Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeIssues XXIX-1“A Vast Publicity Exercise”: The ...

“A Vast Publicity Exercise”:1 The 1952 Colombo Plan Exhibition and the Uses of Propaganda at the End of Empire

“Un vaste exercice publicitaire” : l’exposition du plan de Colombo de 1952 et les différents objectifs de la propagande à la fin de l’Empire
Erika Rappaport

Abstracts

This article traces the ideologies and practices of British propaganda surrounding the first years of the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia. In the early 1950s, British officials hoped that through their strategic use of propaganda the Colombo Plan would help Britain maintain influence in decolonizing Cold War Asia. This dream of cultural influence proved especially difficult, however, as leaders of new postcolonial nations, such as Ceylon/Sri Lanka used Colombo Plan propaganda to criticize British imperialism and write alternative development narratives. Rather than maintain imperial influence, the Colombo Plan further decentered the British state’s political and cultural power in Asia.

Top of page

Full text

Introduction

  • 1 The National Archives (TNA), DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.
  • 2 D.S. Senanayake, “Message,” Souvenir and Guide: Colombo Plan Exhibition (Colombo: Ceylon Government (...)

1In the exciting days of early nationhood, D.S. Senanayake, the Prime Minister of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), warmly welcomed the thousands of visitors who arrived in his country in February 1952 to attend the Colombo Plan Exhibition. This international fair celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia. The Plan had a central guiding principle: member nations would work together to improve living standards in South and Southeast Asia through development initiatives and student and technical exchanges. Like the other politicians who founded and publicized the Colombo Plan, Senanayake understood development as having economic, political, and cultural dimensions that produced multiple spatialized and temporalized identities. The Colombo Plan, he asserted, was an “experiment in human co-operation” in which “wealthier nations would guide and assist less developed nations.” This “boldly imaginative undertaking without precedent in the history of the world,” was, he continued, “an attempt to build a new South and South-east Asia out of the countries which had been heirs to all the ills of imperialism.” This last line punctured British officials’ fantasy that the Colombo Plan would become a platform for British influence in South and Southeast Asia.2 The Colombo Plan in fact became a stage for numerous states to engage in nation branding, which at times supported but often stymied British efforts to rewrite the meaning and memory of colonialism in Asia.

  • 3 Key works include Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra, ANU Press, 2 (...)

2The Colombo Plan was first formulated at the British Commonwealth Foreign Ministers meeting held in Colombo, Ceylon in January of 1950. Details were worked out at subsequent meetings held in Sydney and in London a few months later. Founding members included India, Ceylon, Pakistan, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; and the British colonies of Sarawak, North Borneo, Brunei, Malaya, and Singapore were associated through Britain’s membership, though they were not full members. The organization quickly grew beyond the Commonwealth when the United States, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam joined in 1951, Burma and Nepal in 1952, Indonesia in 1953, and Thailand, the Philippines and Japan became members in 1954.3

  • 4 See, for example, Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and (...)
  • 5 Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle (eds), Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Prac (...)
  • 6 Here I am paraphrasing the insights of Craggs and Wintle, Cultures of Decolonisation, 9.

3Its founders were steeped in modernization theory and Cold War dogma, which posited that Western technology and industrialization would raise living standards and that well-fed, housed, and clothed populations were immune to the lure of Communism.4 Such developmental thinking was ubiquitous in this era and inevitably consolidated “a technocratic unilinear notion of modernization as progress towards a ‘Western’ developed state.”5 Recipients of aid, such as Senanayake, nevertheless often used publicity and other forms of soft power to articulate distinct national narratives. For donor and recipient nations, the Colombo Plan thus became a space in which people in the Global North and South proposed, reflected, activated and articulated various postcolonial identities and relationships.6

  • 7 Junko Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity Policies towards Southeast Asia, 1950-1951” i (...)
  • 8 In this article I use the term Ceylon rather than Sri Lanka since the nation still bore its colonia (...)
  • 9 For a discussion of the government’s nationalist political culture in Sri Lanka, see Nalani Hennaya (...)

4This article builds on scholarship on the cultural histories of development and studies which have highlighted how transnational bodies such as the Colombo Plan allowed member states to achieve international and national aims through attraction rather than coercion.7 Focusing on Britain’s and Ceylon’s propaganda surrounding the Plan, especially the 1952 Colombo Plan Exhibition, I highlight here the efforts and failures of Britain to dominate the conversation around its place in decolonizing South and Southeast Asia.8 This international show ostensibly promoted the idea of regional cooperation, but Britain and Ceylon dominated the spectacle. Both states hired the same British expert to stage their islands as progressive nations in which social welfare, state planning, and engineering would create an equitable modern future. Both island nations also, however, relied on older narratives and ideologies as they grappled to represent the place of imperialism and capitalism in their new national stories. While British officials tried to rebrand their country as a humanitarian state that actively supported Asian development, Ceylon’s propaganda cast their nation as heir to both the ills and the positive legacies of imperialism, and to a glorious pre-colonial Sinhalese-Buddhist past.9

  • 10 B.R. Tomlinson, “The Weapons of the Weakened: British Power, Sterling Balances, and the Origins of (...)
  • 11 For this phrasing and concept, see Robert Gildea, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Po (...)
  • 12 For comparisons, see Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge U (...)
  • 13 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 (Cambridge (...)

5The Colombo Plan represents how British international relations began to shift methods of global influence from imperialism to multilateralism.10 It also exemplifies the broader practice of letting go, in order to cling on to their empire.11 In the late 1940s and 1950s, British officials, media and business experts sought out and built institutions that could do the work of empire just as its political structures were being severed.12 Like the Commonwealth more broadly, the Colombo Plan also epitomized the then popular ideology of “partnership,” in which, as historian John Darwin summarized, empire was reconfigured as an “instrument of social, economic and political uplift”.13 This ideology began decades earlier, but the stakes and meaning of partnership had changed after the war. The Colombo Plan’s history thus illuminates how colonialism, decolonization, and the Cold War shaped British ideas and practices about propaganda and other forms and uses of what we now call soft power.

6In the early 1950s, British leaders expected that the Colombo Plan’s international meetings, technical aid programs, student exchanges, and propaganda would forge positive international relationships and thereby suppress intensifying criticisms of British imperialism in the early 1950s. These ideas were shared and disseminated among colleagues across major government departments in the metropole and former and current colonies as they served together on committees, produced and circulated policy statements, correspondence, and publicity materials, and while they organized meetings, conferences, and exhibitions. Planning and policy documents suggest that the Colombo Plan was influenced by broader conversations about the uses of propaganda and soft power to maintain British influence and fight Communism in Asia. They also reveal that at times officials barely believed their own projections and they knew others were also quite skeptical. Privately, cynical officials admitted that the Colombo Plan was little more than a “vast publicity exercise” designed mainly to advance British economic and political interests. The Colombo Plan was a vast publicity exercise, but during the height of the Cold War and decolonization propaganda mattered.

The Cold War, decolonization, and the making of Britain’s propaganda policy

  • 14 The literature on exhibitions is now substantial. For a book that addresses tensions and collaborat (...)
  • 15 Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919-1939 ( (...)
  • 16 Sir Stephen Tallents, The Projection of England (1932; London, Film Center Ltd reissue, 1955), pp. (...)
  • 17 Sir Angus Gillan, “The Projection of Great Britain on the Colonial Empire,” Journal of the Royal So (...)
  • 18 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (...)

7Since the enormous success of the Great Exhibition in 1851, international fairs had emerged as a form of soft power that attempted to advance positive visions of the British empire and its industry.14 Such efforts grew more organised during and after the First World War, when government departments, state-funded organizations – especially the Empire Marketing Board, the British Council and the BBC – as well as businesses and trade associations used exhibitions, advertising and other publicity techniques to sell British commodities, ideals and culture at home and in the empire.15 In the interwar period, the leading ideologue who developed this vision of imperial propaganda was Sir Stephen Tallents, director of the Empire Marketing Board, among other jobs, and author of the influential The Projection of England (1932). In the text he wrote that “no country can to-day afford either to neglect the projection of its national personality or to resign to its projections to others”.16 Others, such as Sir Angus Gillan, director of the Empire Division of the British Council, applied such ideas to imperial governance. “The projection of Great Britain on the Colonial Empire is an inevitable concomitant of the imperial connexion,” Gillan explained in a 1942 speech at the Royal Society.17 Gillan uttered this statement at a time when a vast wartime propaganda machine was figuring out how to compel Britons and colonial subjects to fight, work and consume for the war effort.18

  • 19 Caroline Ritter, Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire (Berkeley, Univer (...)
  • 20 Gillan, “Projection,” p. 33.

