154What was true for Canadian exporters was true for British and other colonial producers. If they were to compete on quality as well as price, they had to get the measure of empire markets, and to understand the specific needs of the customers to whom they wished to sell. Imperial exhibitions greatly facilitated this process by bringing both parties into closer contact at venues purposely designed to promote long-distance trade. The fact that these exhibitions spread so rapidly to the dominions, and were even staged multiple times in a single place, further speaks of the importance that colonial as well as British businessmen attached to them. None of this is to deny their propagandist functions – the visual imagery of empire had a strength and immediacy that the written word often lacked – but we need equally to be alert to their commercial and financial motivations and effects.117

Britishness: cultures of consumption

The study of material culture is a vibrant field of research.118 What we consume, and the way we consume it, is widely recognised as a marker of identity. By exploring tastes in food, furniture and fashion scholars have sought to understand how people in the past perceived themselves and were in turn perceived by others. Commodities, it is argued, were culturally specific: they took on a symbolic value from the environment in which they were produced. After 1850 consumerism intensified across the English-speaking world.119 The rise of bourgeois society in Britain, the United States and the settler colonies saw a language of ‘needs’ increasingly displaced by a language of ‘wants’, particularly in the sphere of household goods. Women led the way in forging this expressive genteel culture, its values and practices. Notions of gentility surrounding the nineteenth-century household fuelled the demand for certain types of goods, and shaped the meaning attached to them. The question of how far British habits of consumption, as well as marketing and advertising practices, were shaped by the colonial encounter is a complex one.120 Certainly, by the end of the nineteenth century, several leading British companies were actively, even aggressively, exploiting imperial sentiment in selling their products at home. But British firms

117 Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, pp. 84–8.

118 For a key study, see Young, Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century.

119 P. N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire, 2nd edn

(London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 30, 47.

120 For references and a commentary on the recent literature, see Thompson, The Empire

Strikes Back?, pp. 44–9.

155Markets and consumer cultures also found themselves at an advantage in responding to colonial consumer preference. They were often the first to establish distribution networks in the colonies, and they were in a good position therefore to try to inculcate, as well as to exploit, ‘British’ tastes. This is not to deny that colonial South Africans, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians ate, drank, dressed and generally behaved in distinctive ways: they did, and colonial preferences did not slavishly follow imported British (or European) styles. People in the colonies lived differently, and so, even when goods were imported from Britain, the use to which they were put, and the meanings they acquired, could change.

There was not always a need for product differentiation between Britain and its colonies. Thus in the case of the serialised fiction syndicated to colonial weekly newspapers by Lancashire’s provincial press (Australia and New Zealand proved its most durable market), rather than targeting particular kinds of client or consumer, it was assumed that a single, standardised list, based around sensational novels, would appeal equally to overseas settlers and people in the provinces in Britain. ‘Syndication amounted to an imposition of the metropolis’s cultural machinery on that of the (settler) colonies, since it cramped literary production, or at least opportunities for publication, in the colonies.’121

The same is true of many so-called ‘comfort’ foods and drinks. ‘We are what we eat’ is a popular refrain, and food is said to be ‘loaded with cultural meaning and value’ – a crucial element in defining national ­identity.122 The fact that ‘British’ food was widely consumed in the dominions partly reflects a preference for the familiar, partly a residue of earlier eating habits, and partly perhaps a desire to sustain cultural and historical bonds.123 For example, long after their arrival, middle-class colonists continued to rely on British cookery books and household guides. Not until the end of the century did they begin to be locally produced. The most famous is Mrs Beeton’s skilfully marketed Book of Household Management (1859–61), a major publishing success story of the Victorian era.124 Such guides played an important role in acculturation. To be sure, much of the food derived from their recipes was locally grown, and merely took on

121 C. Hilliard, ‘The Provincial Press and the Imperial Traffic in Fiction: 1870s–1930s’,

JBS 48:3 (July 2009), 653–73. The colonies’ share of provincial newspapers’ fiction

department revenue was approximately 20 per cent from the 1870s through to the

1920s.

122 P. Manning, Migration in World History (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 127.

123 A. Wessel, ‘There’s No Taste Like Home: The Food of Empire’, paper presented at the

British World Conference, University of Melbourne, July 2003.

124 N. Humble (ed.), Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management:  Abridged Edition

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and K. Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times

of Mrs Beeton (London: Random House, 2007).

