Scotch Whisky, Empire and Colonial Trade

A 1910 Johnnie Walker advert addressed drinkers in Calcutta, Borneo, Cape Town, Sydney and Valparaiso who missed the Scotch they knew at “home”. It captures how Scotch whisky spread through imperial trading connections, overseas sales networks and advertising that associated the drink with British identity. Empire helped build that international trade, but the history also includes racial hierarchies, unequal liquor controls and drinking cultures that existed before Scotch became prominent.[1][2][4][5]

How Scotch whisky became an imperial drink

“By 1900 Scotch was an imperial drink,” writes historian Thora Hands. Buchanan, Dewar and Walker had developed substantial export markets using imperial trade links, although their business also reached beyond British colonies. Buchanan’s markets included Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Jamaica, South America, North Africa, Canada and the United States.[1]

That distinction matters: imperial connections were a route into international commerce, not a boundary around it. The United States appears alongside colonial markets in the scholarship, and Buchanan’s trading reach cannot be described simply as a map of British possessions.[1][3]

Bower and Higgins give two figures for exports as a share of industry sales by 1914: about 39 per cent in one passage and about 40 per cent in another. They say the bulk went to the United Kingdom’s colonies and the United States.[3]

Claim: Exports accounted for around two fifths of industry sales by 1914. Verdict: Disputed in detail. What the record shows: Bower and Higgins give both 39 and 40 per cent. Source: Bower and Higgins, 2023. Last checked: November 2026.

The broader chronology belongs in the history of whisky. Here, the distinctive question is how traders and advertisers made Scotch part of an imperial commercial and cultural network.

Agents, branches and changing competition

The export business depended on organisation as well as publicity. McCormack dates Dewar’s entry into the London and export markets to 1886; by 1908, The Illustrated London News listed branches stretching from New York to Sydney, Calcutta and Barbados.[2]

Dewar’s own history says that in August 1892 Thomas Dewar began his first world sales tour, appointing 32 agents in 26 countries.[6]

Claim: Thomas Dewar appointed 32 agents in 26 countries on his first world sales tour. Verdict: Documented in the producer’s account. Evidence gap: The tally has not been independently established in the sources checked. Source: Dewar’s, History. Last checked: November 2026.

McCormack identifies five major businesses in the literature: Dewar, John Walker and Sons, James Buchanan and Co., John Haig and Co., and Mackie and Co., later White Horse Distillers. These were businesses building distribution and recognition, not merely waiting for overseas drinkers to discover their whisky.[2]

Competition also changed. McCormack attributes the swing from brandy towards Scotch to the phylloxera blight in European vineyards during the 1880s. That makes a simple story of Scotch winning through taste alone inadequate: disruption to a rival drink’s supply belongs in the explanation too.[2]

Selling British identity overseas

McCormack’s study examines Scotch advertising in The Illustrated London News between 1890 and 1914. Read across the Empire, the paper acted, in his description, as “a vehicle for the dispersion of British culture”. Its Scotch adverts placed commercial messages beside images and language of military service, monarchy and imperial belonging.[2]

An 1893 John Robertson and Sons advert showed officers resembling the Black Watch toasting a royal wedding. Pattisons’ adverts from 1896 to 1898 placed army officers before the Union Jack beneath the phrase “in general use”. In July 1905, DCL advertised its King George IV blend for the export market in the same publication.[2]

Hands describes a September 1900 Four Crown Scotch advert in The National Guardian, titled “A Powerful Peacemaker”, which used a Boer War prisoner of war scene in Pretoria. The advert is evidence of the promotion, not proof of its claim.[1]

Racial hierarchy also appeared in the language. On 23 May 1908, The Illustrated London News called Dewar’s “a household name wherever people are sufficiently civilised to be able to appreciate whisky”. Quoted by McCormack, that wording made appreciation of a commercial drink into a supposed measure of civilisation.[2]

Hands identifies a 1909 Black and White advert showing two women “in a manner suggesting a colonial mistress and maid relationship”. She writes that after 1910 the brand’s advertising used black and white imagery “to symbolise the ideals of British imperialism”, first with a black Scottish terrier and a white West Highland terrier. These are her analyses of the adverts.[1]

A story in one advert: Scotch at “home”

The striding man’s idea of home

Founding story: Hands dates the Walker firm’s beginnings as a licensed grocer in Kilmarnock to 1820. This is a trading origin, not a distillery founding date.[1]

Documented record: Walker’s 1910 advert addressed drinkers “out in Calcutta or Borneo or Cape Town or Sydney or Valparaiso” who could not obtain “the good old Scotch they have at ‘home’”. The striding man was in use by then.[1]

Verdict: Documented. The advert named overseas destinations and invoked “home”, but it does not establish who actually bought or drank the whisky. Source: Hands, chapter 7, 2018. Last checked: November 2026.