8After the Second World War ended, some government officials and opinion makers were reluctant to support propaganda in peace time, especially since such methods were associated with Fascist and autocratic states. Yet, as Caroline Ritter so eloquently described it, the “cultural project of the late British Empire” grew with decolonization.19 As she and other scholars have shown, many agencies and private bodied deployed British culture in the colonies, to, as Gillan had hoped, “demonstrate clearly without condescension the rational and spiritual advantages of the British connection.”20

  • 21 Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1845-53: The Information Research Dep (...)
  • 22 In addition to Defty, see John Jenks, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh: (...)

9Such ideas became embedded in the new information apparatus which Labour created when it came to power in 1945. During these years, the government often used the word “information” as a euphemism for propaganda, and most bureaucrats preferred to follow their prewar predecessors who had advocated the value of understated, truthful sounding language and a great many statistics, photographs, maps and graphs when projecting the “vital ideas” of “British Social Democracy” and “Western Civilization”.21 The state also utilized black propaganda, or entirely fictional messages that were often distributed through the innocuous-sounding Information Research Department. Established in 1948, this top-secret government department was funded and run through the Foreign Office, and with close contacts with the British and American security services. IRD bureaucrats spread anti-Communist propaganda via trusted sources, such as journalists and academics, the BBC, reputable publishing houses, and a worldwide network of information offices.22

  • 23 Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (Lo (...)
  • 24 Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, p. 77.
  • 25 Jenks, British Propaganda, 65. Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britian’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948 (...)
  • 26 British Library, India Office Information Records, IOR/L/I/1/25, File no, 4/10, Minutes of Meeting (...)
  • 27 TNA FO 953/1636, “Information work in Federation of Malaya and Singapore: Efforts of Colombo Plan t (...)

10The IRD and related bodies were fighting the Cold War but they were also components of what historian Calder Walton has described as a vast intelligence empire, with experts gathering and disseminating information and moving among the worlds of colonial and metropolitan administration, communications and private industry.23 For example, Ralph Murray, the first director of the IRD, was a seasoned publicity expert who, among other things, had worked for the BBC before directing information services in Southeast Asia in 1946.24 Lt Col Leslie Sheridan, head of the IRD’s editorial department, worked as a journalist, wartime propagandist, and private public relations consultant.25 Similar people also served on the Cabinet Committee on Colonial Information Policy that was also established in 1948. Like the IRD, this committee included people who had worked together for decades as part of Britain’s information empire.26 One of its members, A.H. Joyce, who was at the Commonwealth Relations Office in the late 1940s, had worked in information offices in India in the 1930s, had been head of developing propaganda in Burma in 1946, and he would publicize the Colombo Plan in the early 1950s.27

  • 28 Cmnd. 9138. Summary of the Report of the Independent Committee of Enquiry into Overseas Information (...)
  • 29 Drogheda Report, p. 6.
  • 30 This use of propaganda had started much earlier, however. See Milton Israel, Communications and Pow (...)
  • 31 Philip M. Taylor; British Propaganda in the 20th Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, Edinburgh U (...)

11When the Conservatives returned to power in the early 1950s, they established what came to be called the Drogheda Committee to investigate the efficacy of the state’s overseas propaganda. While not accepting the committee’s recommendations wholesale, the government did agree with its assertion that “national propaganda overseas” was needed to “support our foreign policy; to preserve and strengthen the Commonwealth and Empire; to increase our trade and protect our investments overseas.”28 The Drogheda Report used no uncertain terms when concluding that “Information Services must to-day be regarded as part of the normal apparatus of diplomacy of a Great Power.”29 Throughout the postwar decades this idea was tested in the empire where propaganda often worked with extreme forms of violence to suppress anti-colonial sentiment, most notably against the insurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus.30 Both Labour and Conservative leaders thus were engaged in ongoing propaganda campaigns to sell their policies and fight a war for “hearts and minds” at home, in the colonies, and in foreign states.31

  • 32 See, for example, Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda.
  • 33 TNA FO 953/1636, 1637 and 1638, “Information work in Federation of Malaya and Singapore: Efforts of (...)

12By the early 1950s then propaganda was a recognized part of diplomacy, but many pressing questions remained: where and in what form would information be most effective; what kind of information would work in colonial and postcolonial spaces; and how best to distribute scarce resources? With independence in South Asia, Communist insurgency in Malaya, a key dollar-earning colony, Communist movements in Burma, the victory of the Communist Party in China, and the onset of war in Korea in June of 1950, South and Southeast Asia increasingly drew official attention.32 British officials understood that the Colombo Plan was part of the fight to combat Chinese and Soviet propaganda in the region and one way to do so was to encourage postcolonial and colonial publics to see the benefits of their British connection.33

Launching an imaginary ship

  • 34 Oakman, Facing Asia, p. 67.
  • 35 The Colombo Plan: Britain’s Part (London, Nicholas Press Ltd for the Central Office of Information, (...)
  • 36 David Lowe, “Australia’s Colombo Plans, Old and New: International Students as Foreign Relations,” (...)
  • 37 Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, Stanford Univ (...)

13Yet it wasn’t easy to sell a vague plan on a limited budget to skeptical audiences. Difficult to define then and now, the Colombo Plan was not in fact a plan at all. As historian Daniel Oakman has noted, “it featured no centralized or multilateral institutions, no blueprint for integrated economic regionalism, and it had no substantive decision-making power.”34 Each recipient nation submitted six-year plans to the Consultative Committee based in Colombo, which then facilitated bilateral arrangements through grants, loans, and credits.35 One of its most important features was the technical assistance program which, among other things, sponsored student exchanges and scholarships.36 These programs were intended to create a class of local experts who would design and run social welfare programs and large-scale infrastructure projects. The Plan’s early years especially emphasized schemes to industrialize and modernize agriculture, and thereby increase the supply of cheap food flowing to a hungry world. The Colombo Plan was thus an extension of liberal imperial statecraft, in which the state perceived and ruled populations through ideological concepts such as nutrition, the standard-of-living, and development.37 Its experts naturalized hunger and poverty as endemic to “underdeveloped” nations, thereby absolving imperialism from any responsibility for global poverty and suffering. Such development schemes also directed attention from an imperial past to an industrial future.

  • 38 Hideki Kan, “US Cold War Policy and the Colombo Plan: A Continuing Search for Regional Cooperation (...)
  • 39 Oakman, Facing Asia p. 37 and 60.
  • 40 Oakman, Facing Asia, and Lowe, “Canberra’s Colombo Plan.”
  • 41 Katsuhiko Yoki, “The Colombo Plan: The Cooperation for the Indian Institutes of Technology,” in Tra (...)

14The states that supported the Colombo Plan in 1950 were all interested in fighting Communism. The emphatically anti-Communist Americans saw it as a Cold War instrument with their British ally and a means to manage and limit British imperial designs in the region.38 Wary of joining the Plan, American politicians insisted that Commonwealth be left out its title, with one American congressman calling the Plan a pale body that reflected “the dying glow of a setting sun.”39 Pro-Commonwealth Australia spearheaded the development of the Plan in part to declare its status as a regional power in the Cold War and as a tolerant, multi-racial state, thereby countering charges of anti-Asian racism associated with its infamous White Australia immigration policies.40 India used the plan to promote its industrializing efforts and also articulate its position as a non-aligned regional power.41

  • 42 Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity Policies.”
  • 43 TNA FO 953/1201, Office of the Commissioner General for South East Asia to the South East Asia Depa (...)
  • 44 TNA CO 825/89/4, “Note on Colombo Plan Publicity” and report from J.B. Hunt to Ian P. Bancroft at t (...)
  • 45 TNA CO 825/89/4, “The Colombo Plan,” Malay Mail, July 3, 1951. Extract from 33rd Meeting of Joint I (...)
  • 46 TNA CO 825/89/4, “Colombo Plan,” press statement No. JU. 51/224, 30 June 1951.
  • 47 TNA CO 825/89/4, Letter from the Office of the High Commissioner General for the United Kingdom in (...)
  • 48 TNA CO 825/89/4, K.S. Chang, “Barmecide Feast,” Singapore Standard, 4 July 1951, p. 6.
  • 49 TNA CO 825/89/4, “Colombo Plan,” Singapore Free Press, July 3, 1951.
  • 50 TNA CO 825/89/4, Information Officer, Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom in South East Asi (...)
  • 51 William Clark, “The Colombo Plan: Prospect and Retrospect,” The Listener, 19 July 1951.

