Overview
- Winner of the 2019 Society for the History of Childhood and Youth Grace Abbott Prize and the 2020 ISCHE First Book Award
- Compares histories of colonial education across multiple sites, including the Caribbean, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa
- Explores a wide spectrum of education, from broad imperial and governmental schemes, to local, intimate and emotional relationships between adults and children
- Considers various parties interested in education, including Indigenous people, families, settlers, governments, missionaries and researchers
Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (CIPCSS)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book tracks the changes in government involvement in Indigneous children’s education over the nineteenth century, drawing on case studies from the Caribbean, Australia and South Africa. Schools were pivotal in the production and reproduction of racial difference in the colonies of settlement. Between 1833 and 1880, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire with it increasingly seen as a government responsibility. At the same time, children’s needs came to be seen as different to those of their parents, and childhood was approached as a time to make interventions into Indigenous people’s lives. This period also saw shifts in thinking about race. Members of the public, researchers, missionaries and governments discussed the function of education, considering whether it could be used to further humanitarian or settler colonial aims. Underlying these questions were anxieties regarding the status of Indigenous people in newly colonisedterritories: the successful education of their children could show their potential for equality.
Reviews
“An ambitious and meticulously researched book … . Through a series of illuminating case studies, she highlights the tendency of imperial educational efforts to become enmeshed and subsumed by settler interests. … Swartz’s tight focus on (mainly secular) forms of education and her deft movement from the bird’s-eye level of imperial policy making to on-the-ground contestations, breaks new ground in revealing the centrality of education to the management of racial difference. … Swartz’s insightful study lays the groundwork for future investigations … .” (Ellen Boucher, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 61 (1), January, 2022)
“Swartz’s monograph is a well written and important study in the examination of education as a tool of humanitarians to shape children in the colonies, and the ways in which the colonial contexts warped this tool to reflect their own expectations of indigenous children as labourers serving the settler colonists, thereby contributing to discourses of essentialist ‘racial’ differences in various colonial contexts.” (Felicity Jensz, History of Education, February 3, 2020)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Rebecca Swartz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. She is an African Humanities Program research fellow, and held the Commonwealth Scholarship for her doctoral studies in the United Kingdom. She has published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and is co-editor, with Peter Kallaway, of Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective (2016).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Education and Empire
Book Subtitle: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880
Authors: Rebecca Swartz
Series Title: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-95908-5Published: 21 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-95909-2Published: 09 January 2019
Series ISSN: 2635-1633
Series E-ISSN: 2635-1641
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 253
Topics: Imperialism and Colonialism, World History, Global and Transnational History, History of Education, Social History