India before Scotch’s imperial prominence

India’s colonial drinking history did not begin with Scotch. Erica Wald’s study of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describes European soldiers drinking arrack and toddy in place of the ale, small beer, malt liquor or gin they had left behind in Britain. Wealthier Anglo Indians preferred imported claret, port and champagne.[4]

Military drinking arrangements were unequal. Wald records a daily allowance of two drams for European soldiers in the East India Company army, while Indian sepoys had no equivalent ration. Officially sanctioned regimental canteens appeared from the 1820s.[4]

Claim: European soldiers in the East India Company army received a daily spirit allowance. Verdict: Documented. Evidence gap: Wald’s account does not establish that Scotch was the rationed spirit. Source: Wald, 2018. Last checked: November 2026.

Wald also describes later nationalist and temperance campaigners attacking “foreign” drink, meaning stronger European distilled spirits. Imported alcohol could therefore become a target of opposition, not simply a sign of attachment to Britain.[4]

Claim: Scotch was the drink of the Raj from the start. Verdict: Legend. Wald describes other drinks in colonial India, while Scotch’s imperial expansion is documented in the later nineteenth century. The sources checked do not establish Scotch as the defining drink from the beginning.[1][2][4]

For the separate development of production and drinking traditions, continue with the history of Indian whisky.

Colonial liquor controls were not equal

The imperial drinks trade also operated within systems that distinguished between populations. The Convention relating to the Liquor Traffic in Africa, signed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 10 September 1919, provides a particularly explicit historical example.[5]

Its preamble proposed prohibiting distilled beverages described as especially dangerous to “native populations”. Article 2 banned “trade spirits of every kind” across colonial Africa, excluding Algiers, Tunis, Morocco, Libya, Egypt and the Union of South Africa. Article 4 allowed governments to prohibit other spirits where their use “has not been developed”, while permitting limited quantities for “non-native persons”. Article 5 banned the manufacture of distilled beverages and import of stills in the specified area, except in the Italian colonies.[5]

Claim: The convention imposed unequal restrictions on spirits for different populations. Verdict: Documented. Evidence gap: The sources checked do not establish whether Scotch was classed as trade spirits in any colony. Source: Convention reprint, 1919. Last checked: November 2026.

The treaty belongs beside the advertising evidence because both reveal distinctions embedded in colonial commerce: who was addressed as a customer, and who was subjected to restrictions.[1][2][5]

A short timeline of the imperial trade

After empire, a changing export map

Exports did not cease to matter as the industry’s markets changed. Bower and Higgins write that exports have “dominated the industry’s fortunes since 1945”. Their figures also show why the export trade should not be imagined as a fixed collection of destinations.[3]

In 1950, the United States accounted for 45 per cent of Scotch sales by volume and Europe for less than 5 per cent. By 2000, the respective shares were 10.8 and 40.6 per cent. Those changing proportions distinguish the later export business from the colonial networks through which Scotch had expanded before 1914.[3]

McCormack concludes that Scotch was promoted “as a part of the Empire”, alongside goods such as tea, cocoa and soap. Scotch was sold through networks and imagery of imperial belonging, rather than becoming international through flavour or individual entrepreneurship alone.[2]

Where to go next

• A History of Whisky: From Early Distilling to Global Spirit: place imperial expansion within the longer chronology.
• The History of Indian Whisky: follow India’s distinct whisky history.
• Whisky in the World Wars: Rationing, Bombs and Exports: continue into wartime production and overseas trade.

Sources

1. Hands, T. Drinking in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Beyond the Spectre of the Drunkard, chapter 7, “Making Scotch Respectable: Buchanan and Walker”. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Open access chapter, copy hosted by Electric Scotland. https://electricscotland.com/food/MakingScotchRespectableBuchana.pdf

2. McCormack, M. The Universal Whisky: Advertising Scotch Whisky to the Empire in The Illustrated London News, 1890-1914. Business and Industrial History, volume 34, 2025, pages 80 to 103. https://journals.gla.ac.uk/bih/article/view/596

3. Bower, J. and Higgins, D. M. Litigation and Lobbying in Support of the Marque: The Scotch Whisky Association, c. 1945 to c. 1990. Enterprise and Society, volume 24, issue 1, 2023, pages 286 to 316. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/enterprise-and-society/article/litigation-and-lobbying-in-support-of-the-marque-the-scotch-whisky-association-c-1945c-1990/6079210D01A46DF05BC966B687E114AA

4. Wald, E. Governing the Bottle: Alcohol, Race and Class in Nineteenth Century India. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, volume 46, issue 3, 2018, pages 397 to 417. Author’s accepted manuscript, Goldsmiths Research Online. https://eprints.goldsmiths.ac.uk/23153/9/Published%20-%20Final%20-%20Governing%20the%20Bottle%20Alcohol%20Race%20and%20Class%20in%20Nineteenth%20Century%20India.pdf

5. American Journal of International Law, Official Documents supplement. Convention Relating to the Liquor Traffic in Africa and Protocol, signed 10 September 1919. Reprint of Great Britain Treaty Series 1919 No. 19, text hosted by Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/jstor-2213281/2213281_djvu.txt

6. Dewar’s. History, producer’s timeline, undated. Entry for August 1892. https://www.dewars.com/us/en/?p=7340

This desk research article uses the site’s verified fact sheet, distinguishing scholarly analysis, historical treaty text and the producer’s own account.

Last checked: November 2026