Histories of empire and histories of education

ABSTRACT

The past few years have seen a vigorous resurgence of public and academic debate and controversy regarding the British Empire, its place within Britain’s own history and the legacies of British colonial practices. In spite of this reinvigorated discussion of empire, education and schooling seem to have been an area largely overlooked within the field of new imperial history. Nonetheless, histories of education have increasingly been shaped by theoretical shifts in the imperial histories. This article discusses some recent literature concerning the British Empire, and suggests how these could prove useful for future studies of empire and education. First, it surveys a selection of key literature and developments in histories of empire and education. Then, it suggests three areas for future exploration by historians of education with interests in colonialism or empire: non-traditional sources, studies of and by indigenous and non-elite people, and research into the educational legacies of imperialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• imperialism
• British empire
• imperial historiography

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ See for example Maya Jasanoff, ‘Misremembering the British Empire’, New Yorker, November 2, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/misremembering-the-british-empire (accessed April 20, 2021); Ben Quinn and Nazia Parveen, ‘Historian David Olusoga joins academic criticism of No 10’s race report’, April 2, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/02/historian-and-hundreds-of-academics-attack-no-10s-race-report (accessed April 15, 2021); and Jessica Murray, ‘Politicians should not ‘weaponise’ UK history, says colonialism researcher’ , February 22, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/22/politicians-should-not-weaponise-uk-history-says-colonialism-researcher (accessed April 15, 2021).

² Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387–409.

³ Spencer Segalla, Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology and Muslim Resistance (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 8.

⁴ Clive Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I: India’, History of Education 34, no. 3 (2005): 315–29; Clive Whitehead, ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II: Africa and the Rest of the Colonial Empire’, History of Education 34 (2005): 441–54.

⁵ There is of course the question of whether these should still be called ‘new’ imperial histories, given that they are now part of a subfield that is some thirty years old. On the impact of the empire at ‘home’, see Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

⁶ Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London: Verso, 2019), 3.

⁷ See Stephen Howe, ‘Introduction’, in The New Imperial Histories Reader, ed. Stephen Howe (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 1–20.

⁸ Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002); Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001); Alan Lester, Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. David Lambert and Alan Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

⁹ Durba Ghosh, ‘AHR Forum: Another Set of Imperial Turns?’ American Historical Review 117, no. 3 (2012): 778.

¹⁰ Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

¹¹ Felicity Jensz, Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830 –1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).

¹² Tony Ballantyne, ‘Review: The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 5: Historiography’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 3, no.2 (2002): n.p; Dane Kennedy, ‘The Imperial History Wars’, Journal of British Studies 54 (2015): 11–12.

¹³ Norman Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 261–84; Norman Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire Revisited’, Social Sciences and Missions 24 (2011): 171–89. In many ways, Felicity Jensz’s Missionaries and Modernity responds to this call.

¹⁴ Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch and William Richardson, ‘“Empires Overseas” and “Empires at Home”: Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives on Social Change in the History of Education’, Paedagogica Historica 45 (2009): 703.

¹⁵ Antonio Novoa, ‘Endnote: Empires Overseas and Empires at Home’, Paedagogica Historica 45 (2009): 817.

¹⁶ Tamson Pietsch, ‘Rethinking the British World’, Journal of British Studies 52 (2013): 447.

¹⁷ Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education, ed. Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014).

¹⁸ Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘History of Education beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship’, in Bagchi et al., Connecting Histories of Education, 16–17.

¹⁹ See Tim Allender, ‘“Lessons” from the Subcontinent: Indian Dynamics in British Africa’, in Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective, ed. Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 29–50.

²⁰ Jana Tshurenev, ‘A Colonial Experiment in Education Madras, 1789–1796’, in Bagchi et al., Connecting Histories of Education, 105–120; Jana Tshurenev, Empire, Civil Society and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

²¹ E. Roldan Vera and Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘Introduction: The Transnational in the History of Education’, in The Transnational in the History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldan Vera (Cham: Palgrave, 2019), 24.

²² Rebecca Rogers, ‘Conversations about the Transnational: Reading and Writing the Empire in the History of Education’, in Fuchs and Roldan Vera, The Transnational in the History of Education, 112.

²³ Ibid., 120.

²⁴ See Women, Power Relations, and Education in a Transnational World, ed. Christine Mayer and Adelina Arredondo (Cham: Palgrave, 2020) for an excellent collection of these perspectives.

