Transnational Connections and the Making of Modern Childhood in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries:A review article Temilola Alanamu Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt By Heidi Morrison. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Imperial Childhoods and Christian Mission: Education and emotions in South India and Denmark By Karen Vallgårda. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church evangelicalism and colonial childhood, 1860-1895 By S.E. Duff. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories Edited By Saheed Aderinto. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. The 1960 publication Centuries of Childhood by Philippe Ariès propelled childhood history into academia. Ariès’ controversial claim that childhood, as a separate and distinct period of the human lifecycle, did not exist in Europe until the eighteenth century historicised childhood, prompting scholars to recognise for the first time that childhood, like other categories of analysis, is historically, socially and culturally constructed. By so doing, Ariès’ work revealed that childhood history was a crucial arena of social enquiry.1 The study of this biological and social category—one which is liminal, universally experienced, and yet uniquely implicated in matters of sex, gender, race, ethnicity and socio-economic status—has made significant strides in the social sciences. However, advances in such fields as sociology, anthropology and psychology have been difficult to replicate in historical scholarship. Contemporary perspectives on childhood suggest that children’s views and voices are crucial to understanding childhood experiences.2 However, historical sources by children are rare. Children are seldom actors, and are thus often invisible in the archives. The records that do exist arise from adult contact, exchanges and interactions with children, and are often mediated by the adult experience, as documented in missionary collections, court records, government archives or adult reflections on childhood in autobiographies. This impediment has commonly resulted in the history of childhood being subsumed within such fields as state history, colonial and imperial history, women and gender history, or the history of migration, missionaries, education and reproduction.3 All of the four books reviewed here encountered this same obstacle. Notwithstanding their aspirations to analyse the histories of childhoods in India, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria, the paucity of children-authored texts compel the authors to evaluate the subject matter from the perspectives of adults and through the ideological burden children were made to bear by nationalists, religious organisations and imperialists. Lending weight to Peter Sterns’ contention that the history of childhood is “mainly centred on what adults were doing or saying about this or that aspect of children’s lives,”4 these books argue that notions of what constitutes a “good” or “proper” childhood are both contested and continually changing. While the family and community have been dominant historical influences, beginning in the nineteenth century, childhood was increasingly fashioned by the church, state and nationalist movements, all of which often co-opted childhood to advance their respective modernisation agendas. Debates concerning childhood were seldom solely about children; instead, they foregrounded anxieties concerning nation building, racial and social hierarchies, religious conversion and other social, economic and political contests. While childhood histories have blossomed in Western academia since the 1960s, aided by the postmodern emphasis on the complexities of social phenomena constituted by intersecting matrixes of race, gender, class and age, outside the West, childhood studies is still in its infancy, though authors such as Marie Rodet, Elodie Razy, Benjamin Lawrance and Abosede George have recently begun to bridge the gap.5 Given this comparative dearth of studies, the four Palgrave Macmillan books reviewed here constitute significant progress in non-Western, imperial, transnational histories and a crucial addition to the growing genre of global childhood history. In Childhood and Colonial Modernity in Egypt, Heidi Morrison explores changing ideologies of childhood in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egypt amidst nationalist agitation, semi-autonomy, independence and Egyptian modernity. The author argues that the new hybrid ideas concerning childcare that came to the fore in this period were rooted in both modern science and ancient adab literature, “a literary genre dating to the ninth century that focused on norms of conduct such as building children’s moral character.” Such...