Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. History Dept.

Advisor(s)

Sarah Duff

Second Advisor

Kelly Brignac

Abstract

Between the late nineteenth century and Indian independence in 1947, tea advertising became a key site through which imperial authority and Indian nationalism were negotiated. Drawing on advertisements, trade journals, and visual marketing campaigns produced from the 1880s through the 1950s, this honors thesis argues that tea advertising was a cultural and political mechanism through which the British Empire attempted to normalize imperial consumption and legitimize colonial authority. British campaigns framed tea as modern and routine while obscuring the exploitative labor systems and landscape transformations that sustained plantation production in Assam. As nationalist movements expanded in the early twentieth century, tea became incorporated into Swadeshi politics and emerging ideas of Indian economic self-sufficiency. Indian advertisers and consumers increasingly redefined tea through vernacular language, domesticity, and national identity, transforming a commodity rooted in empire into one associated with Indian modernity and everyday life. Examining tea advertising as a site of imperial negotiation reveals both the ambitions and limitations of colonial authority and demonstrates how ordinary practices of consumption became entangled with broader political struggles over identity, legitimacy, and power.

Keywords

Tea, Colonial India, British Empire, Imperial Advertising, Consumer Culture, Swadeshi Movement

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