Recipe for Empire: Imperial Commodities and the Empire Marketing Board

About this Taster Session

Did Britons buy into their empire? In the 1920s, British officials weighed various options for promoting unity and trade across the British Empire. After ending a system of “imperial preference”, which used tariffs to incentivise the buying of imperial commodities such as Australian apples or Caribbean sugar, Britain’s leaders created the Empire Marketing Board (EMB). The EMB actively sold Britons a positive and sprawling vision of their empire. Intended to promote inter-imperial trade (without the need for tariffs), EMB personnel produced posters, films, classes, recipes, and radio broadcasts encouraging the public to ‘buy empire’. Most famously, this body created a recipe for the King’s Christmas Pudding – the most British of dishes made from the least-British commodities of empire. In this session, students consider how empire and consumerism interacted through the materials created by the Empire Marketing Board. Did the EMB succeed in selling Britons their empire, or an expanded concept of Britishness? What imperial commodities existed? And how did Britons experience their empire, even if they never left home? Together, we examine the posters fashioned by EMB designers, the Empire Christmas Pudding recipe, and one of the Board’s successful film projects to uncover the links between consumer culture and colonial rule that existed in the interwar period – many of which have been reinvented, yet remain in place, today.

Key topics covered

• British history
• Imperial history
• Political economy
• Trade
• Consumerism
• Visual culture

How do I book?

If you would like to book a session, please email SCL@hull.ac.uk

Also available for pre-16 students

This session can also be adapted for pre-16 students