Boots and the colonial world: imperial networks and the business of empire, 1919–1960

This pilot is the first phase of a larger project examining the international history of Boots. The project will undertake a rare scholarly investigation of the Walgreens Boots Alliances (WBA) archive to produce a timeline mapping its international retail, wholesale, drug research and pharmaceutical production activities, with a focus on Boots international relationships during the colonial period and within British colonial dependencies. This will allow for the establishment of a sustainable interdisciplinary scholarly network as the basis for a larger funding bid provisionally entitled ‘Chemist to the Nation, Pharmacy to the World: the International History of Boots’.