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The educational afterlife of Greater Britain, 1903–1914

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 48; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00309230.2012.671836

1477-674X

Philip Gardner,

Global Educational Policies and Reforms

Abstract Following its late nineteenth-century emergence as an important element within federalist thinking across the British Empire, the idea of Greater Britain lost much of its political force in the years following the Boer War. The concept however continued to retain considerable residual currency in other fields of Imperial debate, including those concerning policies and practices of education across the Empire. This paper explores aspects of such debate by examining the intellectual contexts, theoretical assertions and conceptual formulations deployed in relation to questions about education, leadership, Imperial unity and racial identity in the early twentieth century. These issues are illuminated by an analysis of proposals by the Imperial theorist E.B. Sargant for the educational “colonisation” of the Empire of white settlement by “daughter” schools transposed from the traditional public schools of the metropole and staffed by teachers conceived as “the regulars of the State”. Keywords: Greater BritainImperial IdentityEmpire of SettlementPublic SchoolsE.B. Sargant Notes 1Joyce Goodman, Gary McCulloch and William Richardson, “‘Empires overseas’ and ‘empires at home’: Postcolonial and transnational perspectives on social change in the history of education”, Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 695–706. See particularly Ruth Watts’ essay, “Education, empire and social change in nineteenth century England”, 773-86. For the most influential early formulation of the relation between metropolitan “core” and colonial “periphery”, see David Fieldhouse, “Can Humpty-Dumpty be put together again? Imperial history in the 1980s”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History XII, no. 2 (1984): 9–23. 2Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, “Introduction: Being at home with the Empire”, in C. Hall and S. Rose, eds. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 131; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3, 13, 21; Gary McCulloch “Empires and education: The British empire’, in R. Cowen, A.M. Kazamias, E. Unterhalter, eds. International Handbook of Comparative Education (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 169–179; Gary McCulloch, The Struggle for the History of Education (London: Routledge, 2011), 93–97; Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the inadequacy and the indispensability of the nation”, in Antoinette Burton, ed. After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–23; Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 415–417; Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1–5. 3Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4. In discussing the analytical utility of the notion of “Greater Britain”, David Armitage has welcomed that “The New British History and Atlantic History are each, in their own ways, transnational historiographies…. However, if they remain in isolation from one another, they risk perpetuating merely ampler species of parochialism….” David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A useful category of historical analysis?” American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (1984): 427–445, 444. For theoretical approaches to transnationalism, see Ludger Pries, ed. Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-link of organisations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 4Lake and Reynolds, 10. 5Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 1. 6Fieldhouse “divides(s) all the one-time dependencies into two broad groups … white settler communities and non-settler societies”, noting that “Seeley made precisely the same differentiation”, 12. 7Catherine Hall, “Culture and Identity in Imperial Britain”, in Sarah Stockwell, ed. The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 199–217, 204. 8Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 8; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994). Also see Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 14–15. 9Fieldhouse, 12–13. 10“Scholarly constructions of empire have had little or nothing to say about this British world over the last 50 years and we are only now beginning to turn our attention to its character and dynamics”. Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, “Mapping the British world”, in C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003),1–15, 11. 11Fieldhouse, 13. 12Raewyn Connell, Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 9. 13Connell, 20–21. 14Armitage, 19. 15Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1. 16Lake and Reynolds, 66–67. 