15British leaders wanted to fight Communism and improve their economy by holding on to their remaining Asian colonies and strengthening relationships with newly independent South Asian states.42 If officials in London were enthusiastic about the Plan, businessmen and bureaucrats in the field were sometimes dubious about the utility of using an international body to rebrand imperialism, reconstruct Britain’s global image, and stimulate its economy. Critics everywhere but especially in Britain’s Southeast Asian colonies went further and called out the Plan for what it ostensibly was, a new form of British imperialism.43 Widespread press coverage had not muted and even in some case had sparked serious criticism.44 The local press in Malaya during the time of the emergency not surprisingly asserted that the Colombo Plan did not meet the colony’s social, industrial, and security needs. One journalist chastised the colonial government for failing to “elaborate and define on what lines development with Commonwealth aid is to be carried out.45 If too little money and information was a problem, too much of the wrong kind of information also created difficulties. The Public Relations Office in Singapore, for example, released a press statement the day before the Plan’s launch that outlined an idealistic social democratic future that included large-scale housing programs, medical schemes, a huge “expansion of services to children and juveniles,” a new airport, and improvements in dock facilities.46 These grandiose promises invited criticisms.47 The editor of the Singapore Standard, K.S. Chang, mocked Hugh Gaitskell, then Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, for “bestowing his blessing on this plan,” in a way that gave the “impression that considerable achievements had been made under the plan.” In fact, Chang wrote, “he broke an imaginary bottle of champagne to launch an imaginary ship.”48 Similarly, a journalist in the Singapore Free Press asked readers if they remembered “the Colombo Plan, that great Commonwealth blueprint to make a great new world out of South and South-East Asia?” All Singapore heard, he suggested, “was a whimper.”49 The Information Office blamed a misplaced piece of official propaganda for such negative press.50 A lost document could hardly explain similar reflections in other regions and in the metropolitan press, where Conservatives were using the Colombo Plan’s early failures to decry Labour’s foreign policy.51 In 1950 and 1951, metropolitan and colonial governments had not yet succeeded in broadcasting an acceptable and/or believable story about the Colombo Plan.

  • 52 TNA T277/200, “Note of a meeting of Information Officers to Discuss Colombo Plan Publicity,” 15 Sep (...)
  • 53 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 15 September 1952, p. 2.
  • 54 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 27 September 1952, pp.1-4. Also see, TNA DO 35/6 (...)
  • 55 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 22 September 1952, pp. 1-2.

16Rather than step up real aid or support, metropolitan officials decided they needed to be more organized and persuasive. In 1951 the Conservative government established an interdepartmental working party under the Treasury charged with explaining the Colombo Plan’s aims and achievements to other governments and publics in the United Kingdom, member countries, and the United States.52 With representatives from the Treasury, Central Office of Information, Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, Colonial Office, Ministry of Labour and the Board of Trade, this group labored “to infiltrate Colombo Plan publicity into every available channel, including private ones.”53 Such channels included press conferences, press releases, journalist tours, films, photographs, and countless news articles in the United Kingdom and abroad.54 The body also relied on business to sell their story, placing stories in company magazines, factory displays and professional and technical journals.55

  • 56 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 6 October 1952, pp. 1-4.
  • 57 TNA DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.
  • 58 TNA DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.

17The Colombo Plan working party also began to develop a postcolonial lexicon and iconography for selling a new vision of Britain in Asia.56 They did this for example when they wrote the 1952 policy document known simply as “Publicity for the Colombo Plan.” The brief admitted that while the Plan was motivated by “a very real desire to help raise living standards,” it also was “a vast ‘publicity exercise’” primarily intended to get “trade moving and expanding,” allow Britain to “influence development,” to attract U.S. aid and investment, and to combat “Communist penetration in the area.”57 Calling the Colombo Plan a publicity exercise was not a criticism. Rather it was a recognition that consistent, organized, and long-lasting propaganda was critical to British interests in Southeast Asia. The brief noted for example that propaganda should consist of “a steady stream of informative material” that demonstrated the positive results of industrial capitalism, Western science, and democracy. A main theme of all publicity should state that “the Plan constitutes the first serious attempt on the part of the peoples of South and South-East Asia to work together and with other friendly countries in preparing a co-ordinated onslaught on poverty and hunger.” The United Kingdom was merely a “friendly nation” that was not infringing upon “national sovereignty whatsoever.” Indeed, the brief explicitly noted how “national independence is enhanced by this voluntary co-operation among equals.” Finally, the authors wrote that “little harm will be done by drawing attention to the fact that it represents one of the most effective answers of the free world to the threat of the spread of Communism, by helping remove the conditions in which Communism tends to flourish.”58

  • 59 TNA DO 35/6224. See for example, “Double Shift Dollars and Colombo,” Economic Record, 6 (September (...)

18The Colombo Plan was the infrastructure then not so much for a new Asia but for a new story about Britain in Asia. This “friendly” power supported Asian “sovereignty,” by fostering higher living standards, and thereby removing the conditions that led to the growth of Communism. This was by no means the only source of this story, but this policy paper was circulated widely to high commissions and information departments in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, including South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, and Northern Ireland.59 The meaning of British “friendship” was shaped by local contexts, alternative stories, and diverse media forms, as we can see in the official and unofficial messages surrounding the Colombo Plan Exhibition.

Exhibiting the Colombo Plan

19The possibilities and complications associated with publicizing the Colombo Plan became especially visible in Ceylon’s capital city in 1952. That winter, member states hosted an exhibition to commemorate the first-year anniversary and reassert the Plan’s values and goals. Like so many spectacles of this kind, this was an international stage for national inventions. Great Britain (and its Southeast Asian colonies), India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Canada, Australia, the Maldives, Indonesia, and the United States were the main participants at the Exhibition, which covered 40 acres of land in Victoria Park (later renamed Vihara Maha Devi Park) in the center of Colombo. The showgrounds were divided into a National Section, a Ceylon “Government Section,” a Cultural Section, an “Amusement Section,” and a trade show.

  • 60 Hennayake, Culture, Politics and Development.

20While ostensibly a time to sell the principles of regional collectivity, Britain and Ceylon occupied extra space and both hired Misha Black, Britain’s leading exhibition designer, to stage their national stories. Black marketed Britain as a global center of engineering and exporter of high-quality manufactured goods, recalling the mid-Victorian past when Britain was the workshop of the world. Black boosted Ceylon as a marketplace, stable British-style democracy and, in keeping with his employers’ vision, home to a glorious Buddhist past. Ceylon’s displays thus blended Western secular and Buddhist ethnonationalist models of development.60 Both Britain and Ceylon stressed private enterprise as a key to future development.

  • 61 In addition to the Board of Trade, members of the group came from the Colonial Office, Commonwealth (...)
  • 62 TNA FO 953/1201, Colombo Plan Exhibition Working Group, Note of 4th Meeting, 6 September 1951.

21A working group under the Board of Trade hired Black and oversaw the building and filling of Britain’s national pavilion. This group focused on technical and ideological questions and acted as a conduit for information between different member states.61 Their main problem, however, was how to build an “an adequate, if austere pavilion […] for a figure of £15,000 inclusive.” The answer, somewhat ironically, was to hire Misha Black because he was already consultant to the Government of Ceylon and, as the committee’s chair cynically confessed, the famous designer would not “run the risk of damaging his reputation by producing anything other than a first-class display.”62

  • 63 Jacquie L’Etang, Public Relations in Britain: A History of a Professional Practice in the Twentieth (...)
  • 64 Misha Black (ed.) Exhibition Design (London: The Architectural Press, 1950), p. 12.
  • 65 “Colombo Plan Exhibition,” Official Architect (April 1952), pp. 175-176; Erika Rappaport, A Thirst (...)

22A commercial artist and exhibition designer, Misha Black was a modernist whose client list included the London Underground, UNESCO, Lyon’s Corner Houses, Crosse and Blackwell, Shell Oil, the Ministry of Information, and most recently the national extravaganza, the Festival of Britain in 1951. He was also a theorist who had pushed the idea that exhibitions should be regarded as “Propaganda in three dimensions.”63 In Exhibition Design, a volume Black edited in 1950, he also endorsed the notion that the “task of every exhibition is to sell something, whether it is a new line of tea-pots or a plan for the regeneration of Western civilization.”64 In fact, Black was also selling tea as civilization in the tea industry’s pavilion at the Colombo Plan Exhibition, as he had a year earlier at the Festival of Britain, and would also do permanently at the Ceylon Tea Centre in London’s West End.65 In all of these locations he used clean lines, bold colors, new materials, and tropical motifs to market Ceylon in Britain and Britain in Ceylon.

