Examine the role of state publicity and propaganda in sustaining imperial economic ties in the interwar period.

The interwar Empire was held together as much by persuasion as by power. When Britain's law barred tariffs on food imports, the state turned to publicity: the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), operating 1926–33, used large-scale advertising to steer British consumers towards Empire produce [1].

Why publicity replaced policy

• With taxes on food imports legally closed off, Britain had no price instrument to favour Empire goods; it could only shift preferences, not prices [2].
• A 1926 cable reported an EMB scheme of £1,000,000 for "advertising the empire" — the scale of state-funded promotion [3].
• Posters, exhibitions and documentary film carried the message, making the EMB "the archetype of government public relations departments" [1].

Publicity as political, not merely commercial, work

• Its purpose extended beyond selling butter and tea to focusing British subjects' attention on the Dominions, shaping how citizens viewed an economic and political order [3].
• The same 1926 Imperial Conference produced the Balfour Report, declaring Britain and the Dominions "equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another" — a status India did not hold [4].
• Thus Dominions were partners whose consent was sought; colonies like India were suppliers whose produce was marketed — best described as state publicity for an economic purpose, with political effects.

Limits of the instrument

• Persuasion lapsed once coercion became lawful. The Ottawa Agreements (1932), built on imperial preference and the maxim "home producers first, empire producers second, foreign producers last", created bilateral tariff pacts for five years [5][6].
• The EMB was wound up in 1933 — proof that publicity was a stand-in for policy, not a policy itself [1].

State publicity therefore sustained imperial economic ties only while legal tools were unavailable, binding markets sentimentally where tariffs could not bind them fiscally. Its deeper legacy is instructive: mass communication became a recognised instrument of statecraft, later codified in the Statute of Westminster, 1931 for the Dominions [7], while India's exclusion from that equality sharpened nationalist demands that culminated in Purna Swaraj.