So Clean

This book is an unorthodox biography of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme (1851–1925), the founder of the Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap empire. So clean places Lever squarely in his social and cultural context and is fully informed by recent historical scholarship, using him as an entry-point for contextualized and comparative essays on the history of advertising; on factory paternalism, town planning, the Garden City movement and their ramifications across the twentieth century; and on colonialism and forced labour in the Belgian Congo and the South Pacific. It concludes with a discussion of his extraordinary attempt, in his final years, to transform crofting and fishing in the Outer Hebrides. Written in an engaging and accessible style, So clean will appeal to academics and students working in business, social, cultural and imperial history.