  • 66 TNA FO 953/1201, Memorandum from G.M. Wilson, Director of Technical Co-Operation Bureau, on the Col (...)
  • 67 INF 10/336/15, Photograph # ZZZ 48860 H. Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. ‘Colombo Plan Exhibition Site, 1950.

23Even with Black on board, staging the Colombo Plan was not easy. British planners complained endlessly about their limited budget and admitted that “technical cooperation” was “so abstract that it is not easy to see how it could be effectively portrayed.” One official commented for example that “pictures of experts alighting from aeroplanes or of trainees in laboratories are not very inspiring.” They would, of course be more interesting if “linked up” with development projects, but the other nations would also showcase these projects in their pavilions.66 Although it cost much more than the original allocations, Britain’s pavilion was something of a chimera, something the architectural press praised. They appreciated the way in which five 27-foot-high brick piers, painted sky blue, linked by lattice screens, hid the tropical sheds that housed Britain’s displays. Concealing sheds, the screens were impressive as they stood adjacent to very simple barnlike open structures that housed the colonial pavilions. The entire exhibition was large and well laid out but looked especially austere sitting across the gleaming white neoclassical colonial-era town hall, completed in 1924 [Figure 1].67

Figure. 1. Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. ‘Colombo Plan Exhibition Site, 1950.

Figure. 1. Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. ‘Colombo Plan Exhibition Site, 1950.

White arrows in the original.

Source: The National Archives, INF 10/336/15, # ZZZ 48860 H.

  • 68 Nihal Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka ( (...)

24While the exhibition buildings were plain, the site drew upon an older, more magnificent style of British imperial architecture and urban planning in a way that undercut the stated message that Britain was merely one among many member states. As a colonial rather than indigenous city, Colombo’s parks, boulevards, buildings, ports, and placenames referenced British power, though new elites now occupied many of these spaces.68 The city was beginning to undergo indigenization to be sure but in 1952 that process was in its infancy. So, when visitors arrived in Colombo, they still experienced a hybrid form of British imperial culture. However shabby in its design, the British pavilion’s central position within the exhibition and the exhibition site within Colombo conveyed the sense that Britain was still an imperial power.

  • 69 Souvenir and Guide to the Colombo Exhibition (Colombo, Ceylon Government Information Office, 1952), (...)
  • 70 For comparative examples see, for example, Andrew Apter, The Pan African Nation: Oil and the Specta (...)

25Once inside the pavilion, visitors confronted a different but no less nationalistic view of Britishness. Trying to avoid charges of imperialism, Britain’s pavilion was officially organized around the question: “How can the United Kingdom assist?” But the unstated message might have been: “what would you like to buy?” The state’s limited funds and the Conservative government’s insistence that private enterprise should initiate development, meant that displays of fertilizers, pumps, mill machinery, cranes, barges, and tools served as advertisements for British manufacturing firms. The British Iron and Steel Federation exhibit relayed how “the British Steel Industry” could help build Asia’s railways, harbors, pipelines, and bridges.69 Black’s Ceylon tea center told visitors that tea was one of the most important industries in Southeast Asia. Dozens of companies, including Shell Oil, Whiteaway’s department store, Lipton’s Tea, George Payne and Co., and English Electric advertised their wares and their industries as useful to new states, whose leaders were debating whether to nationalize foreign industries. While we can’t know how visitors read such texts, government photographers captured, commodified and repurposed Ceylonese and other fairgoers smiling faces and interested expressions to suggest the success of the spectacle. Such images demonstrate how visitors were literally learning to view, look at, and enjoy mass marketed entertainment [Figure 2]. This consumer lifestyle implicitly imagined visitors as members of the anti-communist camp, but the spectacle was a malleable form.70

Figure 2. “Photograph of Colombo Plan British Exhibition Hall by Central Office of Information”, Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 1952.

Figure 2. “Photograph of Colombo Plan British Exhibition Hall by Central Office of Information”, Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 1952.

Photograph by Central Office of Information. Alamy # 2J72DRO

  • 71 Pieris, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka, p. 161.
  • 72 Colombo Plan Exhibition Prospectus, 1951.
  • 73 H.A. Hulugalle, “Steps to Democracy: Twenty-One Years of Adult Franchise,” Souvenir and Guide to th (...)
  • 74 K.M. de Silva, “Sri Lanka in 1948” in John Clifford Holt (ed)., The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Cult (...)
  • 75 Nira Wickramasinghe, Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka, 1927-1947, A Historical Perspective, (N (...)
  • 76 Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (Honolulu, Univ (...)

26Ceylon’s exhibition buildings and accompanying texts presented a mixture of pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial idioms and narratives. As scholar Anoma Pieris has argued, Ceylon’s exhibition displays reclaimed a “pre-colonial past for an indigenous polity” and disseminated Western modernist design and ideals of technological progress.71 The government’s exhibition prospectus, for example, welcomed businesses and other visitors to “the shop window of South and South-East Asia,” noting how the island nation was “centrally situated with direct sea and air communications with all the Commonwealth countries and the United States.” Open to foreign trade and tourism, Ceylon was also cast as a beneficiary of British colonialism. Under British rule, Ceylon had been on the road to modernity, boasting “responsible government, social welfare and economic progress, under a democratic system and an adult franchise.”72 Now with independence, it had “come of age as a democratic nation.”73 This story of evolving democracy and political stability played up a widespread understanding of Ceylon as heir to British parliamentary traditions and a model Dominion in the Commonwealth.74 It also illustrated the way in which Senanayake’s United National Party had used cultural and legal exclusions to accrue power. Recent citizenship laws made the Tamil planation workers stateless, and this coupled with rapidly falling tea and rubber prices brought widespread unemployment, massive labor struggles, and created a fertile ground for Communist organizing.75 The country’s national pavilion entertained visitors while suppressing knowledge about such protests, while reinforcing ethnic, racial, religious, and class-based inequalities.76

  • 77 J.R. Jayewardene, “The Colombo Plan,” Souvenir and Guide, p. 8.
  • 78 Ceylon Food Plan (Colombo: Government Department of Information for the Ministry of Food and Co-ope (...)

27Ceylon’s exhibition demonstrated certain Western traditions, while condemning others. In an article published in the government-sponsored exhibition guide, J.R. Jayewardene, Ceylon’s Minister of Finance, founding member of the United National Party, and key architect of the Colombo Plan stated directly that the West owed aid to former colonies since under “Western rule,” colonies such as Ceylon had been exploited “for the benefit of the ruling countries.”77 The same argument circulated in other English language government propaganda such as the pamphlet, Ceylon Food Plan (1950). This text argued that total war and long-term European capitalist imperialism had led to their nation’s current food crisis. “The transformation, or, rather, complete reversal of Ceylon’s position from that of self-dependence to one of almost total dependent on foreign counties was effected when Ceylon was caught up in the meshes of colonial imperialism,” the pamphlet commented. Exporting crops for world markets, had also “cast aside the age-old system of agriculture […] choking out of existence the village communities with husbandry, their crafts and arts and communal culture.”78

  • 79 Hennayake, Culture, Politics, and Development, p. 51.
  • 80 Ibid, pp. 64-65. Among the large body of scholarship on the film, see Jon Hoare, “‘Go the Way the M (...)

28Ceylon’s displays also presented this analysis of colonialism and underdevelopment. The main pavilion erected in “the traditional Kandyan style of architecture,” and the cultural performances, displays of arts and crafts, and numerous photographs of villages, rice paddies, and Buddhist shrines and temples conveyed the United National Party’s ethnonationalist ideal of the village at the center of the nation. Texts and displays showed how ancient irrigation systems fed village agriculture. This indigenous understanding of development reclaimed sustainable relationships among the land, water, humans, and environment.79 It challenged Eurocentric models of science and technology, but it also drew upon both tropes created by the Buddhist revival movement in the nineteenth century and British colonial writers, colonial-era exhibitions, and most recently reproduced by John Grierson and Basil Wright in their famous 1934 documentary, The Song of Ceylon.80 As in the film, modern Western and ancient indigenous tropes collectively represented Ceylon, and given that Black had worked with the tea industry in making the film, it is not surprising that he used similar narratives and visual language to represent the island. At the fair, as in the film, Sinhalese villages and artifacts stood alongside “striking dioramas” of the tea, rubber, and coconut industries, and illustrations of massive new irrigation and hydro-electric schemes, Colombo’s harbor, and large new hospital. This blend of ancient and modern culture and technology was built on omissions and silences. Exhibit descriptions were printed in Sinhala, English, and Tamil, but Buddhism was the only religion that had a place in the past, present, or future of the nation.

