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When a British housewife bought a bar of soap in 1905, the label on the box might have shown a tanned African child smiling beside a mound of white suds. When a Frenchman poured a cup of coffee, the poster above his café table might have displayed exotic figures from Africa or Indochina bringing the beans to Europe’s ports. Such images were everywhere, and their message was clear: empire was not only a political system—it was a way of consuming the world. In the early twentieth century, advertising became one of the key cultural technologies of empire. It taught Europeans…