The Emergence of Brand-Name Capitalism in Late Colonial India: Advertising and the Making of Modern Conjugality

This book explores the emergence of professional advertising in western India during the interwar period, analyzing how global manufacturers promoted the sale of global commodities to the Indian middle class. It discusses the cultural strategies used by foreign businesses to capture urban consumers and the limitations of brand-name capitalism during this period.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 328 pages
Publication date: 18 April 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

This book delves into the emergence of professional advertising in Western India during the interwar period. It explores the strategies employed by global manufacturers to promote a "brand-name capitalism" among the Indian middle class during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when advertising emerged as a profession in India and underwent significant transformations. By analyzing the cultural techniques used in foreign advertisements to captivate urban consumers, Haynes argues that the promoters of various commodities crystallized their campaigns around principles of modern conjugality. He also highlights the limitations of brand-name capitalism during this period, examining its inability to penetrate rural markets or secure middle-class customers.

The book provides numerous examples of illustrated advertisements from Indian newspapers, covering campaigns for male sex tonics, women's medicines, hot drinks like Ovaltine and Horlicks, soaps like Lifebuoy, Lux, and Sunlight, cooking mediums like Dalda, and electrical household technologies. By examining the formation of "brand-name capitalism" and two key structures that accompanied it—the advertising agency and the field of professional advertising—this book sheds new light on the global consumer economy in interwar India and places developments in South Asia within a broader global history of consumer capitalism.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350278073