In the long, brutal history of empire, education programs have often appeared as a bright spot. Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries, humanitarian groups, and imperial officials alike touted the “gift of education” as a means of uplifting colonized peoples and placing them on a path toward modernity (35). This argument has remained prominent among imperial apologists today, with scholars such as Niall Ferguson and Bruce Gilley celebrating education—and its corollary, the spread of the English language—as a “positive” legacy of colonialism. In Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880, an ambitious and meticulously researched book, Rebecca Swartz seeks to counter this imperial nostalgia by tracing the varied implementation of education policies across the settler empire. Through a series of illuminating case studies, she highlights the tendency of imperial educational efforts to become enmeshed and subsumed by settler interests. As a result, education policies played a decisive role in furthering structural racism throughout the settler empire, both by cementing the subordination of Indigenous peoples as unskilled laborers and by enabling the violent settler dispossession of Indigenous land.

While the majority of the study focuses on a comparison between Natal and Western Australia, Swartz begins in the Caribbean in the wake of emancipation. She traces the rise and fall of the Negro Education Grant from 1835 to 1845, the first large-scale governmental investment in the education of formerly enslaved children. At a time when the British state was slowly expanding its support for education “at home,” the size of the grant was remarkable; by the end of the 1830s, governmental spending on education in the West Indies was on par with the amount spent in the United Kingdom, even though the Caribbean population was one-twentieth the size of Britain's. This generosity reflected both the optimism of the post-emancipation moment, when it was widely believed that the formerly enslaved were available for civilizing, and an early drive to use education as a tool of governance, aimed at producing a loyal and docile workforce. Over the course of the grant, however, an initial emphasis on teaching Black children basic literacy and numeracy fell victim to local settler opposition. The planter lobby successfully argued that agricultural training would be more useful for transitioning formerly enslaved children into adult lives as laborers while also teaching them the moral value of hard work. By 1845, the imperial state had phased out its funding and shifted the responsibility for education to the local government. As Swartz shows in subsequent chapters, it was a pattern that would be replicated throughout the settler empire.

Swartz's method is to identify key trends in nineteenth century imperial pedagogy—such as the adoption of industrial training from the late 1830s onward, which focused on teaching children skills such as brick making, cleaning, and laundering, or the expansion of compulsory schooling in the years following the 1870 Education Act—and to follow the local debates that arose as these ideas were implemented in different settler territories. In Western Australia, for instance, where the aim was to incorporate Aboriginal peoples into settler society as servants and laborers, industrial training appeared as a salutary way of ending nomadism and reorienting Aboriginal communities toward more settled and subordinate lifestyles. In Natal, on the other hand, where Africans dramatically outnumbered the European population, industrial training fell from favor amid concerns that a skilled African workforce would threaten the economic dominance of settler artisans. The through line between these cases was a shared presumption that educational policies should always prioritize the economic needs of the settler community over the desires of Indigenous families. The purpose of education in the colonial context, in this respect, was to destroy children's preexisting cultural attachments. Although their methods differed, educational authorities throughout the empire viewed Indigenous culture as a deficiency that schooling could remedy.

The broad strokes of Education and Empire, from the shift from environmental to biological interpretations of race and to the growing power of settler authorities vis-à-vis the imperial government, will be familiar students of imperial history. Yet Swartz's tight focus on (mainly secular) forms of education and her deft movement from the bird's-eye level of imperial policy making to on-the-ground contestations, breaks new ground in revealing the centrality of education to the management of racial difference. Despite the very limited nature of educational offerings in these regions—in Natal at the turn of the twentieth century, only 1 percent of Africans had ever seen the inside of a classroom, while in Western Australia educational authorities operated just two schools for Aboriginal children, which together accommodated a few dozen students—education policy played an outsized role in upholding settler ideologies that defined Indigenous peoples as incapable of attaining equal standing with white Europeans.

In emphasizing policy debates more than practice, Swartz provides only hints of what the experience of schooling was like for Indigenous students. Swartz does pepper her study with intriguing comments from her sources that indicate that Indigenous communities were clear-eyed about the hollowness of settler arguments about education's ability to provide upward mobility for their children. One missionary writing from the Cape in 1859 reported that many African parents were “indifferent, and some hostile to education” due to “a fear that their children might embrace the gospel and break off from their heathen customs” (146). Even more strikingly, a student at a neighboring industrial education school called on African fathers to “come and fetch [their son], if he loves him, because there is nothing which he will learn” at the institution (148). The purpose of the scheme, this young man reiterated, was simply to provide African boys to be “hired out to white man by white man” (148). Swartz overstates the case when she claims that such comments illustrate that in schools, “colonisers were forced to recognise the agency, abilities, and aptitudes of colonised people” (236). Nevertheless, by illuminating the deep connections between imperial educational efforts, the expansion of settler power, and the creation of colonial racial hierarchies, Swartz's insightful study lays the groundwork for future investigations of how Indigenous peoples experienced and resisted the institutional racism of imperial schooling.