Empires and Education: The British Empire

Abstract

This chapter analyses the interactions involved in the relationship between Empires and education by exploring the case of the British Empire. Over the past few years, increasing attention has been given to the history of the British Empire and the nature of its contribution and legacy in the modern world (Louis, 1999; Ferguson, 2003; Brendon, 2007). Much of this general literature, for example, the recent fi ve-volume Oxford History of the British Empire (Louis, 1999), has included little material specifi cally on education. At the same time, a substantial literature has also developed on the ways in which the ideas and practices of education in Britain infl uenced the character of education in different parts of the British Empire. This literature has generated interesting debates around the nature of cultural imperialism, the relationship between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’ (e.g. McCulloch & Lowe, 2003), the extent to which imperial infl uences were benefi cial and the ways in which these infl uences were played out in different nations and areas. Latterly, there has been increasing interest in the kinds of resistance that developed on the part of colonised and indigenous groups. The case of New Zealand (Maori name Aotearoa), 12,000 miles away from Britain, will be examined in particular detail to demonstrate the extent and the characteristics of the imperial writ. Yet the educational relationships between Britain and her Empire did not run only in one direction. As Peter Burke has pointed out, there are evident dangers in a simple model of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ in which knowledge is diffused from Europe to other parts of the globe, in particular for the tendency of such an approach to take suffi cient account of ‘fl ows of knowledge from periphery to centre as well as in the opposite direction’ (Burke, 2000: 57). Over the last decade, there have developed the beginnings of historical interest in the reverse process, that is, how ideas and practices of education in different parts of the British Empire exerted infl uence in the imperial homeland. This new literature, stimulated in part by Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994), has potential for a great deal of further development to investigate the dynamics of education in the British Empire which were rarely stable and often unpredictable in their nature and effects.