156British trademarks. Yet some of it was actually imported from Britain. By contrast, there is little evidence of indigenous foods from the dominions being exported back to the ‘mother country’; in fact, colonists tended to overlook such foods, or regarded them as inedible. Interestingly, this situation was different from that of the Victorian Raj. In their letters to the editors of British magazines, memsahibs proffered Indian recipes – those for curry were especially popular, as such dishes were regarded as a relatively easy way for housewives in Britain to use up leftovers.125

Usually, however, British products had to be adapted for colonial tastes. Alcoholic drinks are an example. The three leading Scotch whisky blenders – Buchanan, Dewar’s and Walker’s – all developed major markets in Australia, Canada and South Africa. The whisky industry boasted an above average export performance, and its products tended to follow the flag. But the preferences of colonial consumers were distinct. On the South African Rand and in the Australian Outback it was strongflavoured, fiery whiskies that were most prized, so much so that a much higher proportion of grain whisky had to be put into colonial blends.126

The case of Australia is worth exploring a little further here.127 It was once claimed that ‘no people on the face of the earth ever absorbed more alcohol per head of population’.128 Yet the reality was somewhat different. Tea was a better thirst quencher and was consumed in large quantities in Australia, even when compared to Britain. The drinking of alcohol peaked in periods of economic prosperity during the 1830s, 1850s, 1870s and 1880s, and then slumped during depressions. During the convict years, when rum and brandy were favoured spirits, alcohol seems to have offered migrants an opportunity (temporarily) to escape the harsh realities of settler life. Subsequently, from the mid century, the consumption of alcohol reflected the growing prosperity and security felt by many settlers. Whisky grew in popularity during these years: by the 1890s, more of it was drunk than all of other spirits combined. However, during the nineteenth century there was a long-term decline in spirit drinking, and a gradual shift from spirits to beer. Unlike whisky, imported beer faced stiff domestic competition. Beer was expensive to transport and de­teriorated rapidly with age. This encouraged local production. Australian breweries already accounted for 80 per cent of total consumption by the late 1880s,

125 N. Chaudhuri, ‘Shawls, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain’, in N. Chaudhuri and

M. Strobel (eds.), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Blooming­

ton: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 231–46.

126 Thompson and Magee, ‘A Soft Touch?’, pp. 699, 708.

127 Our analysis is based on A. Dingle, ‘ “The Truly Magnificent Thirst”: An Historical

Survey of Australian Drinking Habits’, Historical Studies 19 (1980), 227–43.

128 R. Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 35.

157Markets and consumer cultures albeit that local production developed more rapidly in New South Wales than it did in Victoria, which was more dependent on British imports. From the early 1900s, a lighter chilled Australian beer, different in style from English ales, was introduced by the New York brothers W. R. & M. Foster. On the back of this new, ‘lager style’ of beer, which was better suited to a hot climate, Fosters greatly increased production.129

Fashions in clothing and home decoration also provide insights into the spread of consumer culture across the British World. Among middleclass emigrants – an ‘Anglo’ bourgeoisie, as they have been called – there is evidence that, as early as the 1830s and 1840s, women were recreating changing metropolitan tastes in clothes and furnishings.130 The maintenance of such connections demonstrated their determination to stay in touch with friends and family back home through correspondence and, later, through the reading of British magazines. Dresses, tablecloths, curtain fabrics and other domestic items were either requisitioned from relatives or ordered directly from British firms; the poor quality and expense of locally available goods helps explain why. Because many early settlers relied on parcels sent by their families back home this transfer of goods does not show up in export statistics, although relatives may well have been reimbursed by remittances (see Chapter 3).

Such consuming habits need to be set in the context of colonial cultural sensitivities. There was a widespread fear of being labelled ‘provincial’, ‘unfashionable’ or ‘backward’ by metropolitan visitors to the colonies; strongest in the early-to-mid 1800s, it persisted into the second half of the nineteenth century. More generally, there was the bourgeois desire to assert social status – a desire that intensified later in the century as a result of the rise of home ownership, the growth of suburban living, and the widening range of domestic furnishings and other household goods. A study of household inventories in Edinburgh, Delaware and Sydney shows how there were marked continuities across English-speaking societies in terms of the ownership of commodities through which the rising middle-classes sought to establish a sense of identity: drawing and dining room tables, bedroom wardrobes, bathroom equipment, china services and pianos. Consumers in these cities purchased similar goods and used them in similar ways, a practice reinforced by the fact that their codes of etiquette were derived from the same body of texts. On this basis, it

129 D. Dunstan, ‘Boozers and Wowsers’, in V. Burgmann and J. Lee (eds.), Constructing

a Culture: A People’s History of Australia since 1788 (Fitzroy, Victoria: Penguin, 1988),

pp. 96–123 (pp. 108–10), and ‘A Sobering Experience’, pp. 179–81.

