Public Events Calendar

We warmly invite you to the launch of the SNSF project “The Battle of Materials: Commodity ‘Research and Propaganda’ and the Road Towards Immoderate Consumption, 1900 – 1980”, led by Prof. Dr. Moritz von Brescius. The launch will be followed by a public lecture by Prof. Erika Rappaport, University of California Santa Barbara, entitled "‘Aims of Industry’: Big Sugar, Public Relations and the Fight for Free Enterprise in Decolonizing Imperial Britain”.

Opening remarks by Prof. Dr. Moritz von Brescius, followed by the public guest lecture. 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.

All welcome