Several new studies, by the likes of Tobias Nagl on Weimar Cinema and Angelica Fenner on the 1952 West German film Toxi, have explored the way in which a concept of race built around an image of a Black Other was constructed and disseminated in German visual culture, specifically through film. In a similar vein David Ciarlo's rich and imaginative new book, Advertising Empire, looks at the earlier imperial period with a focus not on moving pictures but instead on the emerging consumer imaginary and the world of advertising. Ciarlo outlines a trajectory that charts the emergence of the figure of the Black African as a ubiquitous racial icon, frequently used from the turn of the twentieth century to attract German consumers to purchase a wide range of everyday goods from shoe polish and chocolate to toothpaste and bicycle tires. He convincingly argues that this development was underpinned by the interconnectedness of what might at first appear to be two unrelated phenomena: the rise of modern advertising in Germany and the onset of realized German colonialism in Africa. Ciarlo, however, demonstrates that from the late nineteenth century onward the growing professional class of graphic artists and admen in Germany as well as colonial propagandists and government officials seized on a vision of race to promote their respective causes. In the case of the first this was not only to sell goods, but also to legitimate their profession, while in the case of the second it was envisaged as a means of promoting the German colonial project. Their divergent goals and audiences brought them into competition with one another as the advertisers and imperialists sought to establish themselves as “Masters of the Modern Exotic.”

The study is based upon a vast and impressive visual archive. At the heart of this are the images found in the trademark registration roles of the Imperial Patent Office for the period 1894 to the mid-1920s. These are complemented by a wide array of further pictorial sources including advertising posters, stamps, and cards, as well as product packaging and images from advertising journals and guidebooks. More than 100 black and white images from this corpus are beautifully reproduced in the text alongside a glossy insert featuring a further twenty-seven color images. Viewing the images collectively enables Ciarlo to bring to light patterns of representation and to reach conclusions about how they were received by their audience. His expert deconstruction and contextualization of these images proves a real strength of the study. In addition, Ciarlo uses records of the German Colonial Society as well as various publications of colonial propagandists to provide an insight into the promotional strategies of the imperialists. With their class prejudice, narrow social base, and use of more ethnographic than sensational images, the imperialists were never able to match the reach and appeal of the advertisers. Instead, Ciarlo concludes that it was the advertisers whose vision of race, tailored to appeal to the widest possible audience, was ultimately more lasting and influential.

Over the course of six chapters Ciarlo charts the growth of modern advertising from a fairly disreputable pursuit to an established field of business, which intentionally infused products with cultural meanings. Influenced by trade and colonial exhibitions as well as Völkerschauen (“people shows”), early practitioners were quick to realize the allure of the exotic as a means to attract attention. At the same time as they fought for respectability, they looked overseas to Britain and the United States as perceived pinnacles of advertising acumen and representatives of “modernity” for models of practice. Here they encountered images of empire and racialized Black figures, which they soon borrowed, copied, or adapted to suit their own needs. From 1900 onward the figure of the Black African was increasingly visible in German commercial imagery and frequently used to promote products that often had little or no connection to the German colonies or to Africa. Thanks in part to colonial violence, there was a surge in such racialized depictions over the course of the decade. Ciarlo argues that the Black figure itself was visually colonized and that the resulting construction of blackness was then used to reinforce notions of white German cultural and racial superiority. Standardized and simplified racial markers such as thick red lips, wide eyes, and native jewelry became essential conventions of caricatured Africans, and invariably such figures were barefoot and infantilized. As Ciarlo notes in his conclusion, this hegemonic vision of racial difference in commercial imagery pre-1914 was constructed against blacks and not Jews.

Caricature is identified as one of the many impulses behind the increasingly coherent image of blackness, but perhaps here Ciarlo could have said more about its relationship to commercial advertising. The images of Africans that regularly appeared on the pages of satirical magazines such as Kladderadatsch and Fliegende Blätter from the 1880s onward had already become standardized long before this process took place in consumer imagery. Ciarlo also makes a couple of false assertions, such as in the conclusion where he speculates on the impact on constructions of blackness of an increased black presence in post-World War I Germany. Here he suggests that the Weimar period saw an increased migration of Africans from Germany's colonies. This was not the case; instead the Great War brought an end to this migration flow. Additionally, the book's lack of a bibliography is somewhat irritating. These, however, are minor quibbles. Advertising Empire is a very impressive and creative study as well as a compelling read. Not only does it underline the value in employing visual history as a means of historical research, but Ciarlo has much to say about the complex relationship between consumer society and colonialism as well as the construction and articulation of race in Imperial Germany.