Crafting a Postcolonial (Inter)national Identity: Malaysian Pewter Company Royal Selangor’s Branding Strategies (1970–1992)

Abstract

Conventional viewpoints on global branding for design-focused consumer goods presuppose national identities as a given and prerequisite to market expansion, the key examples being Danish design furniture, Swiss watches, and Parisian fashion. Through the case study of Royal Selangor—a Malaysian family firm specializing in manufacturing pewter tableware and gifts—this study analyzes how businesses in former colonies adapt their branding strategies to transitioning ideas on national identities and economic development in the postcolonial era by drawing upon cosmopolitan worldviews of malleable identities and utilizing ties with former colonizers to gain cultural capital domestically and abroad. This study engages with theoretical frameworks of business history, organizational studies, and nationalism to explore how companies in developing countries in Southeast Asia that are also former colonies interact with colonial histories and participate in postcolonial nation-building through branding and entrepreneurship.

From craft to industry and back: transnational efforts in reconstructing tin’s social meaning to the retail consumer (1950s–1960s)

“…Nevertheless, as the saga on international tin restrictive schemes unfolded, Chinese and British tin miners had also appealed to the colonial government in the 1930s to develop manufacturing industries to expand tin use, including a pewter industry as exemplified by a flourishing Chinese family enterprise in Kuala Lumpur (Yong, 2022). Promotion of Malayan pewter in Britain thus began with the initiatives and collaborations of British and Chinese entrepreneurs, which spurred promotional and research activities by the colonial government since the 1930s.…”