²⁵ Joyce Goodman, ‘“Their Market Value Must Be Greater for the Experience They Had Gained”: Secondary School Headmistresses and Empire, 1897–1914’ , in Gender, Colonialism and Education: The Political Experience of Education, ed. Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin (London: Woburn, 2002), 188.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Joyce Goodman, ‘Working for Change across International Borders: the Association of Headmistresses and Education for International Citizenship’, Paedagogica Historica 43 (2007): 167.

²⁸ See the special issue on gender, teaching and transnationalism edited by Deirdre Raftery and Marie Clark, History of Education 44, no. 6 (2015); Kay Whitehead, ‘British Teachers’ Transnational Work within and beyond the British Empire after the Second World War’, History of Education 46 (2017): 324–42; and Lynne Trethewey and Kay Whitehead, ‘Beyond Centre and Periphery: Transnationalism in Two Teacher/Suffragettes’ Work’, History of Education 32, no. 5 (2003): 547–59.

²⁹ Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flag: Protestant Missions and British Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Leicester: Apollos, 1990); Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire?: British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire: 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). An interesting example of the school of thought that positioned white missionaries as imperialists is Nosipho Majeke (Dora Taylor), The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest (Johannesburg, 1952; repr. Cumberwood, 1986).

³⁰ John Gascoigne, ‘Introduction: Religion and Empire, an Historiographical Perspective’, Journal of Religious History 32, no. 2 (2008): 171.

³¹ Margo S. Gewurtz and Seija Jalagan, ‘Introduction: Transnationalism and Mission History’, Social Sciences and Missions 30 (2017): 4.

³² Gascoigne, ‘Introduction’, 168.

³³ Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press, 1990).

³⁴ Segalla, Moroccan Soul.

³⁵ John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa, Volume 1 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991); John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Volume 2 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

³⁶ For an overview of missionaries’ role in education, see Felicity Jensz, ‘Missionaries and Indigenous Education in the 19th-Century British Empire. Part I: Church-State Relations and Indigenous Actions and Reactions’, History Compass 10 (2012): 294–305; and ‘Part II: Race, Class, and Gender’, History Compass 10 (2012): 306–317.

³⁷ On Christian childhoods in the Anglo-world see Hugh Morrison and Mary Clare Martin, eds., Creating Religious Childhoods in Anglo-World and British Colonial Contexts, 1800–1950 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

³⁸ Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Introducing Settler Colonial Studies’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no.1 (2011): 1.

³⁹ Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (Cham: Palgrave, 2019).

⁴⁰ Sean Carleton, ‘“The children show unmistakable signs of Indian blood”: Indigenous Children Attending Public Schools in British Columbia, 1872–1925’, History of Education (2021): 3.

⁴¹ Kennedy, ‘The Imperial History Wars’, 7.

⁴² Lambert and Lester, Colonial Lives; Clare Anderson, Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

⁴³ Alan Lester, ‘Spatial Concepts and the Historical Geographies of British Colonialism’, in Writing. Imperial Histories (Studies in Imperialism), ed. Andrew Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 129.

⁴⁴ Lauren Benton, ‘Spatial Histories of Empire’, Itinerario 30, no. 3 (2006): 19–34.

⁴⁵ Rebecca Swartz and Peter Kallaway, ‘Imperial, Global and Local in Histories of Colonial Education’, History of Education 47, no. 3 (2018): 362–7.

⁴⁶ Richard Drayton and David Motadel, ‘Discussion: The Futures of Global History’, Journal of Global History 13 (2018): 3.

⁴⁷ Segalla, Moroccan Soul, 21.

⁴⁸ Simon Potter and Jonathan Saha, ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 16, no. 1 (2005), n.p.

⁴⁹ Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous Peoples in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 10.

⁵⁰ Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 5.

⁵¹ Ibid., 6.

⁵² David Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial-Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 4.

⁵³ Pomfret, Youth and Empire, 209.

⁵⁴ Stephen Jackson, Constructing National Identity in Canadian and Australian Classrooms: The Crown of Education (Cham: Palgrave, 2018), 3.

⁵⁵ Patrick Walsh, ‘Education and the “Universalist” Idiom of Empire: Irish National School Books in Ireland and Ontario’, History of Education 37 (2008): 645–60.

⁵⁶ Helen May, Baljit Kaur and Larry Prochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 8.

⁵⁷ Swartz, Education and Empire..

⁵⁸ Kevin Myers, Paul J. Ramsey and Helen Proctor, ‘Rethinking Borders and Boundaries for a Mobile History of Education’, Paedagogica Historica 54, no. 6 (2018): 681.

⁵⁹ Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020).

⁶⁰ Tim Livsey, Nigeria’s University Age: Reframing Decolonisation and Development (Cham: Palgrave, 2017), 15.

