Empire Marketing Board

Created by the British government in 1926, the Empire Marketing Board sought to strengthen trade within the Empire and persu...

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Created by the British government in 1926, the Empire Marketing Board sought to strengthen trade within the Empire and persuade consumers to “Buy Empire”. Under its secretary, Stephen Tallents, it commissioned leading artists and placed vivid posters on hoardings, in railway stations, schools, shops and factories. MacDonald Gill’s monumental maps of Ireland, Scotland and Canada were issued in 1929–30 as part of this ambitious peacetime propaganda campaign. Agriculture, fisheries, industry and transport become crowded panoramas of produce, animals, workers, ships and decorative lettering. Designed to make dispersed dominions appear abundant, familiar and economically interconnected, these enormous maps are outstanding examples of pictorial cartography: visually exhilarating, while also embodying the idealised and paternalistic assumptions of interwar imperial publicity.

Created by the British government in 1926, the Empire Marketing Board sought to strengthen trade within the Empire and persuade consumers to “Buy Empire”. Under its secretary, Stephen Tallents, it commissioned leading artists and placed vivid posters on hoardings, in railway stations, schools, shops and factories. MacDonald Gill’s monumental maps of Ireland, Scotland and Canada were issued in 1929–30 as part of this ambitious peacetime propaganda campaign. Agriculture, fisheries, industry and transport become crowded panoramas of produce, animals, workers, ships and decorative lettering. Designed to make dispersed dominions appear abundant, familiar and economically interconnected, these enormous maps are outstanding examples of pictorial cartography: visually exhilarating, while also embodying the idealised and paternalistic assumptions of interwar imperial publicity.

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