About Anne McClintock's "Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising"

Anne McClintock argues that Victorian era advertisers’ raison d'être was not only commercial expansion, but also the legitimization of empire and race through a deliberate, cynical, homogenously coordinated cultural action.  “If all these new commodities were to be managed,” she says –mentioning Thomas Richards– “a unified system of cultural representat…