Notice Board

The Department of History Colloquium Series would like to invite you to join us for the following presentation:

Children, Education and Settler Colonialism: Reflections from the Nineteenth Century British Empire
Guest Speaker: Dr. Rebecca Swartz (Postdoctoral Fellow, Universty of the Free State in South Africa)
Day/Date: Friday, February 26, 2021
Time: 3 p.m. (MST)
Location: via Zoom (https://uleth.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcud-mgrzojGda4R-Xzi64lbhmJyu0r50yC)

During the nineteenth century, what it meant to be a child changed in fundamental ways across Britain’s expanding empire. Childhoods came to be shaped by new concerns about the welfare of the child as separate to that of their parents. At the same time, humanitarian discourses shaped by the antislavery movement and the growth of evangelical Christianity positioned children as in need of ‘rescue’, civilisation, and protection from corrupting environments. In the British settler colonies, these issues took on new dimensions as they collided with widespread settler colonial expansion and violence. This paper focuses on the concept of ‘industrial education’, exploring how work and education increasingly shaped the lives of Indigenous children in different parts of the British Empire in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. While education might have been positioned as part of a ‘humanitarian’ government’s responsibility to colonised people, it was increasingly used to make and entrench difference between groups of people. The paper highlights how ideas about industrial education moved between metropole and colonies, and were used to justify increasingly racialised and exclusionary education practices.

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute of Child and Youth Studies (I-CYS).