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The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Empire Marketing Board used enhanced marketing tools and approaches to reduce British consumer bias against foreign products. The paper asks: “How have marketers historically increased foreign exports to domestic markets?”

The paper comprises an historical account of the Empire Marketing Board during the 1920s and 1930s. Applying a qualitative approach, it relies on archival materials gathered by the author in the United Kingdom – including official and personal papers; newspaper and poster advertisements of the Board; and existing scholarship for its information.

The Board used three strategies in its advertisements: collaboration, showing how domestic and overseas markets were linked in mutually beneficial ways; globalization, emphasizing the expansive “home” market and the benefits of removing borders; and producer profiles, narrating the producers of imperial products to create the desire to benefit producers.

The strategies of the Board are not dissimilar to fair trade campaigns used by the private sector today, notably in coffee. Looking forward, these approaches could be valid ways for companies today to reduce consumer bias against foreign goods, and this paper hopes to be a stepping-stone for future research.

Analyzing under-used archival sources, the paper illuminates the complex processes and ideologies embedded within the Board’s campaigns. The Empire Marketing Board played an important role in the interwar British consumer conceptualization of the relationship between Britain and her Empire, construction of a global British “home” market and the familiarization of imperial producers.

This article provides a discussion of the unaccompanied British juvenile migration programme to Australia by the Salvation Army (henceforth, the Army) within the context of the imperialist ideas of William Booth and the racist White Australia Policy, as well as Booth’s ideas regarding the ‘training’ of children. The programme was complex in character and diversity, particularly in relation to its philosophy, aims and objectives. One of the central themes of the Army’s programme was support for British imperialism and expansion of the British Empire by populating its Dominions with large numbers of white British migrants: hence it was referred to as ‘emigration and colonisation’. Such migration was regarded as vital to generate economic growth and a strong defence of the Empire. The Army claimed that its migration programme would be of national benefit as it could provide Australia with migrants with significant economic potential.

Despite the exponential spread of the British Empire by the late nineteenth century, there remained in England a continued indifference to “the Empire”. In 1883, J.R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, had expressed concern because ‘we think of Great Britain too much and of Greater Britain too little’. People had to rethink their understandings of nation and empire, he suggested, and steps had to be taken to modify what he saw as a ‘defective constitution’. Seeley’s lecture series had prompted debate about ‘the imperial question’, but the ‘anomalous political arrangements’ and the reluctance of the people to think imperially persisted. Insularity was not exclusive to the people in Britain, however. Because of their preoccupation with their own local affairs, it was suggested, there had been little opportunity for people from other parts of the empire to devote much time to the larger questions of imperial and common citizenship.

This paper seeks to examine the social construction of the racialised, colonial subaltern accountant in the British imperial centre in the early twentieth century..

Primary sources are used to provide an historical analysis of the British accountancy arena in the 1920s, this being the period when “race thinking” first became explicit. Secondary histories of race and empire are used to contextualise this analysis by highlighting: the growth of “race thinking” in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth centuries; and the American challenge to British imperial hegemony after the First World War.

This paper tracks the struggles of British accountants in the imperial centre in the 1920s to find a path between racialist attitudes in the imperial centre, their own included and countervailing discourses of non‐discrimination. For the Scottish chartered bodies, this involved the development of a de facto barrier to entry when a proposed de jure one aroused, surprisingly enough, the prospect of retaliation from American accountants.

Limitations in the primary sources preclude detailed examination of the attitudes of individuals or for all variations in the positions adopted by particular bodies.

The troubling thing about the demise of explicit race talk by the end of the 1920s is that de facto barriers to the entry of the racialised, subordinated Other remained in place.

This paper shows that the rise of race thinking in Britain did not leave British accountancy untouched; largely through the pressure it placed upon the identity of British accountants qua Britons and the consequential issue of inclusion/exclusion of non‐Britons.

The purpose of this paper is to provide fresh insights into the meaning and experience of an imperial education and the evolving concept of empire itself in Britain during the inter‐war years. At this time, in imperially‐minded circles, the desire to preserve the cultural and political unity of the Empire was, in part, channelled into forging lasting bonds of brotherhood amongst Empire youth through education. To this end, a host of Empire‐oriented societies launched a variety of travel and exchange programmes designed to educate British youth in the importance of their imperial inheritance. Among these was the School Empire Tours (SETs; 1927‐39), a voluntary organisation led by prominent figures in government and education, which, over the course of 12 years, was responsible for the expeditions of more than 500 public schoolboys to the far flung corners of the Empire.