17Bell, 12. Also see James G. Greenlee, Education and Imperial Unity 1901–26 (New York: Garland, 1987), xii. 18“In the first rush of a new enthusiasm, the champions of unity turned to formal political schemes for ‘imperial federation’”, Greenlee, 3. Duncan Bell justly identifies Seeley’s book as “the most influential account of colonial unity in the late Victorian age”, 8. For Seeley, “The state … was constituted as a community ethnically, religiously and by commonality of interest…. On these grounds, Greater Britain had as much of a claim to be called a state as ‘England’ itself…”, Armitage, 19. Also see Lake and Reynolds, 90. Armitage describes late Victorian debates on Greater Britain as enjoying a “brief vogue”, 17. Also see Fieldhouse, 9. For a helpful chronological sketch of the rise and fall of the concept of Greater Britain, see Bell, 3. 19Greenlee, 9. 20Bell, 23. Also see Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 27. 21Simon J. Potter, “Richard Jebb, John S. Ewart and the Round Table, 1898–1926”, English Historical Review CXXII (2007): 105–132. 22Potter, 107. Also see Bell, 264. 23John Russell, The Schools of Greater Britain (London: William Collins, 1887); G. Gordon Brown and G. Noel Brown, The Settlers’ Guide: Greater Britain in 1914; A Summary of the Opportunities Offered by the British Colonies to Settlers of All Classes (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1914). 24Bell, 266, also 15. 25Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 1. 26Bell warns of the dangers of attending disproportionately to canonical “great” figures in political thought because “‘great’ figures are often unrepresentative (or are only partly so) of the intellectual currents of any given historical epoch…. This is also the case with the political theory of Greater Britain. It is the ‘murky shallows,’ not only of policy debate but also of general political argument, that we must scour in order to enrich understanding of the way in which the empire was imagined…”, Bell, 22. Sargant is referenced by Gorman, but not seen as sufficiently important to be listed in an extensive appendix, “Biographical information on persons referred to in the text”, see Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 21. Fabian Ware, a contemporary acquaintance and erstwhile colleague of Sargant, bracketed him with Michael Sadler as “two of the foremost educationists in the country”, further noting of Sargant that: “As anyone knows who has been associated with him he ‘thinks Imperially’.” Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 110–111. Ware was here consciously invoking Chamberlain’s injunction: “Learn to think Imperially”, The Times, 12 February 1904, 7. The West Australian described Sargant as “one of the most distinguished educational thinkers in the Empire”, 1 July 1912, 5. 27Sargant in A.J. Herbertson and O.J.R. Howarth, eds. The Oxford Survey of the British Empire, vol. VI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914), 230–265, 265. 28Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 5. Gorman also uses the associated terms, “centralizing social imperialist” and “cosmopolitan associationist”, 210. 29Eliza Riedi, “Teaching Empire: British and Dominions Women Teachers in the South African War Concentration Camps”, English Historical Review CXX (2005): 1316–47, 1320. 30 British Citizenship: A Discussion Initiated by E.B. Sargant (London: Longmans, Green, 1912). Also E.B. Sargant, Esq., “Naturalisation in the British Dominions”, Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, New Series XIV, no. 2 (1914): 327–336. 31Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 18. 32Ibid. As Lake and Reynolds argue, the greatest pressure upon the notion of Imperial subjecthood – and leading ultimately to “the British betrayal of the idea of imperial citizenship” – came from the white settler colonies: “the status of British subject … was fast being eclipsed in the self-governing colonies by the ascendant dichotomy of white and non-white”, Lake and Reynolds, 132. 33Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 21. 34Ibid, 18, 205. Also see Bridge and Fedorowich, 9. 35Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 17; italics in original. 36Here the work of Quentin Skinner is particularly instructive; see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. The task of the historian, “is not of course to enter into the thought-processes of long-dead thinkers; it is simply to use the ordinary techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to appreciate their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things their way.” 37See Douglas A. Lorimer, “Race, science and culture: historical continuities and discontinuities, 1850–1914”, in S. West, ed. The Victorians and Race (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 12–33, 13. Also see Said’s distinction between the exercise of “power political” and “power intellectual”; Said, Orientalism, 12. 