Christopher Bischof – författare

Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers in nineteenth century Britain claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home, and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of media, from accounts of local happenings in their schools'' official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachersalso obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state. As highlyvisible agents of the state and beneficiaries of new state-funded opportunities, teachers also represented the largesse and the reach of the liberal state - but also the limits of both.

Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers in nineteenth century Britain claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home, and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of media, from accounts of local happenings in their schools'' official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachersalso obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state. As highlyvisible agents of the state and beneficiaries of new state-funded opportunities, teachers also represented the largesse and the reach of the liberal state - but also the limits of both.

Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers in nineteenth century Britain claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home, and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of media, from accounts of local happenings in their schools' official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachers also obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state. As highly visible agents of the state and beneficiaries of new state-funded opportunities, teachers also represented the largesse and the reach of the liberal state - but also the limits of both.

In this ambitious study of the transition from slavery to freedom, Christopher Bischof explores the idealism that characterized imperial responses to emancipation. Employing a new analytical framework, he considers how British reformers used schemes of liberal humanitarian reform to encourage outcomes that were humane for freedpeople but also secured the continued prosperity of sugar plantations. Through wide-ranging case studies of free-labor abolitionism, special magistrates, elementary education, freeholding, and Chinese indentured labor, the cheap, light-handed humanitarian interventions designed to produce this outcome come into view. As Bischof argues, this idealistic vision helped to legitimize British imperialism at a key moment in its expansion and ideological consolidation. However, this ultimately proved insufficient as freedpeople pursued their own vision of freedom. Combining social, cultural, and political history, Bischof sheds light on the story underpinning this endeavor and the new forms of racism and imperial authority that emerged in its wake.