  • 81 “Faith in Commonwealth,” Ceylon Today (December 1953), p. 153.
  • 82 “Philippines and Indonesia,” Ceylon Today (March 1954), p. 8.
  • 83 Cindy Ewing, “The Colombo Powers: Crafting Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-Asia at (...)

29After the visitors went home, sponsored books, magazines, newsletters, films, and later exhibitions continued to publicize the Colombo Plan. Ceylon’s Government Information Department, for example, regularly celebrated the Colombo Plan’s achievements in its glossy periodical, Ceylon Today. Its early issues echoed the British government’s talking points, in some sense fulfilling the state’s dream of cultural influence. For example, one article described the Colombo Plan as exemplifying “Faith in the Commonwealth” and “the fruits of partnership.”81 Over the course of the 1950s, however, the periodical began to define partnership differently. Commonwealth relationships were replaced by Pan-Asian alliances forged in the struggle against racism and imperialism. Reporting on Prime Minister Sir John Kotelawala’s visit to Indonesia in 1954, for example, an article in Ceylon Today attributed the friendship between these two “Colombo Powers” to have grown out of their shared emergence from “age-old Colonialism.”82 As early as 1954, Ceylon Today began to present the Colombo Plan as an anti-colonial agency which contributed to the global realignments, which were later forged at the Bandung Conference held in 1955 and the All African People’s Conference held in Accra in 1958.83 Partnership and progress thus came to signify postcolonial coalitions seeking to displace British power across the Global South.

  • 84 Tomaru, “British Publicity Policies,” pp. 163-68. Examples of such literature include The Colombo P (...)
  • 85 D.G. Bridson, Progress in Asia: The Colombo Plan in Action (London, HMSO, 1953), verso page.
  • 86 Bridson, Progress in Asia, 7. Guy Wint What is the Colombo Plan? (London, Batchworth Press, 1952) a (...)
  • 87 Bridson, Progress in Asia, pp. 22-23.

30Despite, or likely because of such developments, British sponsored publications foregrounded its continued leadership and investments in the region.84 Progress in Asia: The Colombo Plan in Action (1953), written by D.G. Bridson, a BBC reporter who had “just returned from a tour of the area,” typifies this genre.85 Using maps, graphs, photographs and a lengthy text, Bridson demonstrated “Why the Colombo Plan is Necessary” and “What the Plan is Doing.” Like so many congratulatory accounts of development, this booklet relied on Orientalist tropes about Asia as vast, poor, hungry, and a place where “desert and jungle continue to reign supreme.”86 Asia, as in the days of colonialism, was seen as a source of necessary global commodities, the producer of the “bulk of the world’s supply of jute and rubber and tea…. A third of the world’s oils and fats and two-thirds of the world’s tin.” The West (a stand in for Britain) brought technology to extract Asia’s “natural” resources. The pamphlet then featured how Colombo Plan tractors helped grow wheat in Pakistan’s desert and its engineering schemes aided rice cultivation in Malaya. The Colombo Plan was “in action” spurring new industries, forms of power, transportation, medicine, education, and expertise.87

  • 88 Progress in Asia, p. 34.
  • 89 See, for example, the image in A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of the Colombo Plan (The Colombo P (...)

31Progress in Asia included a shortened version of the 1953 Consultative Committee’s meeting in New Delhi, which told the same story of progress through statistics, maps, graphs, narratives and illustrations of dams, irrigation systems, and student exchanges.88 Photographs depicted Colombo Plan students studying at an agricultural research station in Britain, British and Ceylonese nurses attending a class together at London Chest Hospital, and beautiful Ceylonese “land girls” tilling the soil on a cold farm somewhere in the United Kingdom. Such stock photos implied that Britain was helpful, knowledgeable, racially tolerant, and a site of pleasure and learning for young Commonwealth men and women.89 South Asian land girls were especially evocative as they referenced wartime Ministry of Information photographs that turned average working Britons into heroes and heroines. This was not an open invitation for mass migration from the Commonwealth, but rather a reassertion of Britain as a space for international students to become educated in modernity.

  • 90 The Colombo Plan, Vol. 1, no 4 (June 1956), p. 3.

32In 1953, Colombo Plan propaganda became more organized as the agency established its own Information Unit. Based in Colombo, but headed by British officials, the unit’s steady stream of propaganda decentered Britain but continued to author positive accounts of technology, planning, development, and economic growth. Its monthly English-language newsletter, The Colombo Plan, measured the Plan’s achievements in terms of, for instance, numbers of cement factories, cold storage units, irrigation works, hydro-electro projects, and training programs for nurses, machine operators, social workers, dentists, nurses, surveyors, and midwives.90

  • 91 TNA DO 35/6223, Letter to Mr. A.R. Swinnerton, UK High Commission, Karachi, 25 June 1953.
  • 92 TNA DO 35/6223, J.D. Murray to Symon, 10 November 1952.

33Ubiquitous and long-lasting, Colombo Plan publicity was a projection that was both internalized and criticized. Some overseas British information officers questioned the Plan’s unitary approach or the basic assumption that the promotion of an international body would benefit British business. How, for example, could propaganda distinguish the Colombo Plan from programs funded by other agencies such as the Ford Foundation or the United Nations Technical Assistant Program?91 How could boosting an international entity avoid filling the coffers of Britain’s competitors? The High Commissioner’s office in Karachi bluntly warned that the “sensitive and outspoken” British business community in Pakistan were concerned that “good press for Pakistan’s Development Programme” meant more “publicity for the United Kingdom’s competitors in this market.” They agreed with the basic premises that “Trade follows Aid” and “Experts follow Experts,” but the Colombo Plan could not compel independent nations to purchase British goods.92

34This last question was the most pressing, since although British officials and experts were committed to presenting Britain’s part in Asian development, ultimately the Colombo Plan gave voice to critics or to those who were simply uninterested in the British story. Nevertheless, whether produced in Colombo, London, or elsewhere the Plan’s propagandists deliberately and consistently ignored regime changes, wars, economic crises or any topic that would mar the illusion that its member nations were internally cohesive and externally united in their admiration of science, progress, and partnership.

Conclusion

  • 93 Simon Faulker and Anandi Ramamurthy (eds), Visual Culture and Decolonisation (London and New York, (...)

35In the winter of 1952, officials, designers, and publicists had turned to the exhibition format, an older yet very popular method of selling commodities, ideals and national identities to multiple publics. At this fair the British government hoped a Commonwealth institution, though not named as such, would influence development, stimulate trade, and uphold British prestige and influence in Asia. Ceylon too wanted a “big show” to create national cohesion and entice foreign aid and investment. The exhibition and surrounding propaganda would, Ceylon’s leaders believed, bolster their country’s new economy and support for the UNP’s ethnonationalist notion of development. Both Britain’s and Ceylon’s propaganda naturalized visions of the state as humanitarian and obscured knowledge about or discussion of colonial or postcolonial violence and inequalities. Of course, the publicists who explained the Colombo Plan in the early 1950s were not unique, but rather they were part of an international development culture that produced glossy images of tractors, irrigation systems, and Black and brown men and women working in laboratories, fields, classrooms, and homes to redefine global relationships and rebrand nations during a time of unprecedented changes in domestic and international politics.93 Such iconography and rhetoric is especially flexible, which no doubt had been key to its longevity in Asia, Africa, and other postcolonial spaces.

  • 94 See https://colombo-plan.org/ and the sponsored book, A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of the Colo (...)
  • 95 Dato’ Patricia Yoon-Moi Chia, Welcome Speech, 60th Anniversary of the Colombo Plan, 1 July 2011, ht (...)

36Today, the twenty-eight-member Colombo Plan rightly claims to be one of the oldest inter-governmental organizations of its kind. The organization has retained but also reconfigured the twin goals of partnership and progress. Its motto, “Planning Prosperity Together,” captures the organization’s belief that South-South cooperation is a non-hierarchical means to bring about socio-economic “progress.”94 Its standing programs currently focus on environment and climate change, drugs, gender affairs, and capacity building. Secretary General Dato’ Patricia Yoon-Moi Chia proposed in a speech celebrating the organization’s 60th anniversary, that the spirit of mutuality had accounted for the body’s longevity and resilience.95 This rhetoric of cooperation and South-South relations grew out of the economic and cultural logics of the late colonial empire in South and Southeast Asia.