A contextualist methodology is employed throughout to produce a nuanced description of the concept of Empire as found within the archive, to assess the contribution made by the SETs to contemporary understandings of Empire and therein identify the significance of the organisation in the thought and practice of education across time.

A discursive change is highlighted through the subtle re‐conceptualisation of Empire as a progressive and modernising force and the evolving perceptions of the tourists themselves. Moreover, the SETs appear as a microcosm of the problematic co‐existence of democratic tradition and imperial practice during a period of intense social and political flux.

A new light is cast on the competing ideologies of imperialism and brotherhood, offering a unique perspective on the role of gender, class and race in imperial education at this time.

From the mid‐nineteenth to the early twentieth century universities and colleges were founded throughout Australia and New Zealand in the context of the expanding British Empire. This article provides an analytical framework to understand the engagement between changing ideas of higher education at the centre of Empire and within the settler societies in the Antipodes. Imperial influences remained significant, but so was locality in association with the role of the emerging state, while the idea of the public purpose of higher education helped to widen social access forming and sustaining the basis of middle class professions.

Before 1500 Britain was not considered a major European power. Three hundred years later Britain led the way for the Industrial Revolution and held sway economically and militarily during the nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw the United Kingdom lose her empire, her military leadership and, most of all, her capacity to lead the world in technological innovations. What were the circumstances which first thrust England into world leadership and then led her into technological decline? Examines the rise and fall in a sociocultural context and attempts to generalize the results into a modern context to understand better the innovation phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of national identity, as imparted to students by the Western Australia Education Department, in the early part of the twentieth century. By specifically examining The School Paper, as a part of a broader investigation into the teaching of English, this paper interrogates the role “school papers” played in the formation of the citizen subject.

This paper draws on all available editions of Western Australia’s Education Department school reader, The School Paper, between 1909 and 1911, and on the Department’s Education Circular publication between the years 1899 and 1911. These are read within the context of the prevailing education philosophy, internationally and domestically, and the extent to which it was shaped by Australia’s cultural heritage and the desire to establish a national identity in the years post-federation.

The School Paper featured stories, poems, songs and articles that complimented the goals of the new education. Used in supplement to a revised curriculum weighted towards English classics, The School Paper, provided an important site for citizenship training. This publication pursued dual projects of constructing a specific Australian identity while defining a British imperial identity from which it is informed.

This research builds on scholarship on the role of school readers in other states in the construction of national identity and the formation of the citizen subject. It is the first research conducted into Western Australia’s school paper, the school reader, and provides a new lens through which to view how the processes of national/imperial identities are carried out and influenced by state-sanctioned study of English.

This article presents a historical investigation into the foreign policy messages of the British Union of Fascists' (BUF) publicity and propaganda from its foundation in 1932 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, along with a discussion of the methods and institutional arrangements used to propagate its ideas of peace, empire and transnational co-operation.

The historical investigation is based upon scrutiny of original BUF documents relating to the period 1932–1939 from various archives. After cataloguing of the relevant publicity and propaganda materials in time sequence and thematically, analysis was organised using a historical institutionalism approach.

The article explains the different phases of the BUF's message development and how publications, meetings and media were used to project its ideas. It also discussed the impact of support from Viscount Rothermere's newspapers and financial support from Benito Mussolini. Consideration of publicity materials alongside files from BUF headquarters enabled identification and investigation into the communicative actors who did the publicity work, including Director of Publicity, John Beckett.

The article reflects upon how the British Union of Fascists' publicity and propaganda relates to modern manifestations of the communication of authoritarian and nationalistic political propositions and the historical continuities that endure therein.

The project makes an original contribution to the history of British political propaganda and public relations through an inquiry based upon scrutiny of historical documents in UK archives relating to BUF publicity related to foreign policy.

Using the example of a “school paper” titled The Children's Hour, developed in South Australia in the late nineteenth century, the purpose of this paper is to show the way that the colonial margins could act as sites of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy and not just as importers of ideas from the imperial centre.

The analysis on which the examination of The Children's Hour is based is a combination of Foucaultian discourse analysis and a genealogical approach to curriculum history which tracks different formations of techniques and programmes for shaping the human subject.

The Children's Hour (1889-1963), featured the innovative use of literature and other genres, and provided new ways to shape the identities of school students and teachers. School papers were strongly implicated in the discursive construction of both a global/imperial and local/Australian identities and represent an informative case of the ways in which teaching and learning practices have been highly mobile in the field of reading.

This research shows that the humble school reading text is an overlooked site for examining processes of the constitution of national identity and the citizen subject. It is also a reminder of the significance of communications technologies in the formation of, and struggles over, national/imperial imaginaries and that the school is an important site for studying these processes.