Soap and Imperial Commodity Racism

With thanks to Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Imperial Conquest, section 1: The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism for bringing up this subject and spurring the search for these images. (Click on any image to see a larger version.)

More commentary to follow soon...

The first step towards lightening The White Man's Burden

is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.

Pears' Soap

is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances, 

while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place—it is the ideal toilet soap.

The Pears' Soap advertisement above, featured in McClintock's chapter, is striking and rich in its symbolism, as she details: the private domestic sphere indicated by the setting in a washroom and the act of hand-washing; the racial and moral purity indicated by the white clothing; the imperial voyage into the virgin land indicated by the location on a ship; the porthole indicating the window into knowledge with its implication of power; the kneeling African gratefully receiving a bar of soap as one "might genuflect before a religious fetish". (McClintock, p. 32.) "Domestic hygiene, the ad implies, purifies and preserves the white male body from contamination in the threshold zone of empire." (McClintock, p. 32.)

Said Uncle Sam: "I will be wise,
and thus the Indian civilize:
Instead of guns, that kill a mile,
Tobacco, lead, and liquor vile,
Instead of serving out a meal,
Or sending Agents out to steal,
I'll give, domestic arts to teach,
A cake of IVORY SOAP to each.
Before it flies the guilty stain,
The grease and dirt no more remain;
'Twill change their nature day by day,
And wash their darkest blots away.
They'll turn their bows to fishing-rods,
And bury hatchets under sods,
In wisdom and in worth increase,
And ever smoke the pipe of peace;
For ignorance can never cope
With such a foe as IVORY SOAP."