38Daniel Gorman, “Lionel Curtis, imperial citizenship, and the quest for unity”, The Historian 66, no. 1 (2004): 67–96, 82. In his discussion of the imperial thinking of Sargant’s contemporary, Lionel Curtis, Gorman claims that, “Curtis specifically used the notion of ‘race’ in his interpretation of imperial citizenship in much the manner the later British socialist literary critic Raymond Williams used the term ‘culture’.” Also see Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 9. 39Lorimer, 14. 40Stephen Heathorn, For Home, Country, and Race: Constructing Gender, Class, and Englishness in the Elementary School, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 86. 41Bell, 113. 42Connell, 10. Also see Stephen Howe, “Empire and ideology”, in Stockwell, 166. 43 The Times, 23 April 1903, 9. 44Paul R. Deslandes, “‘The foreign element’: Newcomers and the rhetoric of race, nation and empire in ‘Oxbridge’ undergraduate culture, 1850–1920”, Journal of British Studies 37, no. 1 (1998): 54–90, 55. Also see Heathorn, 95: “Whereas the empire in general was almost universally referred to as being British … those personal and communal traits deemed part of the national and imperial heritage, especially the virility, heroism, justice, and glory that were represented as the very foundation of nation and empire, tended to be phrased as attributes of Englishness.” 45Said, Orientalism, 8. 46Connell, 10. Also see the Canadian imperialist W. Wilfred Campbell’s 1904 assertion, quoted in Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 23: “Present day imperialism is … a vital force, a sort of necessary phase of human progressiveness.” 47Bridge and Fedorowich, 2. 48Bridge and Fedorowich, 3. They continue: “Nevertheless, this world was not exclusively white. People from many ethnic backgrounds (both white and non-white) eagerly adopted British identity and were accepted to varying degrees as part of the British world, within the white Dominions, elsewhere in the empire, and to some extent even outside it.” 49Bell, 114. See also Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 206: “That their concept of imperial citizenship came close to an ideal of ‘whiteness’ spoke to their belief that the most important imperial bonds were those between the broader ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world. The dependent Empire, with the partial exception of India, was largely absent from their considerations, a racism of exclusion which arose from a normative sense of British superiority, and the belief that non-white societies did not adhere to the racialist ideal of cultural homogeneity prevalent throughout the ‘British world’.” Also see Catherine Hall, “On gender and empire: Reflections on the nineteenth century”, in Philippa Levine, ed. Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46–76, 48–50. 50Heathorn, 21; italics in original. 51Philippa Levine, “What’s British about gender and empire? The problem of exceptionalism”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 273–282, 273. 52Levine, 273. Also 282: “The British framed themselves through colonialism in ways that brought to the fore an exceptionalist creed founded both on the precepts of Christianity and on stadial and subsequently evolutionary theory, both of a decidedly racial cast, and centrally dependent on gendered assumptions for its force and potency.” 53Levine, 273. 54Bell, 114. 55Levine, 278. 56Howe, 166. Also Bell, 113–114; Heathorn, 89–90. 57The Imperial networks within which Sargant operated were predominantly male ones, and the focus of his thinking in relation to educational colonization was always chiefly concerned with the the education of boys for Imperial leadership, with the development of that which Levine describes as “the proper masculinity displayed by colonizing men.” Levine, 273. For the role of women in early twentieth-century British Imperial movements, see Eliza Riedi, “Women, gender and the promotion of empire: The Victoria league, 1901–1914”, The Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 569–599. Also Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin, eds. Gender, Colonialism and Education (London: Woburn Press, 2002); Julia Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Leicester University Press, 2000); Iveta Jusová, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005). 58Lake and Reynolds, 11. 59E.B. Sargant “British Citizenship”, United Empire III, no. 5 (1912): 366–376, 375. In the same year, the colonial administrator Sir Charles Lucas noted that, “(t)he greatest difficulty in the British Empire is probably the colour question”, with indigenous peoples – “the coloured natives of the soil” – excluded from the franchise in the countries of their birth, and non-white immigrants precluded from entry “whether they are British subjects or whether they are not”. C.P. Lucas, Greater Rome and Greater Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 97–99. Also see Lake and Reynolds, 232–233. Also see Greenlee, 96–99. 60Bell, 117. 61Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 149-50. 64Sargant, in Herbertson and Howarth, 232–233. 