Imaginative Bureaucracy: public relations and the British Empire after the Great War

The history of Public Relations is usually taken to be an American story, its analysts focusing on the manipulation of news media by powerful individuals, intuitions or corporations after Rockefeller. By contrast, this talk examines the development of public relations that occurred in Britain and the British Empire after the First World War where the story is less about newsprint and more about cultural interventions in art, design and film. This paper examines some of the biographies, initiatives and campaigns of public relations practitioners across the British Empire. It focuses on attempts to model state intervention in the public sphere that were less legalistic and adversarial (as in the US) than something akin to cultural Keynesianism. By sketching out this neglected history the paper attempts to tell a larger story about developmentalism, the history of information and the genesis of liberal internationalist organisations such as the World Bank and UNESCO.

Scott Anthony is Assistant Professor of Public History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research interests focus on the history of propaganda, the role of artists and intellectuals in public life and the use of history as a tool of activists, campaigners and policy makers. His books include Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain (Manchester University Press, 2012), The Art of Flight (with Oliver Green) (Lund Humphries, 2012) and Films that Work Harder (Amsterdam University Press, Forthcoming). In addition to his scholarly research he has worked on a number of exhibitions, seasons and public events for cultural institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the British Film Institute in the UK and the National Gallery and the National Library in Singapore. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times, the BBC, The Straits Times, The New Statesman, Tribune, Times Higher and The London Review of Books blog among many others.