Aims of Industry? The Culture Industries in an Era of British Imperial Decline

“Aims of Industry? The Culture Industries in an Era of British Imperial Decline” explores the role of the culture industries in shaping ideals and markets for British goods during the waning years of the British Empire, 1920s-1970s. In particular, we examine how the tabloid press, public relations, and the producers of English-language educational materials took advantage of political and commercial crises inherent in the decline of the formal British Empire and the restructuring of capitalism in the mid-twentieth century. All three papers focus on how the British culture industries responded to, and in some cases, thrived in an era of ongoing "crises" of war, depression and decolonization. Dayton’s paper “British Tabloid Journalism in Australia, 1925-1945” explores how war and political exigencies caused a commercial crisis shifted the market for newsprint, effecting the balance of power between British and Australian firms in the runup to the Second World War. Rappaport's "'Aims of Industry': Big Business, Public Relations and the Fight against Nationalization in Britain and the Commonwealth, 1940s-1960s” traces how British PR firms developed campaigns for large manufacturing firms around the stance of anti-socialism in the colonies and metropole in the late 1940s and 1950s. In “A Global British Language: The Supply and Demand for English-Language Learning Materials” Caroline Ritter examines how British firms positioned themselves for success in the market for English-language instructional materials in their former colonies. Rather than simply see the culture industries as promoting imperial ideals, as many scholars of imperial culture have done, these papers examine how the decline of British global power created a new market for British cultural commodities. These studies help explain the global successes of British cultural productions in the face of a decline of formal imperial power. More broadly, they explore the relationship between the culture industries and the ever-growing political and market power of business in the mid-twentieth century.