The opening event will begin with welcoming remarks by Prof. Moritz von Brescius, followed by a public guest lecture by Prof. Erika Rappaport. In her talk, she will examine how large multinational corporations involved in the manufacture, trade, and sale of imperial commodities turned to the emerging field of public relations during the political crises and transformations of the postwar decades.

Focusing on “Aims of Industry,” a PR firm and front group backed by the sugar, automobile, and steel industries, the lecture explores how corporate actors opposed the Labour government’s planned nationalization of sugar refining by promoting ideas of consumer sovereignty and “free enterprise.”

The campaign helped to legitimize public relations as a key political technology, mobilized in the metropole, across the Empire and Commonwealth, and in newly independent states in Africa and Asia.

More broadly, the lecture will show how advertising and public relations both profited from and shaped the policies and meanings of decolonization and capitalism from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Prof. Erika Rappaport is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focus is on history of gender and consumer cultures, and persuasion Modern Britain and its Empire. In her recent book project, “Whitewashing: How Public Relations Sold the End of Empire”, she examines how the relatively new field of public relations shaped both the process and the memory of decolonization from the late 1940s to the 1970s.

Moritz von Brescius is a global historian of Europe and Asia from the late eighteenth century to the present, focusing on resource and environmental history, economic history, and science and empire studies in global and comparative perspective. He has received an SNSF Consolidator Grant for the project “The Battle of Materials: Commodity ‘Research and Propaganda’ and the Road to Immoderate Consumption, 1900–1980.”