Advertising "the East": Encounters with the Urban and the Exotic in Late Colonial Asia Pacific

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, shipping routes from the east coast of Australia to Southeast Asia developed quickly to serve trade in commodities drawn from industrially scaled extraction and agriculture. This produced an innovative architecture of agricultural buildings, warehouses, and port facilities. On the back of this, in the early 1900s shipping companies began to promote tourism to the Dutch East Indies and Singapore in Australia. Two shipping networks of this kind were those of the Australian firm Burns Philp and the Dutch-owned company KPM. Both were active in advertising tourism to Southeast Asia in their own publications, including BP Magazine. Both were also regular advertisers..