Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introduction: Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Education and Empire

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

  • 858 Accesses

Abstract

The introduction argues that in order to fully understand local educational experiences we must pursue a comparative and connected approach that highlights the connections and divergences between different parts of the Empire. Colonial education was shaped by a number of competing and cooperative discourses, including settler colonialism and humanitarianism. Between emancipation in the 1830s and the 1880s, where the study concludes, there were remarkable changes in thinking about education in Britain and the Empire. Education was 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, from a predominantly cultural to a biological understanding of difference.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Annual Report of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (London: Printed by Order of the Society, 1838), 6.

  2. 2.

    Sarah De Leeuw and Margo Greenwood, ‘Foreword: History Lessons: What Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods Teaches Us’, in Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies, by Helen May, Baljit Kaur and Larry Prochner (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2014), xv–xxii, xvi.

  3. 3.

    Linda McCoy, ‘Education for Labour: Social Problems of Nationhood’, in Forming Nation, Framing Welfare, ed. by Gail Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 93–138, 96.

  4. 4.

    Native Protector Charles Symmons Annual Report, 31.12.1840, Western Australia Government Gazette, 8.01.1841.

  5. 5.

    A notable exception is Shirleene Robinson, ‘Resistance and Race: Aboriginal Child Workers in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Australia’, in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed. by Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 129–143. On settler colonialism see Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labour and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, The American Historical Review, 106 (2001), 866–905. See also Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  6. 6.

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

  7. 7.

    Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 48.

  8. 8.

    Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies’, Journal of American History, 88 (2001), 829–865, 850; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (London: University of California Press, 2002), esp. Chap. 5.

  9. 9.

    See Clive Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service, 1858–1983 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003); ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part I: India’, History of Education, 34 (2005), 315–329; ‘The Historiography of British Imperial Education Policy, Part II: Africa and the Rest of the Colonial Empire’, History of Education, 34 (2005), 441–454; ‘The Concept of British Education Policy in the Colonies 1850–1960’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 39 (2007), 161–173.

  10. 10.

    Clayton Mackenzie, ‘Demythologising the Missionaries: A Reassessment of the Functions and Relationships of Christian Missionary Education under Colonialism’, Comparative Education, 29 (1993), 45–66, 52.

  11. 11.

    I have argued for the importance of the connected and comparative approach in Rebecca Swartz and Peter Kallaway, ‘Editorial: Imperial, Global and Local in Histories of Colonial Education’, History of Education, 47 (2018), 362–367.

  12. 12.

    Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

  13. 13.

    Ibid., 273.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 14.

  15. 15.

    Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 4; Wolfe, ‘Land, Labour and Difference’, 868; see also the journal Settler Colonial Studies, first published 2011.

  16. 16.

    Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (2012), 729–747, 731.

  17. 17.

    Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 9. Barnett urges us to think of humanitarianisms rather than humanitarianism, 10, 21.

  18. 18.

    Lester and Dussart, Colonization, 7.

  19. 19.

    Timothy Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 75.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 76.

  21. 21.

    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, 296.

  22. 22.

    Esme Cleall, Missionary Discourses of Difference: Negotiating Otherness in the British Empire, 1840–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 163.

  23. 23.

    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); Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African frontier, Volume 2 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  24. 24.

    See Rebecca Swartz, ‘Civilisation and Colonial Education: Natal and Western Australia in the 1860s in Comparative Perspective’, History of Education, 47 (2018), 368–383, on the relationship between the concepts of ‘education’ and ‘civilisation’ for educators. Norman Etherington’s notable work on missionaries and education should be acknowledged for its contribution to the field. He remarked that he was unable to find contributors to write on ‘Missions and Education’ or ‘Missions and Medicine’ for his companion volume to the Oxford History of the British Empire. Thus, ‘Education and Medicine’ appeared as one chapter, authored by Etherington in Missions and Empire, ed. by Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 261–284. Norman Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire Revisited’, Social Sciences and Missions, 24 (2011), 171–189, 176.

  25. 25.

    Megan Watkins, ‘Teachers’ Tears and the Affective Geography of the Classroom’, Emotion, Space and Society, 4 (2011), 137–143, 137.

  26. 26.

    Shurlee Swain, ‘But the Children... Indigenous Child Removal Policies Compared’, in Writing Colonial Histories: Comparative Perspectives, ed. by Tracey Banivanua Mar and Julie Evans (Victoria: University of Melbourne, Department of History, 2002), 133–143, 134.

  27. 27.