130 A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and

Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 74; M. Weidenhofer (ed.), Colonial Ladies (South

Yarra, Victoria: Gordon and Gotch, 1985), p. 14.

158is possible to speak of a ‘transnational Anglo culture’, which was less a case of pale imitation and more of an authentic cultural continuity across ‘Greater Britain’.131 Three case studies will help us to establish how far these bourgeois household and consumer goods were actually exported from Britain. The first is decorative tiles. Marketed to colonial consumers as highstatus goods that could not be purchased locally, decorative ceramic tiles represented the cutting edge in British aesthetic fashion.132 They gained in popularity from the 1850s, and the two biggest tile producers were Maw and Co., and Minton’s. Both companies were successful exporters, with expertise in handling large overseas contracts. They faced relatively little competition from foreign manufacturers until the end of the century. Tile exports to Australia, New Zealand and Canada accounted for a large share of their overseas orders, and lavish catalogues were produced specifically for colonial markets. For a while British-manufactured tiles were also in demand in the United States. But after the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia an American tile industry emerged; American consumers tended to prefer classical styles, while colonial consumers favoured pictorial and ornamental designs. Ceramic tiles were expensive. Hence they were purchased mainly by wealthy emigrants, or to adorn prestigious public buildings. For example, the Scottish decorators Daniel Cottier and John Lyon, who opened a branch of their firm in Sydney in 1873, decorated many big private houses ‘in the latest London style’, while public commissions included St Anne’s Chapel in Fredericton; the Calgary Herald Building; the Canadian Pacific Railroad Hotel in Vancouver; St John’s Cathedral in Saskatoon; St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne; St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney; and the Parliament House buildings in Queensland, Perth and Melbourne.

A second case study is floor and table coverings. The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the launch of linoleum as a household word.133 Linoleum’s appeal was strongly linked to middle-class concerns about cleanliness and home-making – Mrs Beeton’s manual provided two recipes for polishing linoleum floors. The main centres of production were London, Lancaster and Kirkaldy, and the industry grew rapidly from

131 Young, Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century.

132 The rest of this paragraph draws on L. Pearson, ‘The World at Their Feet: Decorative Tile

Exports by British Manufacturers, 1850–1910’, paper given at Imperial Globalisation?

Trade, Technologies, and Transnationalities within the British Empire, c. 1800–2000, 10–11

September 2004, British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol. We are grate-

ful to Dr Pearson for discussing the implications of her research with us during the

conference.

133 P. J. Gooderson, Lord Linoleum: Lord Ashton, Lancaster and the Rise of the British Oilcloth and

Linoleum Industry (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), pp. 17, 25–6, 30–51, 107, 113.

159Markets and consumer cultures the 1890s to 1914. Williamson’s was a leading manufacturer. Benefiting from rising living standards and an increased demand for house decoration and furnishings, the firm specialised in printed and patterned floorcloths at the cheaper end of the market, and higher-quality cork linoleum for wealthier consumers. Steam-powered rotary printing techniques allowed Williamson’s to produce a variety of designs more quickly and cheaply than its rivals. Australia was a key market. First displayed at the Melbourne exhibition in 1888–9, linoleum was then actively marketed through the catalogues of retail emporiums.134 A marked surge in export orders to Australia was recorded in 1904. By 1913, the empire as a whole was taking 58 per cent of exported floorings from Britain. There was a steady growth of demand from South Africa, New Zealand and Canada, while Australia continued to account for the largest share.

Musical instruments, including the organ, were likewise exported all over the British World.135 Compared to the piano, national schools of organ building differed widely. Moreover, unlike pianos, organs were a community’s possession, purchased for town halls and churches by civic or congregational effort. At the forefront of Victorian music technology, organs attracted a lot of public attention at international exhibitions, and provided the basis for a flourishing export business for firms such as William Hill and Sons and Henry Willis and Sons. Missionaries were the first carriers. The Reverend Henry Williams received a mechanical barrel organ in New Zealand in 1830, one that apparently still survives. After this date, the estimate books for organ manufacturers contain a steady stream of empire references. Australia and New Zealand proved the best customers, although in South Africa both Afrikaans and English churches ordered organs from Britain up to 1914, as did many town halls.136 British organs were popular because British-trained organists saw them as world leading in terms of quality and reliability. The colonies welcomed the instruments and, up to a point, the people who played them, although they did not always favour British music.