⁶¹ Marleen Reichgelt, ‘Children as Protagonists in Colonial History: Watching Missionary Photography’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 135, nos. 3–4 (2020): 103.

⁶² Jane Lydon, ‘Australian Photographic Histories after Colonialism’, in The Handbook of Photography Studies, ed. Gil Pasternuk (London and New York: Routledge Ebook, 2020), ch. 17.

⁶³ Emily Manktelow, Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

⁶⁴ Jane McCabe, Race, Tea and Colonial Resettlement: Imperial Families, Interrupted (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 2.

⁶⁵ Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 16.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 19.

⁶⁷ Laura Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and the Settler Colonial Everyday in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019), 7.

⁶⁸ Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, ‘Introduction – Indigenous Networks: Historical Trajectories and Contemporary Connections’, in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1.

⁶⁹ Jane Carey, ‘Indigenising Transnationalism? Challenges for New Imperial and Cosmopolitan Histories’, in Carey and Lydon, Indigenous Networks, 288.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 289.

⁷¹ Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell, ‘Introduction: Empire, Indigeneity, and Revolution’, in Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, ed. Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 3.

⁷² Fullager and McDonnell, ‘Introduction’, 4 (emphasis in the original).

⁷³ Alan Lester and Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, ed. Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.

⁷⁴ Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse’, Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 4.

⁷⁵ Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2 (emphasis in the original).

⁷⁶ Romain Bertrand, ‘Where the Devil Stands: A Microhistorical Reading of Empires as Multiple Moral Worlds (Manila – Mexico, 1577–1580)’, Past & Present 242 (2019): 84.

⁷⁷ Walter Mignolo, ‘Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-Colonial Thinking’, in Globalisation and the Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 2.

⁷⁸ See for example Karen Racine, ‘Monitors and Moralists: The Lancasterian System of Mutual Education and the Vision of a New Moral Order in Spanish America, 1818–1831’, History of Education 49 (2020): 143–59; and Jana Tschurenev and Sumeet Mhaskar, ‘“Wake up for education”: Colonialism, Social Transformation, and the Beginnings of the Anti-Caste Movement in India’, Paedagogica Historica (forthcoming).

⁷⁹ Gopal, Insurgent Empire, 12.

⁸⁰ A useful selection of resources has been curated by the Black British History group at the Institute for Commonwealth Studies: https://blackbritishhistory.co.uk/resources/links/ (accessed April 28, 2021).

⁸¹ Tom Wall, ‘The Day Bristol Dumped Its Hated Slave Trader in the Docks and a Nation Began to Search Its Soul’, June 4, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/14/the-day-bristol-dumped-its-hated-slave-trader-in-the-docks-and-a-nation-began-to-search-its-soul (accessed October 8, 2021).

⁸² See Francis B. Nyamnjoh, #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (Bamenda: Laanga Research and Publishing, 2016).

⁸³ For a personal account of involvement in the Rhodes Must Fall Oxford movement, see Simukai Chigudu, ‘Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford: A Critical Testimony’, Critical African Studies 12, no. 3 (2020): 302–12.

⁸⁴ See for example https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-07-06/mississippi-students-voted-move-civil-war-statue-now-fear-confederate-shrine (accessed November 17, 2021).

⁸⁵ For a searchable database of British slave owners who were compensated, see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ (accessed February 8, 2021), and Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang, eds, Legacies of British Slave Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). A special section of History Workshop Journal 90 (2020): 165–252 explores legacies of slave ownership.

⁸⁶ Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 4.

⁸⁷ Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept’, in Globalisation and the Decolonial Option, ed. Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 97.

⁸⁸ Sarah De Leeuw and Margo Greenwood, ‘Foreword: History Lessons: What Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods Teaches Us’, in May et al., Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods, xvi.

⁸⁹ See UncoverEd’s website, http://uncover-ed.org/ (accessed February 8, 2021).

⁹⁰ See https://www.gla.ac.uk/explore/historicalslaveryinitiative/ (accessed February 8, 2021).

⁹¹ See ‘Introduction’, on https://www.landgrabu.org/ (accessed March 3, 2021).

⁹² Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 2.

⁹³ See https://colonialcountryside.wordpress.com/(accessed April 29, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Swartz

Rebecca Swartz is a historian of education and empire, based at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her first monograph Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833-1880 (Cham: Palgrave, 2019) was awarded the Grace Abbott book prize from the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth and the first book prize from the International Standing Conference on the History of Education. Her research is focused on the relationship between education, childhood and labour, primarily in settler colonial contexts in the British Empire.