrants and investment from Britain to the Dominions would lead to the expansion of the latter nations’ economies, in turn providing expanded markets for UK manufactures. As W. K. Hancock noted in 1940, this ideal ‘aimed at greater wealth and wellbeing for a growing white population in the empire; it aimed also at greater security and power for “the Empire as a whole”’.Footnote 72
Social and economic trends in the interwar years clearly enhanced the existing interdependence between the UK and Dominion economies. Between 1920 and 1929, 1.8 million people emigrated from Britain to the Dominions; although numbers subsequently fell dramatically during the Great Depression, leading politicians retained enthusiasm for large-scale British migration as a means of promoting national development.Footnote 73 Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand remained heavily dependent on British capital to fund development and service existing debts. They, along with Canada, benefited from the development of the Sterling Area and the UK’s increasing focus on importing from empire producers during the 1930s (Table 1).Footnote 74
Value of Dominions’ export trade with the British empire/Commonwealth, 1931–37
Source: Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth affairs, vol. II, pp. 306–11.
The trade concessions gained from Britain at the Ottawa conference proved useful in extracting better trading deals with foreign countries in three-way negotiations, most notably when Britain and Canada negotiated lower tariffs with the USA in 1938.Footnote 75 Australia came to a trade agreement with Japan in 1937 and also entered into talks with the United States, which were curtailed by the onset of war. More broadly, the tariff system established at the Ottawa conference proved useful in encouraging multinational investment in the Dominions, particularly from Britain and the United States, as manufacturers looked to circumvent trade barriers by establishing local subsidiaries.Footnote 76 UK foreign direct investment appears to have been heavily concentrated in the Dominions during the interwar years.Footnote 77 Within Canada, several local subsidiaries of American firms had a long-standing presence. General Motors even joined the ‘Canada calling’ campaign, which promoted Canadian goods in Britain, on account of its production of Buick cars in Ontario. Buick’s advertising was handled by another American company, J. Walter Thompson (JWT), which sought to give its adverts a restrained ‘British atmosphere’. American terminology was avoided where possible and models took on supposedly English-sounding names such as the Empire saloon and Regent tourer. JWT also sought to enhance the prestige of Buick via testimonials from prominent British professional men, and one advert prepared for British newspapers used the slogan ‘Remember your forefathers founded the empire. Support the empire’.Footnote 78
The EMB’s language of ‘Buying British’ and supporting empire unity (at least between those of the ‘British’ race) was seen as having a significant appeal among UK consumers, hence its adoption by campaigns such as ‘Canada calling’. And yet, while political and business leaders in the Dominions remained closely connected to UK trade relationships, in part as a result of self-interest, efforts to promote imperial trade patriotism had little effect among broader public audiences. By and large, empire shopping weeks died out quickly in the Dominions, losing public interest to consumer movements focused on supporting the purchase of national goods.
Whereas attempts to promote Indian and Chinese products among diaspora communities drew heavily upon the support of chambers of commerce and other trade organizations, empire shopping weeks held in the Dominions tended to be organized locally, attracting the support of civic society groups, including women’s organizations and ex-servicemen’s groups. These campaigns needed to be seen to have significant local backing, given the ambivalent relationship that the empire shopping week movement held with manufacturing organizations, who argued that the ‘Buy British’ cause focused on the UK’s interests and risked consigning the Dominions to the status of farmlands reliant on British industrial imports.Footnote 79 The importance of local efforts in promoting empire shopping meant that a curious hybrid culture was created. EMB posters and slogans, designed for a British audience and donated free from London, became a common feature of these campaigns. However, they were often outnumbered by locally produced posters (especially after the EMB disbanded in 1933). Consumers were encouraged to buy national and imperial goods through locally organized exhibitions, window displays, radio broadcasts, and parades.Footnote 80
The language of empire shopping weeks varied significantly between countries. Within the UK and Australia there was much focus on promoting links across the ‘British’ race at home and overseas. However, the question of the ‘British’ character of empire shopping proved more controversial in Canada, with its large French-speaking Québecois population, and in South Africa, where Afrikaners outnumbered the descendants of British settlers. Patriotic shoppers who attended a shopping week in Coulsdon, outside London, were firmly told that empire shopping was a cause designed to unite ‘British peoples’. According to its organizers, the event provided ‘a chance to let you know of the splendid products of the British family overseas … to strengthen the bond which should bind together all men of the Anglo-Saxon race … to build up, by bigger trade, the ability of the great Dominions to stand as bulwarks of peace around the world’.Footnote 81 Supporters of empire shopping in Australia likewise used a racialized language of Anglo-Saxon unity. One poster produced for empire shopping events in Sydney, titled ‘Protect your own interests, buy empire goods’, was described by the Barrier Miner as depicting ‘Miss Britannia supporting the Union Jack and Australian flags while a lion stands guard over White Australia’ (see Figure 2).Footnote 82
Sydney empire shopping week poster. Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 22 May 1928, p. 12.
