Prompt: Nearly all early professional advertising sought to promote the sale of mass consumer goods. Because advertisements reflected their historical conditions of production, these attempts at branding consumable commodities such as tea, cocoa, coffee, sugar, cotton, tobacco, soap, and animal products routinely articulated ideological understandings about the meaning of empire, race, gender, and class. At the same time, the dream worlds conjured up by early professional advertising obscured the actual conditions of production and distribution by which commodities made it to market. Having elided the actual conditions of production, advertisements established new symbolic associations between particular commodity brands and a shifting constellation of ideological claims defined by the historical and political conditions within which the ads were produced and presented. For this short paper, select at least two advertisements produced between 1780 and 1914 that promoted a particular consumable commodity (tea, cocoa, coffee, sugar, cotton, tobacco, soap, and animal products such as furs are good options). Drawing on scholarly work addressing historical advertising for this commodity, make a claim for how the advertisements obscured the actual conditions of production while simultaneously associating the branded commodity with imperial, domestic, national, racial, moral, or gender-based ideologies. You can agree with the scholars upon whom you draw or you can qualify or even disagree with their claims. You may re-evaluate their reading of particular advertisements or you can find and analyze other relevant advertisements. Scholarly Sources: Below I’ve provided options for scholarly sources. Several of these we’ve read already and it is perfectly fine for you to make your job easier by choosing one of them. I’ve made available additional chapters of the text listed below on Bcourses in “Files.” Several other texts on the list relate to other commodities we did not cover, but which you are welcome focus on. If you are interested in a reading listed below that is not currently available in PDF form on Bcourses or through Oskicat, please let me know and I’ll be happy to make a copy and send it to you. Certain scholarly sources focus more on the historical conditions of production than they do on advertising specifically, but you can still use these sources to help you analyze and deconstruct ads for the related commodity. You can also find and use other sources available online through Oskicat, if interested. For additional guidance on where to start, please see the Research and Writing Resources Page.Linda Fu, Advertising and Race: Global Phenomenon, Historical Challenges, and Visual Strategies (New York, 2014)Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2017)Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British advertising (Manchester, 2003)Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, 1990)Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York, 2016)Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014) – Email me if interestedSidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985) Email me if interestedSources and Citation Requirements: At least two scholarly sources (course readings are fine) and at least two historical advertisements.
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