SELLING BRITISHNESS: Commodity Culture, the Dominions and Empire.

• Date: 01 March 2023
• 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...