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  • Did William Lever make palm oil?
  • Bringing in palm fruit in Leverville. Unilever PLC Palm oil was an essential component of soap manufacturing and William Lever duly set up with concessions from the Belgian government in its colony in the Central African – Les Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB) – as a subsidiary of Lever Brothers.
  • Did Lever Brothers use palm oil to make soap?
  • British soap makers, Lever Brothers, made the switch to palm oil early. In this 1897 photo taken at their portside facility in Liverpool, thousands of barrels of soap-making ingredients, including palm oil and nuts imported from West Africa, are being unloaded from boats and stacked in rows. (Image: Henry Bedford Lemere / Alamy)
  • Who was Lord Lever & what did he do?
  • In 1886, together with his brother, James, he established Lever Brothers, which was one of the first companies to manufacture soap from vegetable oils, and which is now part of the British multinational Unilever. In politics, Lever briefly sat as a Liberal MP for Wirral and later, as Lord Leverhulme, in the House of Lords as a Peer.
  • How did the Industrial Revolution affect the development of palm oil?
  • But the Industrial Revolution caused a surge in demand for palm oil in Europe, and the need to secure reliable supplies led to the development of oil palm plantations. Throughout the colonial and post-war era, foreign investment drove intensive expansion of these plantations at the expense of indigenous people, forests and wildlife.
  • Who was William Lever?
  • Originally William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925), the son of a Bolton grocer, made his fortune from soap manufacture, beginning with Sunlight Soap, and building a substantial business empire with brands such as Lux and Lifebuoy. William Lever, by now Lord Leverhulme.
  • Who was Lord Leverhulme?
  • For the aging industrialist Lord Leverhulme, HCB was expected to become the crowning achievement of his own brand of “moral capitalism”. As he wrote in a private letter in 1924, a few months before passing away, the Huileries were “a business like none other we have. Perhaps Port Sunlight comes nearest to it in social work” (Lewis, 2008, 177).