Buying for Britain, China, or India?

Abstract

Chapter 3 seeks to gain a clearer understanding of the language, reach, and limits of competing patriotic trade campaigns in the Empire-Commonwealth during the 1920s and 1930s. Efforts to foster the concept of ‘buying British’ served to highlight the marginality of Indian and Chinese businesspeople within the imperial economic community. This stimulated the development of competing patriotic trade campaigns in which non-white imperial subjects challenged British economic leadership by presenting themselves as part of alternative economic communities connected across and beyond imperial spaces. The hybridity of colonial subjects’ identities impeded efforts to develop patriotic trade networks and meant that the content, character, and popular appeal of trade campaigns shifted between different regions. Despite the prevalence of a ‘Buy British’ rhetoric in the Dominions, patriotic trade drives there quickly came to focus chiefly on national protectionism rather than wider themes of imperial collaboration.