Abstract

"What Value Empire? Commercial Cultural Exports Within and Beyond the British Empire"

Holly Swenson, Northwestern University (hed5747@gmail.com)

In the 1950s, British booksellers were working to get Pride and Prejudice to a bookstore in Colombia while the BBC was selling its teledrama of Pride and Prejudice to Australian Broadcasting Corporation. British publishers were working overtime to retain their markets in the empire while also looking to expand to new markets in South America, Europe, and Asia. This paper develops a framework to explain British cultural export activities—the selling of aesthetics, rhetoric, and images of Britain—both within and beyond the British empire in the twentieth century. Historians of British business have increasingly focused on how businessmen used PR and media exports to achieve their political and commercial goals in the decolonizing and postcolonial British empire. Separately, historians of the British Council and other state-funded bodies have explored how British dance, film, and theatre was exported to countries beyond the empire for reasons of political goodwill and, during the postwar, Cold War imperatives. These literatures, on cultural export within the empire and cultural export in the “global” context, between the business uses of media and the political uses of media, have generally remained separate. I argue these separations have made it difficult to see understand the macro-history of British cultural export beyond the Cliffs of Dover. Through a combination of original research on book and television exports and field synthesis, this paper articulates how political economy, changing concepts of state responsibility, and international monetary policy guided the development of both public and private, imperial and extra-imperial, cultural exports across the century.