ABSTRACT
From about 1890 onwards, British advertising agencies expanded to continental Europe, the Empire and the United States. In this chapter, the author looks at the expansion strategies of these firms from the 1890s to the 1980s and consider the general relevance of this kind of research for historians of modern British consumer culture. At the same time as Great Britain was in the process of becoming the ‘workshop of the world’, it also emerged as a centre of magazine and newspaper publishing. By the late nineteenth century, Britain had become the global centre of advertising at an industrial scale. The first advertising agencies were set up in the US in the 1840s. In 1849, the Philadelphia-based businessman Volney B. Palmer described his outfit for the first time as an ‘Advertising Agency’. Britain’s place in the global market as an exporter of consumer commodities and consumer culture was determined by the role it played in forming a global Empire.