62Sargant, in Herbertson and Howarth, 234. Catherine Hall’s invocation of one of Raymond Williams’ most celebrated categories is helpful in understanding the nature of Sargant’s phrase: “It is the imperial ‘structure of feeling,’ the ways in which ideas about empire were lived and felt, the discursive practices and regimes of representation that distinguished between colonizers and colonized”, in Stockwell, 206. 63Bridge and Fedorowich, 6. 67Sargant, in Herbertson and Howarth, Oxford Survey. Also see Lake and Reynolds, 78. 65Bell, 113. Also see Lake and Reynolds, 89–90. 66Monogenetic approaches comprise those “in which all races were in principle created equal, but had over time progressed at significantly different rates due to the contrivance of extrinsic factors”, Bell, 113. Good examples of Sargant’s use of such an approach can be found in his writing as Education Adviser to the High Commissioner for South Africa, particularly in his Report on Native Education in South Africa; Part III – Education in the Protectorates (London: HMSO, 1908). Having made the standard imperialist assumption that European civilization stood at the zenith of contemporary world progress, Sargant further assumed that African civilization could successfully emulate the European model, though “(i)nstead of endeavouring to take the shortest path to the European track … it is better to edge over by degrees … adopting what is known in mathematics as the ‘curve of pursuit’”, 31–32. This recommendation rested on the ground that “(i)t would be illogical to maintain that there is any fundamental distinction of brain between the South African native and the European, and unjust to use that hypothesis in order to deny to the former the extension, step by step, of … opportunities for European culture”, 57. Also see Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 266. 68 The Times, 23 April 1903, 9. 69Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 4. Also see Greenlee (1987); P.J. Rich, Chains of Empire: English Public Schools, Masonic Cabalism, Historical Causality, and Imperial Clubdom (London: Regency Press, 1991), 148–150; Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 108. 70Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 114. 71J.A. Mangan, Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 136. Also see J.A. Mangan, ed. Benefits bestowed? Education and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); J.A. Mangan, “Eton in India: The imperial diffusion of a Victorian educational ethic”, History of Education 7, no. 2 (1978): 105–118. For imperialist agendas in relation to the elementary school, see particularly Heathorn (2000). 72Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (London: Macmillan, 1986), 76; Deslandes (1998). 73Peter J. Cain, “Empire and the languages of character and virtue in later Victorian and Edwardian Britain”, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 2 (2007): 249–273; Stefan Collini, “The idea of ‘character’ in Victorian political thought”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 35 (1985): 29–50 ; Collini, Chapter 3. 74P.J. Cain, “Character and imperialism: The British financial administration of Egypt, 1878–1914”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34, no. 2 (2006): 177–200. 75 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 106. Also see Greenlee, 19. 76Greenlee, xiii. 77Peter Gordon and John White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers: The Influence of Idealism on British Educational Thought and Practice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), xii, 21–24. Italics in original. 78Sargant, in Herbertson and Howarth, 245. 79R.B. Haldane, “Education and imperial policy”, in C.S. Goldman, ed. The Empire and the Century: A Series of Essays on Imperial Problems and Possibilities (London: John Murray, 1905), 160–165. Sargant also produced an essay for this collection, “Education in South Africa”, in Goldman, 575–586. For Haldane on education, see Andrew Vincent, “German philosophy and British public policy: Richard Burdon Haldane in theory and practice”, Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 1 (2007): 157–179. 80Haldane, in Goldman, 160. 81Ibid. 82Ibid, 162. 83Ibid. 84Greenlee, 15. See also The Times, 12 February 1904, 7: The League’s “object is defined as ‘to inspire personal and active interest in the Empire as a whole, and to promote educational and friendly inter-communication between its different parts’.” 85Greenlee, xviii. 86Ibid, 24–25, 112–116. 87J.L. Hughes, Chief Inspector of Schools for Toronto, speaking at the 1907 Federal Conference on Education, cited in Greenlee, 46. 88Greenlee, 46. 89Ibid, 109. 95Ibid. 90Jebb, quoted in Potter, 111. See also Bell, 118; Greenlee, 88–89. Also J.D.B. Miller, Richard Jebb and the Problem of Empire (London: Athlone Press, 1956). 91Potter, 108–109, 114. 