At times, the rhetoric of Australian empire shopping presented foreign goods as a danger to the health of the home. In Western Australia, readers of the Kalgoorlie Miner were informed that ‘at the present time Australia is being flooded with [cheap] goods from foreign countries, probably made under unhygienic conditions and possibly carrying the seeds of disease’. Given this, they were encouraged instead to buy superior Australian or British goods.Footnote 83
By contrast, the organizers of the ‘Buy empire goods – South African first’ exhibitions of 1932–33 did not make explicit references to ‘British’ loyalism and avoided referring to their events as empire shopping weeks, even though they made substantial use of EMB publicity materials. In Cape Town, the Chamber of Industries was initially reluctant to support the idea of an empire shopping week when it was mooted in 1929, favouring instead the launching of an ‘All South Africa week’. However, the chamber’s ongoing frustrations with the lack of publicity for South African goods meant that that it subsequently agreed to cooperate with the British Manufacturers Representative Association in organizing a ‘Buy empire goods’ campaign, provided that consumers were instructed to have first preference for South African-made products.Footnote 84 At this time, the question of expanding the import of British industrial goods was a controversial matter in South Africa. The prime minister J. B. M. Hertzog’s United Party, with its large Afrikaner support base, used protective tariffs as a way to protect employment for white South African labour during the Depression, and had difficult relations with chambers of commerce who sought to expand imports of British industrial goods.Footnote 85 In Johannesburg, the organizers of the ‘Buy empire goods – South African first’ exhibition focused on promoting unity between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites and advancing the nation’s industrial modernization. Johannesburg was presented as a modern city with a thriving white consumer culture; on the rare occasions that black African culture featured in these events it was depicted as primitive (see Figure 3).Footnote 86
‘A gateway to the golden city’. Source: National Archives of South Africa, HEN2193 432/4/1, ‘Buy empire goods – South African first, Johannesburg 1933’ pamphlet, cover page.
Within Canada, the language of ‘British loyalism’ was employed by supporters of empire shopping in some cities with English-speaking majorities. For example, the Ottawa Citizen produced a special supplement for the city’s 1928 empire shopping week.Footnote 87 Readers were informed that ‘general conditions in Canada are more stable and sound than in many other countries, largely due to the fact that many of her people are of British stock, or are strongly affected by British conditions, deepened and improved by long residence in Canada’. Buying empire goods was portrayed as ‘simply a natural thing for a Canadian or any other British citizen to do’.Footnote 88 However, if an Ottawa citizen had made the short trip across the river into French-speaking Quebec they would probably have found little evidence of enthusiasm for empire shopping week. British Board of Trade officials reported that few efforts were made to produce French-language literature to support empire shopping.Footnote 89 In February 1928 a joint meeting had been called between the Montreal Board of Trade and the Chambre de Commerce, which represented the English- and French-speaking business communities respectively, to discuss plans to participate in the forthcoming 1928 empire shopping week. Acrimonious scenes ensued and several delegates from the Chambre de Commerce questioned the value and purpose of the empire shopping cause.Footnote 90
The appeal of empire shopping weeks in Canada quickly faded as the result of the development of competing movements focused on encouraging the purchase of national goods. In a report on the relative failure of the 1929 empire shopping week, the British Board of Trade noted that the Canadian Manufacturers Association were reluctant to support the movement and ‘there is a very distinct feeling by many interests in Canada that the “Week” should become “Canada Products Week”’.Footnote 91 In 1930 a made-in-Canada campaign was launched with the support of the Canadian Manufacturers Association and Ministry of Trade; it was subsequently publicized via shopping weeks and exhibitions throughout the rest of the decade. One such exhibition was attended by 150,000 visitors in Montreal during 1930. Following this success, the city held an annual made-in-Canada exhibition thereafter.Footnote 92 Employing slogans such as ‘Keep the pay coming: buy produced in Canada goods’ and ‘Every nickel you spend on foreign goods lessens the pay cheque for yourself, family, friends and your country’, the campaign focused on the need to protect industrial jobs.Footnote 93 According to the national manufacturers’ association, Canada needed to maintain tariffs on British imports owing to its higher wage levels. Moreover, the development of national manufacturing was essential as Canada would increasingly need to rely on non-empire markets to expand its foreign trade.Footnote 94 Faced with the challenge of the government-sponsored patriotic-buying movement, empire shopping week appears to have died out in Canada during the early 1930s.