No discussion of material culture would be complete without reference to clothing and fashion. As early as the 1840s, following the sharp fall in prices of cotton fabrics in Britain, the export of clothes to the

134 Historical Houses Trust of New South Wales, Floorcoverings, pp. 48–51.

135 The key study is by Stephen Banfield, ‘Towards a History of Music in the British

Empire: Three Export Studies’, in K. Darian-Smith, P. Grimshaw and S. Macintyre

(eds.), Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne:

Melbourne University Press, 2007), pp. 63–90. The rest of this paragraph is drawn from

this source.

136 Canada, by contrast, does not appear to have imported many organs from Britain. The

United States was a leading supplier, and French-speaking Canada had a first-rank

company of its own, Casavant Frères of St-Hyacinthe, established in Québec in 1879.

160Cape and Australia had become a lucrative business. For example, the London family firm, E. Moses and Son, which specialised in cut-price, ready-made clothing, profited from a surge in Australian orders during this decade.137 After 1850, stylish dress became a sign of social status and moral worth among middle-class settlers. Developments in the production and marketing of clothing, and the rise of the modern department store, laid the foundations of the modern fashion industry.138 Complete outfits were offered to migrants, as well as bedding, washing and eating gear, and a chest to contain them. By the 1860s, Moses and Son had opened several branches throughout the settler empire.

Australia boasts some of the best research into clothing habits and fashions.139 Australia’s manufacturing of cloth was at first limited: the severe depression of the 1840s stifled expansion, as did the outpouring of good-quality textiles from Britain. The same was true of footwear, where a lack of local tradesmen fostered a dependence on imported goods. The British company, C. and J. Clark, opened up a lucrative market in the colony of Victoria during the gold rush, although it faced considerable competition from America later in the century.140 From the mid century, the migrants who poured into Australia were consumers as well as producers, and relatively prosperous ones too. The total value of imports per head expanded accordingly. Wealthier settlers even sometimes ordered their clothes direct from England. The slower economic expansion of the late 1860s, and the implementation of tariffs in Victoria in 1867, subsequently saw a fall in imported clothing and footwear.141

Much colonial urban dress was modelled on European styles. If not imported, it was made up with overseas patterns. In their quest for respectability, the merchants and businessmen of  Victoria and New South Wales adopted the British preference for dark-coloured outfits, consisting of frockcoats, trousers and waistcoats, often offset with a tall top hat. Men in Queensland were understandably more reluctant to follow this sartorial trend, which was hardly suited to its tropical climate. (Even in

137 S. Chapman, ‘The Innovating Entrepreneurs in the British Ready-Made Clothing

Industry’, Textile History 24 (1993), 5–25, esp. pp. 14–22.

138 See, for example, R. Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870: A

Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 85–6, and,

more generally, ‘Cross-Continental Cross-Fertilisation in Clothing’, European Review

14:1 (2006), 135–47 (p. 119).

139 See especially the seminal study by M. Maynard, Fashioned from Penury:  Dress as

Cultural’ Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),

from which the rest of this paragraph is drawn.

140 G. B. Sutton, ‘The Marketing of Ready-Made Footwear in the Nineteenth Century’,

Business History 6:2 (1964), 93–112 (pp. 99–102, 109).

141 K. Buckley and T. Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers:  Capitalism and the Common

People in Australia, 1788–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 99.