92This closeness may be because both men possessed very similar cultural experiences of the settler colonies, garnered during what might be seen as independently undertaken informal fact-finding exercises in relation to the question of imperial unity; see Richard Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1905). Independent Imperial tours of this kind – which is to say, with an explicit intellectual agenda or specific policy concern – were quite commonly undertaken, with Dilke himself doing so in 1866–1867. See Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 36. Also Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 207. 93Sir Richard C. Jebb, “University education and national life”, Popular Science November (1905): 647–659. Also see The Times, 17 August, 5. 94Jebb, 647. 96 The Times, 23 April 1903, 4. 97 The Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 17 January 1913, 2. 98Deslandes, 55. Also Said, Orientalism, 7. 99 The Times, 23 April 1903, 4. 100 The Times, 12 February 1904, 4. 101 The Times, 23 April 1903, 9. 102Hubert Reade, “Education in South Africa”, The Westminster Review 162, no. 4 (1904): 401–414. 103Ibid. 104Reade, 403. 105 The Times, 29 March 1907, 6. For an account of the education conference of 1907 and subsequent imperial education gatherings, see Greenlee, 35–52. Also see Richard Jebb, The Imperial Conference: A History and Study (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), vol. 2, 66: “The Education Conference assembled after the Imperial Conference was over. It was unofficial, having been convened through the commendable enterprise of the League of the Empire, but it was attended by representatives of official education departments in many parts of the Empire, including Britain. It was also a great success; and the feeling arose that the institution should be perpetuated.” Also, “The Conferences and the Empire”, The Round Table: A Quarterly Review of the Politics of the British Empire 1, no. 4 (MCMXI): 371–425. Also, Maxine Stephenson, “Learning about empire and the imperial education conferences in the early twentieth century: Creating cohesion or demonstrating difference?”, History of Education Review 39, no. 2 (2010): 24–35. 106 The Times, 29 March 1907, 6. 107 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 93–118. 108Greenlee, 43. 109 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 97. 110Ibid, 98. Also see Lake and Reynolds, 11. 111 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 97. 112Ibid, 100. For Sargant’s extension of this proposal to university education, see The West Australian, 1 July 1912, 5. 113 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 98–99. 114The concession that it was conceivable that in time the “associated [colonial] school … will equal or even outrival the English public school with which it is connected” demonstrates the degree of Sargant’s difficulty in grasping the nature of Dominion autonomy. See Sargant, in Herbertson and Howarth, 251. 115See Heathorn, Chapter 3. 116 The Evening Post (Wellington, New Zealand), 17 January 1913, 2. 117 The Advertiser, 26 March 1907, 6. 118 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 99. 119Ibid, 98. 120Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 205. Lord Milner – who, as High Commissioner for Southern Africa, had appointed Sargant as Director of Education for the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony during the Boer War – also ranks high on such a list. Milner “believed that the peoples of the United Kingdom and the self-governing dominions were ‘one body politic,’ sharing a single nationality and entitled to a common citizenship. This primal identity stemmed from the ‘racial bond’ between Britons in the metropole and the colonies….” See Ian Christopher Fletcher, “Double meanings: Nation and empire in the Edwardian era”, in Antoinette Burton, ed. After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 246–259, 247. 121Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 212. 122Gorman, “Lionel Curtis”, 74. Also Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 209: “What set Jebb apart … was his attention to colonial nationalism.” 123Jebb, speaking in 1913, quoted in Gorman, “Lionel Curtis”, 90. 124Connell, 213. 125Bridge and Fedorowich, 5. 126Ibid. Also see Connell, xii: “colonised and peripheral societies produce social thought about the modern world which has as much intellectual power as metropolitan social thought, and more political relevance”. Here there is some connection with John Pocock’s influential 1974 “Plea for a new subject”, which offered “a vision of Greater Britain in light of the contraction of ‘England” rather than its expansion, and from the vantage point of a former imperial province rather than from that of the metropole.” Armitage, 20–21. 127Lake and Reynolds, 39. Also see Joost Coté, “Education and the colonial construction of whiteness”, ACRAWSA e-journal 5, no. 1 (2009): 1–14; Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 28. 128 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute XXXVIII (1906–1907), 98. 129Connell, xi. 130Bridge and Fedorowich, 5. 131Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, 210–211.