Education and Empire

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).

“Rebecca Swartz’s Education and Empire … is a welcome addition both to the Cambridge Imperial and Post- Colonial Studies series … . this is an important book for anyone working across such topics and spaces within histories of nineteenth century British world childhood or education. … this book makes a strong case for both education and childhood to be taken seriously as powerful and integrative categories of analysis … .” (Hugh Morrison, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Vol. 16 (3), 2023)“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)

• Chapter One: Introduction: Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British settler colonies.- Chapter Two: ‘The gift of education’: Emancipation and government education in the West Indies, Britain and beyond.- Chapter Three: Civilising spaces: Government, missionaries and land in education in Western Australia.- Chapter Four: ‘Forgotten and neglected’: Settlers, government and Africans’ education in Natal.- Chapter Five: A useful education: Humanitarianism, settler colonialism and industrial schools in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.- Chapter Six: Researching education: Florence Nightingale, British imperialism and colonial schools.- Chapter Seven: Education and obligation: Compulsory schooling, childhood and the family.- Chapter Eight: Conclusion: The ‘chief blessing of civilisation, the benefit of education’.