37Today, as in the past, member states co-created development practices and policies, albeit not on equal terms and not for the same ends. They also collaborated in the creation of national, regional and postcolonial identities and relationships. In the early 1950s, British personnel, ideals, methods of propaganda, and other forms of soft power attempted to rewrite the meaning of empire in a way that would allow the British state and British business to retain a presence in Asia. Yet, as the careers of men like Misha Black and D.S. Senanayake show, the presence of British experts and other legacies did not mean that the “ills of imperialism” were forgotten.

Top of page

Bibliography

A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of the Colombo Plan (Colombo, The Colombo Plan Secretariat, 2014 [2010]).

Akita, Shigeru, Krozewski, Gerold and Watanabe, Shoichi (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015).

Anthony, Scott, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012).

Atkinson, Harriet, ““Lines of Becoming”: Misha Black and the Entanglements through Exhibition Design”, Journal of Design History 34:1 (2020), pp. 37-53.

Apter, Andrew, The Pan African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Black, Misha (ed.), Exhibition Design (London, The Architectural Press, 1950).

Brewer, Susan A., To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States During World War II (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1997).

Bridson, D.G., Progress in Asia: The Colombo Plan in Action (London, HMSO, 1953).

Byrne, Alice, “The British Council and Cultural Propaganda in the United States, 1938-1945”, Journal of Transatlantic studies 11:3 (2013), pp. 249–263.

Byrne, Alice, “The Commonwealth University Interchange Scheme: Promoting Exchanges in a Changing World (1948–60)” in Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (eds), Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World (New York, Berghahn Books, 2018), pp. 65-78.

Carruthers, Susan, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter Insurgency 1944-1960 (London, Leicester University Press, 1995).

Ceylon Food Plan (Colombo, Government Department of Information for the Ministry of Food and Co-operative Undertakings, 1950).

Ceylon Today (Colombo, Government Department of Information, 1953-1957).

The Colombo Plan: Britain’s Part (London, Nicholas Press Ltd for the Central Office of Information, 1961).

The Colombo Plan: Cooperative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia (Colombo, Colombo Plan Information Unit, 1956).

Colombo Plan Exhibition Prospectus (1951), publisher unknown.

“Colombo Plan Exhibition”, Official Architect (April 1952), pp. 175-176.

Craggs, Ruth, and Wintle, Claire, (eds), Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945-70 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016).

Cull, Nicholas John, The British Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995).

Cullather, Nick, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2010).

Dato’ Patricia Yoon-Moi Chia, Welcome Speech, 60th Anniversary of the Colombo Plan, 1 July 2011. https://colombo-plan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/5dc3d8afdc6c0c18b8f81d98_OpeningSpeech60ATCP_01072011.pdf

Darwin, John. The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2009).

Defty, Andrew, Britain, America, and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1945-53: The Information Research Department (London, Routledge, 2004).

Dimier, Véronique, The Invention of European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Dimier, Véronique and Sarah Stockwell (eds), The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Dornel, Laurent, and Michael Parsons, (eds), Fins d’empires/Ends of Empires (Pau, PUPPA, 2016).

Ewing, Cindy, “The Colombo Powers: Crafting Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-Asia at Bandung”, Cold War History 19:1 (2019), pp. 1-19.

Faulker, Simon and Anandi Ramamurthy (eds), Visual Culture and Decolonisation (London and New York: Routledge 2018 [2006]).

Gildea, Robert, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Gillan, Sir Angus, “The Projection of Great Britain on the Colonial Empire”, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 91:4638 (December 11, 1942).

Guy J. Golan, Sung-un Yang, Dennis F. Kinsey (eds), International Public Relations and Public Diplomacy: Communication and Engagement (New York, Peter Lang, 2015).

Grant, Mariel, Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994).

Hadjiathanasiou, Maria, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt: Rebellion, Counterinsurgency and the Media, 1955-59 (London, I.B. Tauris, 2020).

Hennayake, Nalani, Culture, Politics and Development in Postcolonial Sri Lanka (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2006).

Hoare, John, ““Go the Way the Material Calls You”: Basil Wright and The Song of Ceylon” in Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 233-43.

Hodge, Joseph Morgan, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2007).

Hoffenberg, Peter H., An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001).

Israel, Milton, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle, 1920-1947 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1994).

Jenks, John, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

Kan, Hideki, “US Cold War Policy and the Colombo Plan: A Continuing Search for Regional Cooperation in Asia in the 1950s” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015), pp. 177-198.

Krozewski, Gerold, “Britain and the Reordering of Overseas Aid, 1956-64: From Colonial Development Finance to Assistance to Sovereign States” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015), pp. 143-158.

Lashmar, Paul and Oliver, James, Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977 (Stroud, Sutton, 1998).

L’Etang, Jacquie, Public Relations in Britain: A History of a Professional Practice in the Twentieth Century (Mahwah, NJ., Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004).

LeMahieu, D.L., A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain Between the Wars (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988).

Lowe, David, and Kent, Anna, “Sponsored Students and the Rise of “the International” in Australian Communities”, Journal of Australian Studies 43:4 (2019), pp. 479–494.

Lowe, David, “Australia’s Colombo Plans, Old and New: International Students as Foreign Relations”, International Journal of Cultural Policy 21:4 (2015), pp. 448–462.

Lowe, David, “Canberra’s Colombo Plan: Public Images of Australia’s Relations with Post-Colonial South and Southeast Asia in the 1950s”, South Asia 25:2 (2002), pp. 183–204.

Lowe, David, “Journalists and the Stirring of Australian Public Diplomacy: The Colombo Plan Towards the 1960s”, Journal of Contemporary History 48:1 (2013), pp. 175–190.

Lowe, David, “New Zealand and the Colombo Plan in the Long 1950s”, History Australia 17:4 (2020), pp. 661–677.

Lowe, David, “Percy Spender and the Colombo Plan 1950”, The Australian Journal of Politics and History 40:2 (1994), pp. 162–176.

Lyons, John, “The Colombo Plan”, Current Affairs (London, The Bureau of Current Affairs, 1951).

Maartens, Brendan, “From Propaganda to ‘Information’: Reforming Government Communications in Britain’, Contemporary British History 30:4 (2016), pp. 542-62.

Manathunga, Catherine, “Excavating Cultural Imperialism in Student Mobility Programs”, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39:4 (2018), pp. 564-574.

MacKenzie, John M., Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984).

McAleer, John, and John M. McKenzie, (eds), Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015).

McLaine, Ian, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, Allen & Unwin, 1979).

McMahon, Robert J., “Development Assistance as a Cold War Tool: The United States, International Institutions, and the Political Economy of Development, 1947-65” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015), pp. 215-228.

Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002).

Morris, Kate, British Techniques of Public Relations and Propaganda for Mobilizing East and Central Africa (New York, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000).

Murillo, Bianca, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2017).

Nye, Joseph S. Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, Public Affairs, 2004).

Oakman, Daniel, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra, ANU Press, 2010).

Perera, Nihal, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka (Boulder, CO., Westview Press, 1998).

Pieris, Anoma, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The Trouser and the Cloth (London and New York, Routledge, 2012).

Potter, Simon James. Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922-1970 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012).

Ramakrishna, Kumar, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948-1958 (Richmond, Curzon, 2002).

Rambukwella, Harshana. Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (London, UCL Press, 2018).

Rappaport, Erika, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017).

Ritter, Caroline, Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2021).

Sarwal, Amit, ““A Kangaroo and Bradman”: Indian Journalists Visit to Australia Under the Colombo Plan, 1950-1957”, Journalism Studies 20:6 (2019), pp. 840–856.

Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998).

Seikaly, Sherene, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2016).

Souvenir and Guide: Colombo Plan Exhibition (Colombo, Ceylon Government Information Office, 1952).

Stockwell, Sarah, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Summary of the Report of the Independent Committee of Enquiry into Overseas Information Services (Drogheda Report) (London, HMSO, 1954).

Tallents, Sir Stephen, The Projection of England (London, Film Center Ltd reissue, 1955 [1932]).

Tarling, Nicholas, “The United Kingdom and the Origins of the Colombo Plan”, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 24:1 (1986), pp. 3–34.

Taylor, Philip M., British Propaganda in the 20th Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

Taylor, Philip M., The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Tomaru, Junko, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity Policies towards Southeast Asia, 1950-1951” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015).

Tomlinson, B.R. “The Weapons of the Weakened: British Power, Sterling Balances, and the Origins of the Colombo Plan” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015), pp. 34-49.

Torrent, Mélanie, ‘“But always as Friends’: British Cultural Diplomacy, Decolonisation and the Cold War in West Africa (1957-1964)” in Laurent Dornel and Michael Parsons (eds), Fins d’empires/Ends of Empires (Pau: PUPPA, 2016), pp. 93-118.

