CIPIL Evening Seminar: 'Corporate Empires and their Racist Vectors in the Colonial Public Sphere'

PLEASE NOTE: Because of the nature of its subject, this talk will contain racist language and images.

Title: 'Corporate Empires and their Racist Vectors in the Colonial Public Sphere' 

Speaker: Dr Fady Aoun, Senior Lecturer in law at the University of Sydney Law School

Abstract: Colonial and imperialist ideologies, as is well known, were spread not only through official government channels and public art but also by entrepreneurs promoting their wares across an increasingly interconnected globe. Celebratory representations of Britannica—together with racist and gendered portrayals of marginalised Others—frequently materialised in registered trade marks adorning products such as tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, sugar, and soap products. Corporate tobacco, tea, coffee and soap empires often smoothed the integration of metropoles and their colonies and their racist vectors (qua trade marks) featured heavily in historical trade mark registers across the British Empire, continental European states and the United States. Through trade mark registrations and business records, this paper explores the role played by corporate empires and state authorities as agents of imperialist ideology across sophisticated domestic and international trade networks. Many of the confronting trade marks documented in this paper cultivated and reinforced racist and gendered tropes and were unsurprisingly owned by powerful companies such as Lever Bros and various Bristolian tobacco traders. Charting the corporate lives and entanglements of Lever Bros and WD & HO Wills— a preeminent nineteenth century Bristolian tobacco manufacturer— offers fascinating historical vignettes into the complex intersectionality of Empire, people, and places, both real and imagined. Fairly consistent transatlantic and transpacific trade mark laws facilitated semiotic mythmaking relating to the triumphalism of the ‘idea’ of Empire as well as the subjugation of Others from the Global South.

Biography: Dr Fady John George AOUN BEc (Hons)/LLB (Hons) Phd (Syd) is a Senior Lecturer in law at the University of Sydney Law School and is admitted to practice law in NSW. His research and teaching interests are mainly in intellectual property, corporations law, and legal history. He is a co-author of Intellectual Property: Commentary & Materials (6th ed, Thomson Reuters, 2017) and Redmond’s Corporations Law and Financial Markets Law Practice (8th ed, Thomson Reuters, 2023).  Dr Aoun completed his doctoral thesis on the law, theory and policy relating to stigmatising trade marks.  A representative publication emerging from this work is ‘WHITEWASHING AUSTRALIA’S HISTORY OF STIGMATISING TRADE MARKS AND COMMERCIAL IMAGERY’ (2009) 44(3) Melbourne University Law Review for which he was awarded the best Article in the 2020 Australian Legal Research Awards (Early Career Researcher).

A small reception will follow the event in G24.

This event is a hybrid event - to attend online you must register via Zoom.

Enquiries to: cipil@law.cam.ac.uk