ABSTRACT
The idea of the white man’s burden gained wide currency and carried with it notions of civilization that made it suitable for marketing Western products such as soap. As early Western missionaries to the colonies preached, cleanliness was next to godliness. Although indigenous peoples in the colonies had their own cleansing practices, the combination of new nineteenth-century European
cleansing practices involving the use of relatively inexpensively manufactured soap and the rhetorical construction of native peoples as dirty savages that arose from attempts to legitimize imperialism paved the way for the marketing of soap as a civilizing product.
