'Chemists to the Nation, Pharmacy to the World': Exploring the Global Dimensions of British Healthcare and Beauty with Boots the Chemists, 1919-1980

This AHRC funded project running between (1 October 2021-30 September 2025) is led by three members of the history department: Professor Anna Greenwood (Principal Investigator), Dr Richard Hornsey (Co-Investigator) and Dr Hilary Ingram (Postdoctoral Research Assistant)

This project will be the first to critically analyse the international networks of ideas, materials, labour and representations that underpinned ostensibly 'British' experiences of everyday healthcare and beauty. Its central case study will be Britain's most iconic chain pharmacy and manufacturer, Boots the Chemists, a company that, despite being a familiar presence on the British high street, has not been substantively researched since the 1970s. It is little known that Boots actively fashioned itself as an international company from the early twentieth century. It had retail branches and/or sales agents in key locations abroad, and also developed research, manufacturing and wholesale facilities around the world.

Using the largely untapped Boots Archive (c.500,000 items), the project hones in on six product domains (see below), using key example products from each category to trace their journey from research laboratory and field to shop shelves and consumer practices. In mapping these complex international journeys, the project will critically explore how British experiences of healthcare and beauty were formed by material, business and cultural exchanges across the globe, and also how British notions of health and beauty were exported to facilitate, with varied success, the maintenance of British identity abroad. The project covers the period from 1919, when Boots posted its first overseas sales agent (to India), to the streamlining of its divisions in 1980 (after which data protection restrictions substantively limit full access to files).

The central research question asks: How does Boots' international archive allow us to map the global networks that moulded and sustained British experiences of healthcare and beauty both at home and abroad?

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