2025/11/09 by Anna Greenwood, Richard Hornsey, Hilary Ingram · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #History of Science and Medicine #New Zealand Economic and Social Studies #Twentieth Century Scientific Developments
paper · doi:10.1080/00223344.2025.2564228
openalex publication_date 2025/11/09 · openalex created_date 2025/11/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In 1944, Boots The Chemists, the UK’s leading retail pharmacy chain, opened a store in Suva, Fiji. It lasted less than twenty years. The brief and troubled history of this store – hitherto untold – reveals a great deal about imperialist retail cultures and their growing untenability in late-colonial Fiji. Boots’s Fiji branch sought to cater to a European clientele, adhering to principles of service rooted in paternalism, British ‘expertise’, and racialized notions of civility. However, this approach was soon in tension with Fiji’s multi-ethnic social dynamics and, increasingly, its processes of nation-building. The store’s struggles and eventual closure, and the complex relationships between British managers and Fijian and Indo-Fijian shop staff and customers, provide a rich account of social and cultural tensions in pre-Independence Suva.