Education and Empire: Children, Race, and Humanitarianism in the British Settlers Colonies, 1833–1880 by Rebecca Swartz (review)

This book is urgent reading in 2021. With the discovery this year of the remains of more than a thousand Indigenous children buried at the sites of Canadian residential schools—a revelation which, as many First Nations leaders have noted, was well known to Indigenous people—the education policies debated, circulated, and implemented in the nineteenth-century British Empire remain remarkably important for understanding the present. As Rebecca Swartz demonstrates in this richly researched and carefully argued study, education was crucial to the projects of colonialism and settler colonialism: it was the tool by which formerly enslaved (in the case of the West Indies) and Indigenous (in the case of the settler colonies) people might be assimilated; at the same time, it was vital for the maintenance of the colony itself, helping to produce a workforce and entrench social and racial hierarchies. Although missionaries were usually responsible for providing this education, Swartz points out that historians' tendency to focus on mission schools as a route into understanding education in empire produces only a partial view of what was at stake in colonial education: "local officials, the imperial government and settlers were all interested" in the education of Indigenous children (102). This was never only a church or missionary project; it involved nearly every interest group in the colony.

Swartz develops this expansive approach to histories of education by moving beyond colonial and metropolitan boundaries, comparing debates over Indigenous education in Natal and Western Australia, while also taking into account policies and experiences in Britain, Ireland, the West Indies and New Zealand between the 1830s and the 1880s. As she notes, there was never any single, coherent education policy developed in London and disseminated across the nineteenth-century empire, but, rather, a circulation of ideas relating to humanitarianism, race, class and labour, especially, in the colonies, in Britain, and beyond. These ideas were generated by a highly mobile class of administrative officials—Sir George Grey looms large in this book—as well as by humanitarian campaigners, teachers in far-flung schools, missionaries and a relatively new group of education and welfare professionals, among others. These ideas changed over time, as humanitarian debates in the 1830s—occurring at the same time as the emancipation of enslaved people in the British Empire—began to ebb in the 1840s, in the face of settler anxieties over maintaining control over colonial political and economic systems, and the emergence of a proto-eugenic race science which posited that Indigenous people should only be educated sufficiently to render them unskilled workers.

The book consists of eight chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. Swartz opens in the West Indies in the 1830s, during what might be considered the high point of imperial humanitarianism. Focusing on the Negro Education Grant of 1835 to 1845, she points out one of the key tensions within debates over the provision of education to subjugated populations in colonies: the express purpose of the grant was "specifically… the 'moral and religious education' of the freed population" of the West Indies (18), but planters complained that this schooling could potentially produce a population of black West Indians unprepared or unwilling to work as manual labourers. Indeed, this logic harkened similar discussions in Britain and Ireland, where the education of white working-class children was described both as a humanitarian obligation and as a potentially dangerous tool for producing subjects with ideas above their station in life. Put another way, education was a tool both for entrenching and for collapsing difference. What, then, was the role of the state for the provision of education? And especially for those children who would be the (colonial) state's future labour force? While Swartz devotes a chapter to the question of introducing compulsory education in the 1870s and 1880s, in her third and fourth chapters she compares schemes to introduce forms of schooling for Indigenous children in Western Australia and...