SELLING BRITISHNESS: Commodity Culture, the Dominions and Empire.

• Author: McDougall, Hamish

SELLING BRITISHNESS: Commodity Culture, the Dominions and Empire

Author: Felicity Barnes

Published by: Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2022, 264pp, $49.99.

Anyone pondering the strong and persistent cultural links between Britain and the former Dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada is well advised to read Selling Britishness by Dr Felicity Barnes, senior lecturer in history at the University of Auckland.

Selling Britishness follows Barnes's well-regarded 2012 work New Zealand's London, which chronicled the cultural marks that New Zealand made on the British capital in the 20th century, and vice versa. This time around the time-span is more focused, looking particularly at the inter-war period, but the geographic scope is expanded to take in the Australian and Canadian experiences as well as New Zealand's. In this, Barnes follows a now large body of 'transnational' historical research looking beyond single national narratives to explain the past. The research is all the richer for comparing different colonial perspectives and identifying common aspects or points of difference between them.

A central premise of the book is that cultural links between Britain and the Dominions were not 'natural', nor an inevitable result of shared 'kith and kin'. Rather, this sense of shared Britishness was constructed. Of those building such ideals in the 1920s and 1930s, Barnes convincingly argues that the advertising agencies tasked with marketing Australian, New Zealand and Canadian products in Britain (and British products in the opposite direction) were exceedingly influential. Further, this process was not wholly, nor even primarily, imposed by those in the imperial metropolis of London. Rather, it was agencies from the Dominions leading the way, reflecting, creating and sustaining a shared British cultural identity that transcended the vast physical distances across the empire.

The book is lucidly written, and the history is brought to life by fascinating examples of ingenuity and accomplishment by Dominion marketers, which have largely been forgotten today. Trade films about Australian, New Zealand and Canadian agricultural produce and tourism generated long queues for tickets down British city streets. Attractive window displays; banners towed by aeroplanes; children's clubs (British schoolchildren were sent birthday cards by 'Captain Anchor' extolling the virtues of New Zealand butter); and 'demonstration ladies' were all used to...