Selling health in the empire: A multimodal discourse analysis of medicine advertising in colonial North Borneo

Abstract

Modernisation has seen how health and medicine are commodified in the name of profit. The focus of this study is to examine how health is commodified in colonial advertisements. This study examines colonial medicine advertisements in The British North Borneo Herald, a newspaper published in North Borneo during the British colonisation. This study employs Williamson’s approach to studying ideology and meaning in advertising (1978), examining the language and visual images of advertisements to investigate the relationship between health and advertising, particularly in the era of colonialism. The findings show that the advertisements promote certain beauty ideals to the consumers, specifically women, even though the products advertised are medicines. Therefore, this study not only contributes to the understanding of ideology and the production of colonial advertisements but also highlights the continuity of such strategies in contemporary advertising discourse, where health and beauty remain commodified and tied to consumer identity.