During and immediately after the second world war, propaganda educated British subjects around the world to consider their money as a weapon. Campaigners called for individual war savings, collective donations, sacrifice, and performative thrift. Propagandists, and their targets who read the news, participated in savings campaigns, or felt watched by the neighbors, discussed formal sector savings, budgeting, and investment not simply as a matter of individual choice or taste, but as vital. Spending on consumer goods became not civilized, but a sign of treasonous complicity with the “Squander Bug”. Fighting with money, campaigners asserted, was patriotic, would win the war and lay the foundation for a new world. This project examines the propaganda and practices of this global thrift and savings initiative, examining agency and possibility within an embattled, austere, and faltering empire seeking survival and repair in a radically changing world.

Carol Summers is the Mitchell/Billikopf Professor of History at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia (USA) where she teaches African and comparative history. Her publications include examinations of schooling and segregation in colonial Zimbabwe [Colonial Lessons, 2002 and From Civilization to Segregation, 1994], and work on colonial Uganda, especially Buganda. Her articles and chapters on Uganda have drawn on rich archives to examine local values that challenged nationalist paradigms of development and political change. Studies include examinations of syphilis, rudeness, grandfathers, political marriage, scandal, adolescence, lobbying, and more. Her current project on patriotic thrift grows from Uganda’s experiences in the Second World War and goes global to include not simply Uganda and Britain, but Canada, South Africa and beyond as she explores propaganda, practice and worldmaking in war savings campaigns.