161Markets and consumer cultures Melbourne and Sydney lighter clothing was favoured during the summer.) Meanwhile, the quality garments worn by middle-class Australian women were usually imported. Australian women admired the styles of dress from Paris as well as London, and social refinement in female clothing was European rather than exclusively British. In Australia’s sunny climate, women, moreover, preferred boldly designed garments in brighter colours. That said, Australian women wishing to adopt a genteel lifestyle paid close attention to codes of social practice in Britain, including dress. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century what was on offer to them locally was limited and more expensive. Hence the tendency for Australian department stores to combine the retailing of imported British goods with local garment production. While dependence on British garment manufacturers varied over time, and was possibly more pronounced for high-quality goods, British producers made deep inroads into the Australian market from the 1840s. Indigenous peoples adopted European styles of clothing, too. However, when non-Europeans did don western garments they mostly did so voluntarily (rather than because they were required to do so), and they invested them with their own symbolic meanings.142 In South Africa the first people to take on such clothing were male converts to Christianity in the 1860s and 1870s.143 As the Comaroffs have argued, ‘clothing was a morally charged medium for missionaries’; the naked or semi-clad, ‘native’ body evoked degeneracy and disorder, and the campaign to clothe Africans ‘was inseparable from other aspects and axes of the civilising mission’.144 Thus visitors to mission stations on the Eastern Cape commented approvingly on how Africans wore English (or English-style) clothing, such as frock-coats, suits, ties, socks and shoes. Yet there were limits to what whites thought acceptable, and Africans pushed right up against them. While missionaries desired that their flocks should be covered, and saw clothing as a part of their civilising offensive on African manners, they became increasingly concerned with Africans’ use of European dress. They felt such dress was often worn immodestly to display wealth and status, or even to express opposition to white supremacy.

How much of this clothing would have been imported from Britain? The question is hard to answer. During the period 1835–70 we know

142 H. Hendrickson (ed.), Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-

Colonial Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 2.

143 See here Ross, ‘Cross-Continental Cross-Fertilisation in Clothing’; and K. Ruether,

‘Heated Debates over Crinolines: European Clothing on Nineteenth-Century Lutheran

Mission Stations in the Transvaal’, JSAS 28 (2002), 359–78.

144 J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 2 vols., Vol. II:  The

Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1997), pp. 218–73 (quotations from pp. 229, 236).

162that Britain’s share of the Cape’s imports fluctuated between 60 and 80 per cent, and that textiles and clothing in particular made up the largest part of these goods.145 However, traders at this time passed infrequently through the interior of the Cape, and Africans largely lacked the means to purchase their wares. Mission societies had therefore to appeal to the generosity of the British public. Used apparel, collected for the poor and needy at home, was also sent abroad. Meanwhile, missionaries and their wives gathered old clothes whilst on furlough and carried them back to the Cape on their return to their station.146

Subsequently, mineral discoveries, labour migrancy and urbanisation made European clothing more widely available.147 On the diamond fields of Kimberley, the inflow of migrants led to a rapid rise in purchasing power from the early 1880s. For black workers clothing formed an important marker of their passage into a new community. On either side of DuToitspan Road were shops that were emporiums for imported and colonial goods, where migrants were introduced to the wonders of consumerism. Some of this clothing was plain working garb: so-called ‘oilman’s clothing’, such as hats, boots, shirts and the like. Yet fancy and luxury attire was also on sale. To impress their peers, Christian converts wore trousers and tails at weekends, the accessories of a civilised existence; other mineworkers wore a variety of more garish garments, including cast-off military tunics from imperial regiments. Labour migrants took European clothes home for their families, or to sell, as well as purchasing imported cloth, which their wives then used to make clothing for themselves. Similarly, it was social standing rather than a desire to conform to European norms that influenced the dress codes of African ­miners on the Witwatersrand. Here well-stocked shops, catering specifically for black labour migrants, grew up next to the compounds on the Reef. Popular items of clothing included leather boots, hats, frock- and waistcoats, jackets, shirts, socks, belts, canes and umbrellas. ‘European clothing that was rare and exotic at home marked a man as a gayisa’ (a man returned from wage work).148 It is probable that much of this clothing was second-hand: sent to South Africa from Britain when new, and then later sold on to so-called ‘smouse’. These were Jewish traders, mostly from eastern Europe, who were famous throughout southern Africa for

145 J. Inggs, ‘Port Elizabeth’s Response to the Expanding Economy of Europe, 1820–1870’,

South African Journal of Economic History 3 (1988), 61–84 (pp. 71–5).

146 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, p. 237.

147 See P. Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South

Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), pp. 60, 101–2, 124, 173.