    Sarah de Leeuw, ‘“If Anything Is to Be Done with the Indian, We Must Catch Him Very Young”: Colonial Constructions of Aboriginal Children and the Geographies of Indian Residential Schooling in British Columbia, Canada’, Children’s Geographies, 7 (2009), 123–140, 130.

  28. 28.

    See, for example, Beverly Grier, ‘Invisible Hands: The Political Economy of Child Labour in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1930’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20 (1994), 27–52.

  29. 29.

    Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 128.

  30. 30.

    Catherine Hall, Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2012), 204.

  31. 31.

    Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, 269.

  32. 32.

    For calls to rethink this nation-state focus, see António Nóvoa, ‘Empires Overseas and Empires at Home’, Paedagogica Historica, 45 (2009), 817–821; Felicity Jensz, ‘Missionaries and Indigenous Education in the 19th-Century British Empire. Part II: Race, Class, and Gender’, History Compass, 10 (2012), 306–317, 311. See also the special issue of Paedagogica Historica in 2009, especially 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), 695–706; Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘History of Education beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship’, in Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education, ed. by Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014), 11–26; Swartz and Kallaway, ‘Editorial’.

  33. 33.

    Anna Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia, 2nd edn (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1992), and Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). For colonial education policy in the Western Australia, see John Brown, ‘Policies in Aboriginal Education in Western Australia, 1829–1897’ (M.Ed thesis, University of Western Australia, 1979); Neville Green, ‘Access, Equality and Opportunity? The Education of Aboriginal Children in Western Australia, 1840–1978’ (PhD thesis, Murdoch University, 2004).

  34. 34.

    The most comprehensive study on colonial policy regarding ‘native’ education in Natal remains Oscar Emanuelson’s ‘A History of Native Education in Natal, between 1835 and 1927’ (M.Ed thesis, University of South Africa, 1927).

  35. 35.

    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).

  36. 36.

    Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002), 16.

  37. 37.

    Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer, ‘Travelling across National, Paradigmatic and Archival Divides: New Work for the Historian of Education’, History of Education, 38 (2009), 721–727, 722.

  38. 38.

    Clare Anderson, ‘After Emancipation: Empires and Imperial Formations’, in Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, ed. by Catherine Hall, Nick Draper and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 113–127, 122.

  39. 39.

    Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous Peoples in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 4.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 10.

  41. 41.

    Catherine Hall, Nick Draper and Keith McClelland, ‘Introduction’, in Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, ed. by Catherine Hall, Nick Draper and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 1–16, 7.

  42. 42.

    Stoler, ‘Tense and Tender Ties’, 847.

  43. 43.

    Ford, Settler Sovereignty, 10.

  44. 44.

    David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by David Lambert and Alan Lester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–31, 13.

  45. 45.

    Alan Lester, ‘Spatial Concepts and the Historical Geographies of British Colonialism’, in Writing Imperial Histories (Studies in Imperialism), ed. by Andrew Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 118–142, 129.

  46. 46.

    Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999), 165.

  47. 47.

    Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 5, 6.

  48. 48.

    Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood’ in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History, ed. by Stephanie Olsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 22–26. I draw on the concept of the ‘emotional frontier’ in Rebecca Swartz, ‘Educating emotions in Natal and Western Australia, 1854–1865’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 18 (2017), n.p.

  49. 49.

    Stephanie Olsen, ‘Introduction’, in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History, ed. by Stephanie Olsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 10.

  50. 50.

    Much of the source material from the New Norcia mission is written in Spanish.

  51. 51.

    Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 22.

  52. 52.

    Lester and Dussart, Colonization.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 227.

  54. 54.

    See Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin’s Critique of Missions and Anti-Slavery’, History Workshop Journal, 64 (2007), 133–161, 136, and ‘Imperial Complicity: Indigenous Dispossession in British History and History Writing’, in Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, ed. by Catherine Hall, Nick Draper and Keith McClelland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 131–148. See also Catherine Hall, ‘The Slave-Owner and the Settler’, in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange, ed. by Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (New York and Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 29–49.

  55. 55.

    Jana Tschurenev, ‘Diffusing Useful Knowledge: The Monitorial System of Education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–1840’, Paedagogica Historica, 44 (2008), 245–264, 252.

  56. 56.

    Tim Allender, Ruling through Education: The Politics of Schooling in the Colonial Punjab (Delhi: New Dawn Press, 2006), 2; Lyn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (eds.), The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843 (Surrey: Curzon, 1999), 7.

  57. 57.

    Tim Allender, ‘Learning Abroad: The Colonial Educational Experiment in India, 1813–1919’, Paedagogica Historica, 45 (2009), 727–741, 728.

