Recent attention accorded the uneven history of schooling for indigenous children, while admirable, has been limited in its emphases. A focus on boarding schools has taken priority over that on day schools; students of ages roughly ten to sixteen over younger children; and single schools, or at the most single countries, over comparative frameworks. No more. Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner were independently researching the history of early education for indigenous children in, respectively, New Zealand, India, and Canada, when they heard of each other's similar interests. Collaboration around the common theme of the adaptation in colonial sites of infant schools on the British model between the 1820s and 1850s has as its welcome outcome Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods: Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies.

Infant schools originated in early nineteenth-century Britain as agents of moral reform. Intended for poor and working-class children between the ages of two and seven, these schools employed physical and sensory activities, music, an emphasis on order in all things, and a little learning alongside a raft of moral and religious precepts. The chapter introducing these schools in Britain is itself a welcome addition to the literature.

The book's central chapters interpret three different geographical settings in which versions of infant schools were established. While acknowledging local and national differences, these chapters emphasize continuities. Begun in what were already mission settlements, schools similar to those in Britain were intended to turn out little missionaries, hastening the conversion of others to the religious and moral ways being inculcated in them. Bluntly, as explained by the authors, “disciplining small bodies and minds in the ways of Christianity and the ‘high moral and educational standards’ of Britain were synonymous with expanding the British Empire” (xix).

The final chapter, which is very readable on its own, drives home ideological and practical commonalities among the three settings. The Protestant Christian conversion rhetoric so familiar from studies focusing on older indigenous children was no less present in infant schools; indeed, it may have been even more pervasive. In the view of colonial administrators and missionaries, “The moulding of children into new civilized casts was best done when they were very young (‘as soon as they [could] walk’) in light of the importance of ‘early impressions made in the infant minds’” (229). Furthermore, instruction should be conducted strictly in English, compelling students to “speak properly as we do in this country,” with the aim of “invoking a process of internal or self-colonization” (229). The concepts reviewed here are not new, but the authors show us that their application was even more aggressive and targeted than often supposed. The colonization of the mind began early in children's lives.

Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods perforce covers a lot of ground. Inevitably, some topics receive fuller coverage than others. The consequence of the generous direction in the footnotes to other relevant sources encourages us to prospect the latter, as well as the former, more fully by ourselves. In this sense, the book is outstanding as a guide to the topic, as well as a helpful treatment of the topic itself.