Walton, Calder, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London, Harper Press, 2013).

Watanabe, Shoichi, ‘“The 1950 Commonwealth Foreign Ministers” Meeting and the International Aid Programme for Asia” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015), pp. 15-33.

Wickramasinghe, Nira, Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka, 1927-1947, A Historical Perspective, (New Delhi, Vikas, 1995).

Wickramasinghe, Nira, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2006).

Wiegold, Auriol, Churchill, Roosevelt and India: Propaganda During World War II (New York and London, Routledge, 2008).

Wint, Guy, What is the Colombo Plan? (London, Batchworth Press, 1952).

Yoki, Katsuhiko, “The Colombo Plan: The Cooperation for the Indian Institutes of Technology,” in Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015), pp. 50-71.

Top of page

Notes

1 The National Archives (TNA), DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.

2 D.S. Senanayake, “Message,” Souvenir and Guide: Colombo Plan Exhibition (Colombo: Ceylon Government Information Office, 1952), preface, n.p.

3 Key works include Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra, ANU Press, 2010); Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, and Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015). On the plan’s origins, see Shoichi Watanabe, “The 1950 Commonwealth Foreign Ministers’ Meeting and the International Aid Programme for Asia” in ibid., pp. 15-33 and David Lowe, “Percy Spender and the Colombo Plan 1950”, The Australian Journal of Politics and History 40:2 (1994), pp. 162–176. Lowe has also written numerous articles on the Plan from a variety of perspectives.

4 See, for example, Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2007) and Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2010).

5 Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle (eds), Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945-70 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 13. They are drawing on a very abundant literature on development. See, especially, Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002).

6 Here I am paraphrasing the insights of Craggs and Wintle, Cultures of Decolonisation, 9.

7 Junko Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity Policies towards Southeast Asia, 1950-1951” in Akita et al., The Transformation of the International Order of Asia, pp. 159-73; Oakman, Facing Asia, and David Lowe, “Canberra’s Colombo Plan: Public Images of Australia’s Relations with Post-Colonial South and Southeast Asia in the 1950s,” South Asia 25 (2002), pp. 183–204. On soft power, see Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, Public Affairs, 2004), p. x. and for elaborations, applications and critiques, see Naren Chitty, Li Ji, Gary D. Rawnsley and Craig Hayden, (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power (London and New York, Routledge, 2017).

8 In this article I use the term Ceylon rather than Sri Lanka since the nation still bore its colonial name, and early leaders consciously maintained this name until 1972.

9 For a discussion of the government’s nationalist political culture in Sri Lanka, see Nalani Hennayake, Culture, Politics and Development in Postcolonial Sri Lanka (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2006) and Harshana Rambukwella, Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (London, UCL Press, 2018).

10 B.R. Tomlinson, “The Weapons of the Weakened: British Power, Sterling Balances, and the Origins of the Colombo Plan” in The Transformation of the International Order of Asia, pp. 34-49; Gerold Krozewski, “Britain and the Reordering of Overseas Aid, 1956-64: From Colonial Development Finance to Assistance to Sovereign States” in ibid., pp. 143-158; Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity”, and Nicholas Tarling, “The United Kingdom and the Origins of the Colombo Plan”, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 24:1 (1986), pp. 3–34. France engaged in similar strategies. See Véronique Dimier, The Invention of European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (Basingstroke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). For other comparisons, see Laurent Dornel and Michael Parsons (eds), Fins d’empires/Ends of Empires (Pau, PUPPA, 2016).

11 For this phrasing and concept, see Robert Gildea, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 70.

12 For comparisons, see Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Véronique Dimier and Sarah Stockwell (eds), The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020).

13 John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2009), p. 546.

14 The literature on exhibitions is now substantial. For a book that addresses tensions and collaborations within the British Empire, see Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001).

For imperial propaganda, see the seminal text by John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984); For a recent assessment, see John McAleer and John M. McKenzie (eds), Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015).

15 Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981); Mariel Grant, Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994); Simon J. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922-1970 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). Among recent work on the British Council, see Alice Byrne, “The British Council and Cultural Propaganda in the United States, 1938-1945,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 11:3 (2013), pp. 249–263.

16 Sir Stephen Tallents, The Projection of England (1932; London, Film Center Ltd reissue, 1955), pp. 11. An important study of Tallents’ ideas and career is Scott Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012).

17 Sir Angus Gillan, “The Projection of Great Britain on the Colonial Empire,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 91:4638 (December 11, 1942), p. 32.

18 Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1980); Kate Morris, British Techniques of Public Relations and Propaganda for Mobilizing East and Central Africa (New York, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000); Nicholas John Cull, The British Campaign against American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995); Susan A. Brewer, To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States During World War II (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1997); Auriol Wiegold, Churchill, Roosevelt and India: Propaganda During World War II (New York and London, Routledge, 2008).

19 Caroline Ritter, Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2021). This was especially the case in late and postcolonial British Africa. See, for example, Mélanie Torrent, “‘But always as friends’: British Cultural Diplomacy, Decolonisation and the Cold War in West Africa (1957-1964),” in Fins d’empires/Ends of Empires, pp. 93-118.

20 Gillan, “Projection,” p. 33.

21 Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1845-53: The Information Research Department (London and New York, Routledge, 2004), pp. 63-65. Also see, Brendan Maartens, “From Propaganda to ‘Information’: Reforming Government Communications in Britain,” Contemporary British History 30:4 (2016), pp. 542-562.

22 In addition to Defty, see John Jenks, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and TNA FO 1110/532, Policy: revised memorandum on the use of IRD material, 1953.

23 Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London, Harper Press, 2013).

24 Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, p. 77.

25 Jenks, British Propaganda, 65. Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britian’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), xiv.

26 British Library, India Office Information Records, IOR/L/I/1/25, File no, 4/10, Minutes of Meeting of Cabinet Committee on Colonial Information Policy, 17 December 1948.

27 TNA FO 953/1636, “Information work in Federation of Malaya and Singapore: Efforts of Colombo Plan to combat propaganda put out by Soviet Union in South East Asia, 1956.”

28 Cmnd. 9138. Summary of the Report of the Independent Committee of Enquiry into Overseas Information Services (Hereafter Drogheda Report) (London, HMSO, 1954) p. 4.

29 Drogheda Report, p. 6.

30 This use of propaganda had started much earlier, however. See Milton Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle, 1920-1947 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1994); Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter Insurgency 1944-1960 (London, Leicester University Press, 1995); Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948-1958 (London and New York, Routledge, 2002); and Maria Hadjiathanasiou, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt: Rebellion, Counter-Insurgency and the Media, 1955-59 (London, I.B. Tauris, 2020).

31 Philip M. Taylor; British Propaganda in the 20th Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010).

32 See, for example, Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda.

33 TNA FO 953/1636, 1637 and 1638, “Information work in Federation of Malaya and Singapore: Efforts of Colombo Plan to combat propaganda put out by Soviet Union in South East Asia, 1956.”

34 Oakman, Facing Asia, p. 67.

35 The Colombo Plan: Britain’s Part (London, Nicholas Press Ltd for the Central Office of Information, 1961), p. 2.

36 David Lowe, “Australia’s Colombo Plans, Old and New: International Students as Foreign Relations,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 21:4 (2015), pp. 448–462; and David Lowe and Anna Kent, “Sponsored Students and the Rise of ‘The International’ in Australian Communities.” Journal of Australian Studies 43:4 (2019), pp. 479–494. For similar programs, see Alice Byrne, “The Commonwealth University Interchange Scheme: Promoting Exchanges in a Changing World,” in Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (eds), (New York, Berghahn Books, 2018), pp. 65-78, and Catherine Manathunga, “Excavating Cultural Imperialism in Student Mobility Programs,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39:4 (2018), pp. 564-574.

37 Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2016).

38 Hideki Kan, “US Cold War Policy and the Colombo Plan: A Continuing Search for Regional Cooperation in Asia in the 1950s,” in Akita, Krozewski and Watanabe (eds), Transformation, pp. 177-198, 179. Also see, Robert J. McMahon, “Development Assistance as a Cold War Tool: The United States, International Institutions, and the Political Economy of Development, 1947-65,” in ibid, pp. 215-228.

39 Oakman, Facing Asia p. 37 and 60.

40 Oakman, Facing Asia, and Lowe, “Canberra’s Colombo Plan.”

41 Katsuhiko Yoki, “The Colombo Plan: The Cooperation for the Indian Institutes of Technology,” in Transformation of the International Order in Asia, pp. 50-71.

42 Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity Policies.”

43 TNA FO 953/1201, Office of the Commissioner General for South East Asia to the South East Asia Department of the Foreign Office, 14 August 1951.