148 Ibid., p. 173.

163Markets and consumer cultures retail and wholesale trading, and who took goods into the interior to sell from their wagons or to rural traders.149

Perhaps the major item of clothing imported from England for indigenous Africans, however, was the woollen blanket.150 Blankets were an integral part of the costume of many ethnic groups during the second half of the nineteenth century, replacing skin cloaks, and worn in both ritual and everyday contexts.151 Recommended by their versatility, blankets could be secured at the shoulder, or pinned around the waist; they could cradle babies; and they provided bedding. The demand from Basotho people, for example, was such that the company of Wormald and Walker of Dewsbury in Yorkshire began designing blankets for Basutoland (today’s Lesotho) well before the turn of the century. Blankets were sold through the rural trading stores. The famous merchant firm, Fraser Limited, founded in the 1870s by the Ipswich immigrants Donald and Douglas, and based in Wepener in the Orange Free State, generated large profits by importing blankets into southern Africa, paying particular attention to this branch of merchandise.152 The blanket, however, had to be designed to suit African tribal fabric and design preferences, not to reflect European ones, even if the names given to particular styles sometimes reflected their British origins.153 Indeed, to protect market share, and guard against heavy losses, it was vital to keep abreast of (shifting) African tastes. The ‘Victoria’ line, depicting the ‘beloved’ British Queen, and produced during her Jubilee Year of 1897, was probably the bestknown blanket. Sixty years later one of Wormald and Walker’s agents

149 For a contemporary fictional account of eastern European Jews, who had fled the

pogroms for South Africa, at first to trade from a mule-drawn buggy, and later from a

local store, see Pauline Smith’s The Beadle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), pp. 13–17.

Smith was born in 1882 in Little Karoo in the Cape colony; her father, a doctor, was

an Englishman born in China; her mother was a Scottish nurse from Aberdeenshire.

Her novels depict isolated, resourceful, conservative colonists (Dutch, English and

Scots), and are memorable for their fine evocations of the place and people of the Little

Karoo. See D. Driver (ed.), Pauline Smith (Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1983); and G.

Haresnape, Pauline Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). See also C.

Van Onselen, The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath

(Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 272.

150 C. Danziger, A Trader’s Century: The Fortunes of Frasers (Cape Town: Purnell, 1979),

pp. 45–7.

151 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, pp. 263–7.

152 T. Keegan, ‘The Making of the Rural Economy from 1850 to the Present’, in Z. A.

Konczacki (ed.), Studies in the Economic History of Southern Africa, 2 vols., Vol. II: South

Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland (London: Cass, 1991), pp. 36–63 (p. 44).

153 Hence J. Prestholdt’s observation that consumer tastes and demand on the [African]

‘periphery’ were often more significant in the formation of global economic systems

than commentators allow: ‘On the Global Repercussions of East African Consumerism’,

AHR 109 (2004), 775–83 (pp. 755–60).

164could still remark that ‘the Victoria is . . . the hallmark of the well-dressed Basotho’.154 Australia’s Aboriginal population present an equally fascinating case.155 Ignoring the importance of codes of bodily decoration to Aborigines, British settlers regarded their nakedness as a sign of inherent inferiority. From the first moments of settlement, Aborigines were given European clothing and encouraged to dress in ways that conformed to western habits. As in South Africa, this was often at the instigation of missionaries, with posed photographs of Aborigines wearing frock-coats and holding Bibles up as evidence of the soundness of their conversion. That said, Aborigines often discarded government or missionary-issued clothing when they returned to the bush, or sold or exchanged such garments for liquor. During the 1840s and 1850s, men’s trousers and shirts, and women’s petticoats, were worn by Aborigines mostly when they were in direct contact with settlers, either in their employment as stockmen or domestic servants, or when they ventured into towns. During these decades it became more common to see Aborigines dressed like Europeans. The policy of encouraging Aborigines to settle on supervised mission or government reserve stations accelerated the process of acculturation. On Victoria’s reserves, Aborigines were given a clothing ration each year, or cloth to make clothes. They also bought clothing from travelling hawkers (usually Indians), or from mail order catalogues. The Illustrated Australian News of 25 August 1865 remarked on how Aborigines on the Coranderrk reserve were ‘all dressed in European clothes, not received in charity, but acquired by the earnings of their own industry’.156 Indeed, surviving photographs show how elegantly Aborigines on reserves were dressed, a fact remarked on by many of the visitors to these stations.157

While some of the European clothing worn by Aborigines may have been imported from Britain, such as that purchased by mail order from department stores, more of it (especially of the hardwearing variety) was probably manufactured locally – the clothing industry of Victoria gained in strength from the mid century and became a large employer

154 Ibid., p. 46.

155 On Aboriginal dress, see R. Broome, Aboriginal Victorians:  A History since 1800

(Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2005), pp. 113, 137, 140–2, 149; A. Massola,

Coranderrk: A History of the Aboriginal Station (Kilmore: Lowden Publishing, 1975),

especially the photographs in this collection; and Maynard, Fashioned from Penury,

pp. 59–72. We are also grateful to Richard Broome for guiding us through the complex-

ities of this subject.