A similar picture emerges with respect to South Africa. The ‘Buy empire goods – South Africa first’ campaign struggled for newspaper publicity and finance.Footnote 95 Relations between the Cape Chamber of Industries and the British Manufacturers Representatives Association, who organized the Cape Town event, quickly soured. The Chamber of Industries’ minutes note:
It seemed quite apparent that there was a movement afoot to convert the whole scheme into one of an Empire Shopping Week, the point being put forward that South Africa was a part of the Empire and should be happy with that. This attitude was in direct conflict with the original arrangement which was to be on a fifty–fifty basis with South Africa first and Empire goods second, similar to schemes carried out in Canada and Australia. The position was extremely unsatisfactory.Footnote 96
In Australia too, empire shopping week struggled as a result of local opposition. From 1924 the Made-in-Australia Council had organized ‘Australia Week’ drives, where retailers were encouraged to promote national goods. The cause quickly received endorsement from the Housewives’ Association and the Australian Chamber of Manufactures.Footnote 97 Between 1928 and 1930 the latter organization withdrew their support for empire shopping celebrations in South Australia, New South Wales, and Victoria. Empire shopping week organizers reported that several shopkeepers were reluctant to endorse the movement, as they felt that promoting British manufacturing would undermine the efforts of ‘Buy Australia made’ to support the nation’s industrial workforce, which was suffering acutely from the worldwide economic downturn.Footnote 98 By 1937, most of the organizations connected to the Empire Shopping Week Council in Victoria, the most industrially developed state in Australia, were no longer taking an active part in the running of its affairs.Footnote 99 The Australian Association of British Manufacturers believed that empire shopping had made greater headway in Western Australia as a result of the more limited development of secondary industry there. Empire shopping week continued to be celebrated in Western Australia until 1941, longer than anywhere else.Footnote 100
Empire shopping weeks were hindered by the widespread feeling within the Dominions that patriotic trade campaigns should focus on promoting national industry to alleviate domestic unemployment. As was the case with the ‘Buy Indian’ cause in Malaya, active participation in these campaigns appears to have been shaped by class factors. The admittedly fragmentary evidence compiled by the EMB in the early 1930s suggests that empire shopping was a habit that mainly appealed to the better off. It was reported that the 1931 ‘Buy British’ offensive had been highly successful in Waitrose stores in west London, where affluent customers were often willing to pay higher prices to buy patriotically (although abandoning French cognac as an after-dinner tipple proved a bridge too far for the retailer’s discerning clientele).Footnote 101 Another retailer surveyed by the EMB claimed that, while there was significant enthusiasm for buying British and empire goods among the ‘better classes’, most customers ‘consider price first’.Footnote 102 Similarly, in 1934 the Australian Women’s Weekly ran a number of stories claiming that consumers were often willing to buy Japanese clothing, which could be purchased at a much cheaper rate than equivalent British or Australian goods. It was observed that ‘every Australian woman is proud of her British descent and would like to “Buy British”, but only the wealthy woman can afford thus to preserve the commercial purity of her home’.Footnote 103
Nevertheless, while empire shopping appears to have struggled to gain a foothold among consumers concerned with making ends meet and Dominion audiences keen to protect their nation’s industrial employment, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand trade publicity offensives adopted much of the language and techniques of the EMB. As such, trade groups connected across the globe to promote a common culture of empire shopping, even if their message was only designed for a UK audience. The EMB appears to have achieved some success in increasing the uptake of Dominion produce among British retailers, so it made sense for national trade publicity campaigns to continue to employ such methods in promoting their message to the UK public after that body disbanded in 1933.Footnote 104
The largest of these efforts was the ‘Canada calling’ promotion, to which the Department of Trade and Commerce devoted Canadian $240,000 in the 1937–38 fiscal year alone.Footnote 105 Given that the EMB had worked closely with the Dominion Trade Commissioners in London, it should come as no surprise that the ‘Canada calling’ and Australian trade publicity campaigns of the late 1930s employed publicity methods introduced by that organization, including shop displays, film shows, and canvasses of shop owners, concentrated into intensive regional sales drives in British cities.Footnote 106 Using individual city names for the promotions, such as ‘Canada calling Manchester’, and engaging in civic events, reinforced the idea that the UK and the Dominions were united by kinship. British consumers were left in little doubt that they were expected to support farmers overseas out of a sense of familial duty, being bombarded with slogans such as ‘Australian apples and pears: British to the core’; ‘the Canadian milk at your grocers comes from the cattle of the finest British stock’; and ‘Kangaroo butter: an all-British product’.Footnote 107
These campaigns extended the EMB’s practice of presenting the Dominions as ‘homelike’ to a British audience.Footnote 108 Both the Australian and the Canadian export boards’ promotions were organized with the support of the Mather and Crowther advertising agency in London, while New Zealand made use of British artists such as Edward Coles, whose homelike depiction of that country extended to depicting a Maori woman with distinctly European features (see Figure 4)!Footnote 109
Advertising for New Zealand apples, late 1930s (artist: Edward Coles). Source: Wellington, Turnbull Library, C-151-001.