44 TNA CO 825/89/4, “Note on Colombo Plan Publicity” and report from J.B. Hunt to Ian P. Bancroft at the Treasury, 20 July 1951.

45 TNA CO 825/89/4, “The Colombo Plan,” Malay Mail, July 3, 1951. Extract from 33rd Meeting of Joint Information and Propaganda Committee, 25 October 1951.

46 TNA CO 825/89/4, “Colombo Plan,” press statement No. JU. 51/224, 30 June 1951.

47 TNA CO 825/89/4, Letter from the Office of the High Commissioner General for the United Kingdom in South East Asia, Singapore to the South East Asia Department, Foreign Office, 14 August 1951.

48 TNA CO 825/89/4, K.S. Chang, “Barmecide Feast,” Singapore Standard, 4 July 1951, p. 6.

49 TNA CO 825/89/4, “Colombo Plan,” Singapore Free Press, July 3, 1951.

50 TNA CO 825/89/4, Information Officer, Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom in South East Asia, 14 July 1951.

51 William Clark, “The Colombo Plan: Prospect and Retrospect,” The Listener, 19 July 1951.

52 TNA T277/200, “Note of a meeting of Information Officers to Discuss Colombo Plan Publicity,” 15 September 1952, p. 1.

53 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 15 September 1952, p. 2.

54 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 27 September 1952, pp.1-4. Also see, TNA DO 35/6223, A. H. Joyce to A. Gordon Hudson, Director of the U.K. Information Services in Ottawa, 20 November 1952 in which they discussed recycled films. Also see, TNA T 277/337, Malcom to A.H. Joyce at the CRO, December 1951. For a related topic, see Amit Sarwal, “‘A Kangaroo and Bradman’: Indian Journalists Visit to Australia Under the Colombo Plan, 1950-1957,” Journalism Studies 20:2 (2019): pp. 840-856.

55 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 22 September 1952, pp. 1-2.

56 TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 6 October 1952, pp. 1-4.

57 TNA DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.

58 TNA DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.

59 TNA DO 35/6224. See for example, “Double Shift Dollars and Colombo,” Economic Record, 6 (September 1952), issued by the UK Information Office, Ottawa, Canada.

60 Hennayake, Culture, Politics and Development.

61 In addition to the Board of Trade, members of the group came from the Colonial Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, Foreign Office, Central Office of Information, and Ministry of Supply. TNA FO 953/1201, Colombo Plan Exhibition Working Group,” Note of 4th Meeting, 6 September 1951.

62 TNA FO 953/1201, Colombo Plan Exhibition Working Group, Note of 4th Meeting, 6 September 1951.

63 Jacquie L’Etang, Public Relations in Britain: A History of a Professional Practice in the Twentieth Century (Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), p. 81 and Harriet Atkinson, “‘Lines of Becoming’: Misha Black and the Entanglements through Exhibition Design,” Journal of Design History 34:1 (2020), pp. 37-53.

64 Misha Black (ed.) Exhibition Design (London: The Architectural Press, 1950), p. 12.

65 “Colombo Plan Exhibition,” Official Architect (April 1952), pp. 175-176; Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 355-360.

66 TNA FO 953/1201, Memorandum from G.M. Wilson, Director of Technical Co-Operation Bureau, on the Colombo Plan Exhibition Proposals for the Council’s Exhibit, 6 September 1951.

67 INF 10/336/15, Photograph # ZZZ 48860 H. Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. ‘Colombo Plan Exhibition Site, 1950.

68 Nihal Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka (Boulder, CO, Westview Press 1998), p. 38

69 Souvenir and Guide to the Colombo Exhibition (Colombo, Ceylon Government Information Office, 1952), pp. 44-45.

70 For comparative examples see, for example, Andrew Apter, The Pan African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Bianca Murillo, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2017), pp. 115-136.

71 Pieris, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka, p. 161.

72 Colombo Plan Exhibition Prospectus, 1951.

73 H.A. Hulugalle, “Steps to Democracy: Twenty-One Years of Adult Franchise,” Souvenir and Guide to the Colombo Exhibition, p. 12.

74 K.M. de Silva, “Sri Lanka in 1948” in John Clifford Holt (ed)., The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2011). This essay was first published in the Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 4 (new series, 1974), p. 107.

75 Nira Wickramasinghe, Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka, 1927-1947, A Historical Perspective, (New Delhi, Vikas, 1995) and Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, pp. 339-40.

76 Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press 2006), pp. 171-78; 212-17.

77 J.R. Jayewardene, “The Colombo Plan,” Souvenir and Guide, p. 8.

78 Ceylon Food Plan (Colombo: Government Department of Information for the Ministry of Food and Co-operative Undertakings, 1950)

79 Hennayake, Culture, Politics, and Development, p. 51.

80 Ibid, pp. 64-65. Among the large body of scholarship on the film, see Jon Hoare, “‘Go the Way the Material Calls You’: Basil Wright and The Song of Ceylon’ in Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds.) The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 233-43.

81 “Faith in Commonwealth,” Ceylon Today (December 1953), p. 153.

82 “Philippines and Indonesia,” Ceylon Today (March 1954), p. 8.

83 Cindy Ewing, “The Colombo Powers: Crafting Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-Asia at Bandung,” Cold War History 19:1 (2019), pp. 1-19.

84 Tomaru, “British Publicity Policies,” pp. 163-68. Examples of such literature include The Colombo Plan: Cooperative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia (Colombo, Colombo Plan Information Unit, 1956); The Colombo Plan: Britain’s Part (London, Central Office of Information, 1961) and The Colombo Plan (London, Central Office Information Office, 1961).

85 D.G. Bridson, Progress in Asia: The Colombo Plan in Action (London, HMSO, 1953), verso page.

86 Bridson, Progress in Asia, 7. Guy Wint What is the Colombo Plan? (London, Batchworth Press, 1952) and John Lyons “The Colombo Plan,” Current Affairs (London, The Bureau of Current Affairs, 1951) were also widely circulated sponsored publications.

87 Bridson, Progress in Asia, pp. 22-23.

88 Progress in Asia, p. 34.

89 See, for example, the image in A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of the Colombo Plan (The Colombo Plan Secretariat, 2014). One of the two project directors of this book was Dato’ Patricia Chia, who I quoted in the introduction.

90 The Colombo Plan, Vol. 1, no 4 (June 1956), p. 3.

91 TNA DO 35/6223, Letter to Mr. A.R. Swinnerton, UK High Commission, Karachi, 25 June 1953.

92 TNA DO 35/6223, J.D. Murray to Symon, 10 November 1952.

93 Simon Faulker and Anandi Ramamurthy (eds), Visual Culture and Decolonisation (London and New York, Routledge, 2018 [2006]), pp. 12-14.

94 See https://colombo-plan.org/ and the sponsored book, A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of the Colombo Plan (Colombo, The Colombo Plan Secretariat, 2014 [2010]).

95 Dato’ Patricia Yoon-Moi Chia, Welcome Speech, 60th Anniversary of the Colombo Plan, 1 July 2011, https://colombo-plan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/5dc3d8afdc6c0c18b8f81d98_OpeningSpeech60ATCP_01072011.pdf [Consulted 6 January 2023]

Top of page

List of illustrations

Title Figure. 1. Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. ‘Colombo Plan Exhibition Site, 1950.
Caption White arrows in the original.
Credits Source: The National Archives, INF 10/336/15, # ZZZ 48860 H.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/11622/img-1.png
File image/png, 2.5M
Title Figure 2. “Photograph of Colombo Plan British Exhibition Hall by Central Office of Information”, Source: Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 1952.
Credits Photograph by Central Office of Information. Alamy # 2J72DRO
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/11622/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 480k
Top of page

References

Electronic reference

Erika Rappaport, ““A Vast Publicity Exercise”: The 1952 Colombo Plan Exhibition and the Uses of Propaganda at the End of Empire”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXIX-1 | 2024, Online since 29 March 2024, connection on 07 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/11622; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/rfcb.11622

Top of page

About the author

Erika Rappaport

Erika Rappaport is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Her most significant publications include Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton 2000) and a Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2017), which won the American Historical Association’s 2018 Jerry Bentley Prize for the best book dealing with global or world-scale history. She is also the co-editor of Consuming Behaviours: Identities, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain (Bloomsbury 2015) and editor of A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Revolution and Empire (Bloomsbury 2022). She is currently writing a book tentatively entitled Talking Points: How Public Relations Sold the End of Empire, which examines how the British public relations industry managed the process, understanding, and memories of decolonization.

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search