156 Quoted in Massola, Coranderrk, p. 64.

157 D. E. Barwick, ‘And the Lubras are Ladies Now,’ in F. Gale (ed.), Women’s Role in

Aboriginal Society (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1994), pp. 51–63

(p. 57).

165Markets and consumer cultures of labour.158 More likely still, Aborigines on reserves made the clothes themselves, as during the 1860s and 1870s Aboriginal women had rapidly acquired sewing skills. Neither should we see western dress as a sign of the erosion of Aboriginal identity or self-esteem. As Richard Broome explains, Aborigines tended to adopt British culture voluntarily and only in so far as it suited them to do so. Like their fight for equal wages, clothing offered Aborigines an opportunity to assert their equality with British settlers. The same desire can be observed off the reserves. For instance, when the Daisy Hill people from the Maryborough region of Victoria found surface gold nuggets during the 1860s ‘they spent the money on clothing, dressing themselves in black suits, bell toppers and crinolines . . . cutting such airs as to greatly amuse everyone who chanced to see them’.159 Such behaviour can just as plausibly be read as an act of cultural defiance as imitation. Indeed, the rather stark distinction made by officials on the Royal Commission on the Aborigines (1877) between ‘necessary’ and ‘ornamental’ dress suggests white disapproval of Aboriginal peoples wearing anything other than the most basic and functional articles of ­clothing.160 In this light, it is interesting to read a report on the Coranderrk station published five years later. It was littered with complaints from Aboriginal witnesses that they had been given insufficient clothing by its superintendent, who then struggled to explain to officials why his order books contained so many items of more expensive clothing.161

Consumption, therefore, was a rather blunt tool of conquest. If the civilising mission in the settler colonies was founded on an assumption that western commodities, especially clothing, could bring about a revolution in the habits of Africans or Aborigines, the reality proved different. Limited access to such goods and the people who traded them, low purchasing power, the resilience of local costume, the ridicule sometimes directed at those wearing European garb, the fear of missionaries that those who did wear it would become puffed up with their own self- ­importance, and the syncretic clothing styles that emerged – all these things

158 Cooper, Victorian Commerce, pp.  135–6; Cowderoy, Melbourne’s Commercial Jubilee,

p. 61. In 1868, as much as 24.2 per cent of Victoria’s industrial workforce (some 4,347

people), was already employed in the colonies’ clothing and footwear factories; this fig-

ure continued to grow over the latter half of the century, reaching 27.2 per cent (12,941

employees) by 1882–3 and 30 per cent (19,265 employees) by 1900. These data come

from C. J. R. Linge, Industrial Awakening: A Geography of Australian Manufacturing, 1788

to 1890 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), p. 744

159 Quoted in Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, p. 149.

160 Royal Commission on the Aborigines: Report of the Commissioners, Vol. I (1877), p. 47.

161 Report of the Board Appointed to Enquire into the Present Condition and Management of the

Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Vol. II (1882).

166stood in the way of implanting new cultures of consumption among indigenous peoples. Among Europeans, by contrast, commodities, and the specific ways in which they were used, were emblematic of British culture  – especially bourgeois culture. Much of the economic power that derived from ‘Britishness’ was tied to its associations with bourgeois consuming culture. Middle-class women played a particularly important role here. As we have seen, their concerns, tastes and buying power were formative in terms of colonial demand. In this way, it is possible to conceive of the growth of branches of trade in the colonies as an essentially ‘domestic’ expansion process that was driven by middle-class female desires.

Increasingly, merchants and manufacturers from Britain seized upon the settler colonies to expand markets for their products. Their branding of British goods – for example, the way they were linked to particular towns or cities – often evoked the proximity, familiarity, and even romance, of the ‘mother country’. Moreover, the fact that these goods were widely advertised in colonial newspapers, displayed at colonial exhib­itions and agricultural shows, and (later) featured in newsreels, documentaries and films further worked to the advantage of British exporters who had a sharp eye for consumer preferences and how to exploit them. This continued to be true right up to the First World War,