  58. 58.

    ‘Minute recorded in the General Department by Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member of the governor-general’s council, dated 2 February 1835’, in The Great Indian Education Debate: Documents Relating to the Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy, 1781–1843, ed. by Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir (Surrey: Curzon, 1999), 161–173.

  59. 59.

    Helen Ludlow, ‘Examining the Government Teacher: State Schooling and Scandal in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cape Village’, South African Historical Journal, 62 (2010), 534–560, 534.

  60. 60.

    Helen Ludlow, ‘The Government Teacher Who Resolved to Do What He Could Himself’, South African Review of Education, 19 (2013), 25–47, 34; Helen Ludlow, ‘Shaping Colonial Subjects through Government Education: Policy, Implementation and Reception at the Cape of Good Hope, 1839–1862’ in Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective, ed. by Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 81–109.

  61. 61.

    Sometimes also spelled Nyungar, Nyoongar, Nyoongah, Nyungah or Noonga.

  62. 62.

    On first encounters between the Aboriginal population and Europeans, see Tiffany Shellam, Shaking Hands on the Fringe: Negotiating the Aboriginal World at King George’s Sound (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2009).

  63. 63.

    Francis Crowley, Australia’s Western Third: A History of Western Australia from the First Settlements to Modern Times (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1960), vii.

  64. 64.

    Ann Hunter, A Different Kind of ‘Subject’: Colonial Law in Aboriginal-European Relations in Western Australia 1829–61 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2012), xvi.

  65. 65.

    Neville Green, ‘Aborigines and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century’, in A New History of Western Australia, ed. by Charles Tom Stannage (Redlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1981), 72–123, 95; Peter Biskup, ‘The Royal Commission that Never Was: A Chapter in Government-Missions Relations in Western Australia’, University Studies in WA History, 5 (1967), 89–113, 97.

  66. 66.

    Penelope Hetherington, Settlers, Servants & Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-Century Western Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2002), 101; Penelope Hetherington, ‘Aboriginal Children as a Potential Labour Force in Swan River Colony, 1829–1850’, Journal of Australian Studies, 16 (1992), 41–55, 47.

  67. 67.

    Ann Curthoys and Jeremy Martens, ‘Serious Collisions: Settlers, Indigenous People, and Imperial Policy in Western Australia and Natal’, Journal of Australian Colonial History, 15 (2013), 121–144, 130.

  68. 68.

    Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, ‘The Advent of Self-Government, 1840s–90’, in The Cambridge History of Australia: Volume 1: Indigenous and Colonial Australia (Victoria and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 149–169, 149.

  69. 69.

    Lester and Dussart, Colonization, 115.

  70. 70.

    Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press, 2002), 288.

  71. 71.

    Academics continue to debate the significance of the mfecane, particularly regarding the role of Shaka and the broader socio-political changes in the early nineteenth century. See Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cape Town: David Philip, 1998), 15–16; Julian Cobbing, ‘The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo’, The Journal of African History, 29 (1988), 487–519.

  72. 72.

    John Lambert, Betrayed Trust, Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Pinetown: University of Natal Press, 1995), 8, 10.

  73. 73.

    Keegan, Colonial South Africa, 207.

  74. 74.

    Keletso Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (London: James Currey Ltd., 1993), 2.

  75. 75.

    Hall, Civilising Subjects, 338.

  76. 76.

    Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 49.

  77. 77.

    Elbourne, Blood Ground, 378.

  78. 78.

    Keegan, Colonial South Africa, 283.

  79. 79.

    Damen Ward, ‘The Politics of Jurisdiction: British Law, Indigenous Peoples and Colonial Government in South Australia and New Zealand, c.1834–1860’ (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2003), 38.

  80. 80.

    Tiffany Shellam has written about this survey in “‘A Mystery to the Medical World”: Florence Nightingale, Rosendo Salvado and the Risk of Civilisation’, History Australia, 9 (2012), 109–134.

  81. 81.

    See Kaffir Express, 04.08.1873, 2.

  82. 82.

    Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Slavery, Settlers and Indigenous Dispossession: Britain’s Empire through the Lens of Liberia’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 13 (2012), n.p.

  83. 83.

    See Carey and Lydon, ‘Notes on Text’, for a discussion of the term ‘Indigenous’, in Indigenous Networks, n.p.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Rebecca Swartz

Authors
  1. Rebecca Swartz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Swartz, R. (2019). Introduction: Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies. In: Education and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_1

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95908-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95909-2

  • eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation