In Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education, Raja Adal maps out an impressive field of scholarly inquiry from the perspective of global history. This engaging book is a comparative study of how music, drawing, and writing (or perhaps more appropriately labeled “handwriting,” as it refers to calligraphy and penmanship, not composition) – what the author calls “aesthetic education” – were taught in modern primary schools in Egypt and Japan. The study covers the critical years of modernization for both nations from the late nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century. Adal's comparative study stands out from other studies of the kind for his striking choice of the subject: a comparison between Egypt and Japan, the modern histories of which, by the author's own admission, did not intersect directly in significant ways. A typical approach in comparative history is to study the case of one nation modeling oneself after another, or the case of nations competing against one another, or the case of colonial adaptations of the imperial model. Adal's book takes on a different approach. A major and original contribution of this book is the demonstration that the history of primary education in Egypt and Japan was largely comparable, despite the lack of direct communication between the two nations on this matter, and regardless of the many historical conditions that separated the trajectories and shapes of modernity these societies developed and experienced.

Such commensurability, Adal's study convinces the reader, urges one to re-conceptualize what might have been discussed until now as “distinctive” characteristics of a particular nation's or region's modern education – such as the introduction of arabesque in the drawing curriculum of Egyptian primary schools in 1894 or the adoption of the soft sumi ink brush over pencils in the drawing curriculum of Japanese primary schools in 1888 – as patterns that were in fact widespread and recurrent in the global history of modern education. One of Adal's main arguments in the book is that the introduction of such “indigenous” artistic practices into modern school curricula represented “a larger concern with culture, identity, and community” (p. 3) that was especially prevalent in non-Western societies, whether Egypt or Japan, that were “interconnected” through their respective relations to “Western societies like Great Britain and France” (p. 12). In other words, the comparison between Egypt and Japan is instructive, not because of what their interactions with each other reveal, but because it allows one to identify the patterns of how non-Western nations reacted to, appropriated, modified, and distinguished themselves from what they perceived to be the dominant model of modernity in the West.

Adal observes that modern primary schools across the globe generally have more commonality with one another than they do with the systems of education that existed in their respective societies prior to the establishment of state-led modern education. Whether in Egypt, Japan, France, or the United States, the curriculum of primary education placed a central emphasis on “the three Rs – writing, reading, and sometimes arithmetic” (p. 74). The goal was to guide children, through the acquisition of these basic skills, into becoming useful and patriotic members of the society, whose individual endeavors would then collectively result in greater national prosperity. Adal argues, however, that the state assigned another major function to primary education, and that was to produce “the national subject” (p. 28) by enchanting children with a beauty associated with something ostensibly indigenous to the state. The originality of Adal's thesis is to foreground what have often been set aside as “marginal” curricula such as music and drawing to the center stage of state-led national education. The development of domestically shared tastes and common appreciation for the same songs or artworks can serve as a powerful “affective glue” (p. 16) that binds a community.

Aesthetic education was to transport children to the place of beauty that the government envisioned, like the flute played by the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a story of magical enchantment that the author invokes throughout the book as a guiding metaphor. Adal argues that aesthetic education was designed to enchant pupils by arousing their desire for the beautiful, and beauty was presented as national. Herein lies another original conception of the book. Adal asserts that aesthetic education was especially important in non-Western nations because aesthetics, along with spirituality, “was a rare terrain where non-Western societies could claim to be superior to the wealthier and more powerful Western states” (p. 4). Adal states that although non-Western nations “could not use wealth and power to draw the allegiance of their citizens, at least they could use beauty” (p. 28). It is this feeling of national aesthetic distinction and even national aesthetic superiority vis-à-vis what was imagined to be the normative beauty defined by the West that buttressed the psychological foundation for nationalism in many non-Western states, according to the author.

The reviewer would like to be persuaded by the main arguments of the book. The use of art and culture to produce an attractive image of a particular nation domestically and internationally is indeed prevalent. Adal makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of modern nationalism with the book's general thesis that states sought to instill in their citizens a positive awareness of one's national aesthetic heritage through primary school education. At the same time, the purposes, implementations, and outcomes of what Adal calls “aesthetic education” in modern primary schools constitute a complex subject that needs to be considered from multiple angles. The book almost exclusively focuses on “the discourses of leading educators who taught in teachers’ colleges, made policy in their respective Ministry of Education, or edited leading journals in the field,” and it “does not seek to capture the voices of children or of their teachers” (p. 31). Privileging certain types of discourses over others in one's study can be justified and is inevitable. One nevertheless wonders if a discussion of the declared priorities of education from the top, without any attempt to contextualize them in relation to the praxis of teaching and learning, is sufficient to produce a convincing historical study on the subject of education. What is the significance of education if not judged against praxis? How does Adal as a historian evaluate the outcomes of aesthetic educations in modern Egypt and Japan? Was the state largely successful in its goal of enchanting children with beauty?

Adal states that the “observations made here [in the book] are based on the content of the curricula” (p. 30), but the book does not provide sufficient details about the content of the curricula. My lack of knowledge about Egypt does not allow me to evaluate the appropriateness of Adal's characterizations about Egyptian primary education, but it was difficult not to notice a few critical omissions in the case of modern Japan. For instance, in the discussion of music, the book's complete silence on the genre of shōka is difficult to comprehend. The music curriculum in Japanese primary education until 1941 was in fact not called “music (ongaku)” but “shōka,” which were songs commissioned by the Ministry of Education expressly for the purpose of being taught in primary schools. Some of these songs, such as Furusato or Haru no ogawa, have continued to be taught in school even to this day. Singing has been the focus of music education in primary schools in most places. One hence expected to find in the book some discussion of representative songs, and the melodies and lyrics that were set to them, aside from the national anthem, about which Adal does offer an informative discussion. But the mandatory and non-spontaneous singing of the national anthem leaves no room for aesthetic preference, personal or communal. If one wants to evaluate how school-taught music in Japan attracted or tried to attract children, such a discussion must include shōka.

The Ministry of Education in Japan moreover correlated the curriculum of shōka with the curriculum on national language and especially with the curriculum of national morality (shūshin), the ideological pillar of education in imperial Japan. This fact leads one to question the general avoidance of the book to contextualize the content of aesthetic education in relation to the more privileged curricula of reading and writing. In chapter three, for instance, Adal states that there existed a “bifurcation” in wartime Japanese curricula between writing, which emphasized the pursuit of clarity, speed, and functionality, and calligraphy that emphasized aesthetic cultivation in “working to train the child's heart, soul, and spirit” (p. 94). But surely the content of the words that the pupils were instructed to brush on Japanese-style paper carefully corresponded to the values of patriotism that the other curricula also emphasized. One thus wonders if it is possible to consider the differences in emphasis among various curricula more from the perspective of integration rather than from that of bifurcation.

The idea of splitting and separation might have been useful, on the other hand, in the discussion of the drawing curriculum in Japan since different drawing textbooks were published for boys and girls after the pupils reached a certain age. The government regulation from 1891 stated that boys and girls should be taught separately after two years of primary education in principle (if not observed in many cases). It is surprising the book does not mention the fact that the drawing textbooks in Japan reflected this gender division. When one looks at the kinds of pictures featured in the textbooks, and even their styles and techniques in some cases – in other words, their aesthetics – cursory knowledge of local gender stereotypes makes it obvious which textbook was intended for which gender. Adal generally does not address the significance of gender division in modern primary education, but gender was no minor issue, and especially when it came to the discourse of aesthetics. It is well documented that the realm of beauty and aesthetics largely came to be regarded as more “feminine” and intimate, in contrast to the public and more “masculine” realm of industry, wealth, and power, in many modern societies. This was an asymmetrical dichotomy that was also projected onto the global imagination of the “beautiful” non-West versus the “powerful” West, a binarist worldview that indeed informs the conceptual framework of Adal's study. I agree with the book's overall account of how the drawing curriculum shifted from the utilitarian nineteenth-century emphasis on draftsmanship to the more scientific twentieth-century approach of child education and psychology in which arts received considerable attention as creative expressions that were essential to the wholesome development of a child. And yet, a child was, or could only exist as, either a “boy” or a “girl” at the time. Did gender distinction play a role in modern aesthetic education? The book's lack of engagement with the subject of gender thus strikes the reader as a missed opportunity.

These specific remarks lead me to conclude that it is perhaps difficult to produce a convincing discussion of aesthetic experiences, which Adal largely defines as attraction toward beauty, following the work of the contemporary philosopher Alexander Nehamas, without presenting the concrete forms and specific qualities that are identified or are promoted as capable of producing this effect. At the beginning of the book, it is stated that “[t]his book is about the uses of enchantment, attraction, and desire” (p. 2). The book indeed presents a substantial account of the history of the proposed uses of aesthetics by the state and prominent educators in Egypt and Japan, and without a doubt one learns a great deal from Adal's comparative discussion. But as for the history of how (or if) enchantment worked, what was presented and recognized as attractive, and the personal as well as group psychology of desire that was set in motion, the book leaves much to be desired.