Across all these campaigns there was a focus on connecting the economic development of the Dominions with the activities of white settlers and their descendants, neglecting the contributions of Maori, Aboriginal Australians and Canadians, and black Africans. As Felicity Barnes has noted, ‘homelike’ representations of the Dominions had appeared more often in EMB posters than depictions of India and the tropical colonies.Footnote 110 Subsequent trade publicity campaigns sought to place the relationship between Dominion farmland (devoid of non-white workers) and British consumers at the heart of the imperial trade system.Footnote 111
Conclusion: the competing and connecting worlds of patriotic trade
With the world economy embroiled in the Great Depression and divided by high tariffs, the 1930s marked the high point of attempts to promote patriotic trade networks. Recent work has indicated that the East Asian and British imperial economies became more closely connected during this decade. Both China and Japan pegged their currencies to sterling, and the latter came to trade agreements with India and Australia in an attempt to promote stable conditions and advance its industrialization.Footnote 112 However, advocates of patriotic trade campaigns focused more narrowly on promoting economic cooperation based on ethnic connections. Supporters of empire shopping sought to encourage a ‘British World’ identity, building on nineteenth-century efforts to develop trade networks connecting Britain and its settler colonies. Yet, as this movement relied heavily on support from white populations in the UK and the Dominions, it tended to focus on this trade relationship to the exclusion of wider imperial economic connections.
Attempts to promote the idea of a ‘British’ imperial trade community served to highlight the exclusion of marginal groups from full participation in its activities. Indian and Chinese diaspora populations were drawn to competing patriotic trade networks, which sought to develop connections between them and their ancestral homelands. All of these movements shared common tactics, aiming to promote their message via shopping weeks, exhibitions, and the consumption of ‘national’ goods, and they operated concurrently in some key trade centres such as Singapore. However, in other places people could learn about competing trade campaigns through trade journals and newspapers.
Each of these efforts to promote ethnically based trade networks can only be judged as being, at best, a partial success; ultimately all were hampered by the hybridity of colonial subjects’ identities in the interwar British empire. Empire shopping weeks died out quickly in most places during the early 1930s. By contrast, campaigns to support the purchase of national goods gained a wide following within the Dominions, both in English-speaking centres and in regions such as Quebec and the Transvaal, becoming a feature of civic life throughout the decade.
Nevertheless, as John Darwin has shown, the interwar years were a time when, on the whole, Dominion industrialists and politicians were still keen to view themselves as part of a wider British World economic system, despite their sometimes fractious trade relations with the UK. This is hardly surprising given that they still relied heavily on British markets and investment capital.Footnote 113 Indeed, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand trade boards sought to market their products to UK consumers as ‘British’ goods. At the same time, Dominion trade policies focused on protecting nascent secondary industries as a way to strengthen and diversify national economies and make them less susceptible to future global economic shocks. Developing strong industrial bases was seen as vital to the future development of these nations as partners with Britain in the imperial trade system.
Within China and India the act of patriotic buying could challenge the authority of foreign business interests in those countries and operated as an expression of anti-imperialism. Indian supporters of swadeshi sought to present themselves as united with the Chinese national products cause against imperial aggression.Footnote 114 However, attempts to spread patriotic trade campaigns to diaspora communities had limited success. Some Chinese and Indian merchant communities in Southeast Asia were closely connected with the sale of Japanese goods, which meant that they were reluctant to endorse patriotic anti-Japanese boycotts. The meanings of patriotic trade also shifted across spaces, hampering the effective development of consumer campaigns. Although the Indian national products movement had some success in popularizing the wearing of khadi among diaspora communities on Indian national holidays, in regions such as Malaya this act was divested of the anti-imperial meaning that it had in India.
Attempts to promote ethnically based patriotic trade networks were ultimately frustrated by the fact that imperial subjects had developed hybrid identities and loyalties by the interwar years. Yet these campaigns were important over the long term because they encouraged new ways of thinking about trade communities at both national and global levels. The national buying campaigns developed in Australia, Canada, and South Africa during the 1920s and 1930s persisted after the Second World War and played an important role in efforts to develop national industrial strategies as these countries gradually became less reliant on trade with Britain. Moreover, the Indian National Congress supporters’ pioneering embrace of the League of Nations as a platform for the projection of their national economic vision helped to lay the groundwork for the promotion of Global South interests at the United Nations after 1945.
David Thackeray is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Exeter. He is currently preparing a book exploring the politics of culture, ethnicity, and market in the British empire/Commonwealth, c.1880–1970.
