Lecture by Erica Rappaport (UC Santa Barbara) & Launch of the SNSF Project “The Battle of Materials”

You are cordially invited to the lecture by Prof. Erica Rappaport (UC Santa Barbara) titled "Aims of Industry": Big Sugar, Public Relations and the Fight for Free Enterprise in Decolonizing Imperial Britain

Monday, 16 March 2026 | 4:15 pm
Institute for European Global Studies (EIB), University of Basel
Lecture Hall 00.015
Riehenstrasse 154, CH-4058

& Online: Zoom link

This lecture examines how large multinational corporations invested in the manufacture, trade, and sale of imperial commodities turned to the new field of public relations during the political crises and transformations of the postwar decades. Focusing on “Aims of Industry,” a PR firm/front group backed by the sugar, automobile, and steel industries, it explores how corporate actors battled the Labour government’s planned nationalization of sugar refining by promoting consumer sovereignty and “free enterprise.” The campaign helped legitimize public relations as a key political technology—mobilized in the metropole, across Empire and Commonwealth, and in newly independent states in Africa and Asia. More broadly, the talk shows how advertising and public relations both profited from and shaped the policies and meanings of decolonization and capitalism from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The lecture inaugurates the SNSF Consolidator Grant Project: The Battle of Materials: Commodity “Research and Propaganda” and the Road Towards Immoderate Consumption, 1900–1980, led by Prof. Moritz von Brescius and including team members Dr. Adam Przywara and Miguel Cadórniga Martínez (MA).