The British Book Export Scheme, 1939–1951

Abstract: This article explores a unique instance of the British state supporting the book trade’s global export ambitions for both cultural and commercial motives: the British Book Export Scheme (BES). It chronicles how BES operated as a public-private partnership between the British Council and the book trade to help export British books to nonimperial markets despite the challenges of the Second World War from 1940 to 1951. During the six years at the height of the scheme (1940–1946), BES exported £458,679 of British books to more than a score of countries including Brazil, Algeria, and Iran. Yet this unusual balance of cultural and commercial goals proved challenging for government officials and the book trade to reconcile, especially under the pressures of the war, and the scheme was ended in 1951. The article argues that BES’s failure as both a cultural and commercial initiative helps us understand why so many subsequent instances of Cold War cultural diplomacy were explicitly noncommercial. BES had shown that it was exceedingly difficult, and maybe impossible, to pursue commercial and cultural imperatives while retaining both state and trade support.