Liberty¡¯s Double Mission and Dual Identity: The London Department Store in Colonial and Postcolonial Contexts

Liberty & Co., which opened to the public on 15 May 1875 under the name East India House, differentiated its identity and brand image from competitors in terms of goods, design, and architecture. Liberty once enticed customers into the Orient art shop, but nowadays the shop attracts people into its Tudor building in the name of history, tradition, and heritage. This study discusses spatio-temporal variations in the positioning of the shop by tracing how Liberty built its own identity from the nineteenth century to the present day. Liberty¡¯s aesthetic ideal as a tastemaker led the company to its dual mission as an artistic retailer and art manufacturer. Liberty¡¯s self-awareness places it on the boundary between being a shop and a museum by writing a biography of the company and visualizing its self-identity in the form of exhibitions. This article contextualizes Liberty¡¯s position in a wider global framework, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and defines Liberty as the epitome of a dual identity. It then demonstrates how such a sense of duality plays an important role, even in the twenty-first century, in featuring Englishness and imperial nostalgia.