https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3679-4511
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ABSTRACT
Children in settler colonial settings engaged with institutions in diverse ways. They were sometimes coerced, benignly encouraged or lured into these engagements and sometimes they actively engaged and shaped the nature of these institutions over their childhood and subsequent adult years. This lead article provides the historiographical, methodical and conceptual framework for the special issue of Settler Colonial Studies on children, institutions and settler colonial contexts. It provides the basis for the discussion of the following articles which examine children’s interactions with and experiences of institutions in settler colonial contexts in Australia, Palestine, the Philippines, Poland, and Southern Rhodesia that were affected by American, British, German, and Japanese imperialism. Studies of colonialism, and settler colonialism in particular, have tended to overlook the role and position of children in these contexts as objects and agent of change. Rather, focus has been predominantly placed upon the actions and agency of adults of various cultural groups, ones who have left larger traces in the colonial archives. In this article, we provide an overview of some of the broad concepts that frame the special issue being: childhood and race; Institutions and motives; and settler colonialism and imperial contexts.
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Notes
1 Karel Schoeman, ed., The Recollections of Elizabeth Rolland (1803–1901) (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, u, 1987), 50.
2 Karel Schoeman, ‘Elizabeth Rolland (1803–1901), Pionier van Kindertuinonderwys in Suid-Afrika’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library 40, no. 1(1985/86): 32–39, 37.
3 Schoeman, ed., The Recollections of Elizabeth Rolland, 73.
4 Extract from James Backhouse, Narrative of a Visit to South Africa, printed in Theal, Basutoland records 1, 20.
5 Coplan, ‘Erasing History.: The Destruction of the Beersheba and Platberg African Christian Communities in the Eastern Orange Free State, 1858–1983’, South African Historical Journal, 61, no. 3 (2009): 505–20, 510.
6 Mary Howland, The infant school manual, or, Teacher’s assistant, containing a view of the system of infant schools; also a variety of useful lessons for the use of teachers, 5 edition (Boston: Richardson, Lord and Holbrook, 1832), p. 9.
7 Sean Carleton, Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022), 5.
8 Jana Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Paul Sedra, ‘Exposure to the eyes of God: monitorial schools and Evangelicals in early nineteenth-century England’, Paedagogica Historica 47, no. 3 (2010): 265–69; Felicity Jensz, Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830–1910, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 42–44. See also the recent special issue of History of Education edited by Fiona Paisley and Julie McLeod on education and settler colonialism in Australasia and the Pacific. Julie McLeod and Fiona Paisley, ‘Ambivalent histories: education, “race”, and the modernisation of settler/colonial governance in Australasia and the Pacific, 1900s–1960s’, History of Education 52, no.5, (2023): 687–96.
9 On the spread of the infant school system in the British Empire, see: Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Pochner, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods. Nineteenth-Century Missionary Infant Schools in Three British Colonies, Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present (Surrey: Ashgate, 2014).
10 August Gottlieb Spangenberg, Instructions for Missionaries of the Church of the Unitas Fratrum, or United Brethren, trans. From the German, Second (Revised and Enlarged) (London: Brethren’s Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel among the Heathens, 1840), 47.
11 See, for example: Jana Tschurenev, ‘Diffusing useful knowledge: the monitorial system of education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–1840,’ Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 3 (2008): 245–64 For an example from settler colonies in Australia see: Amanda Barry, ‘“Equal to Children of European Origin”: Educability and the Civilising Mission in Early Colonial Australia’, History Australia 5, no. 2 (2008): 41.1–41.16.
12 Appendix 1 of the 12th Annual Report of the Infant School Society (Cape Town: Richert, Pike and Co, 1843), 36.
13 Jane Philip report on schools in Cape Town, 5 October 1837, LMS papers, 15/3/C. Emphasis in original.
14 Zoe Laidlaw, Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 299.
15 Geertje Mak, Marit Monteiro, and Elisabeth Wesseling, ‘Child Separation: (Post)Colonial Policies and Practices in the Netherlands and Belgium’, BMGN- Low Countries Historical Review 135, no. 3–4 (2020): 4–28. See also Swartz, Education and Empire; Carleton, Lessons in Legitimacy; Laura Ishiguro, ‘ “Growing up and grown up … in our future city”: Children and the Aspirational Politics of Settler Futurity in Colonial British Columbia,’ BC Studies 190 (Summer 2016): 15–37; Kristine Alexander, ‘Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History’, History Compass 14, no. 9 (September 2016): 397–406.
16 For a recent discussion of the utility of chronological age as a category of historical analysis, see Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, ‘Introduction’, The American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (2020): 371–84.
17 Jane Carey and Ben Silverstein, ‘Thinking with and beyond Settler Colonial Studies: New Histories after the Postcolonial’, Postcolonial Studies 23, no. 1 (2020): 1–20.
18 Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire. Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
19 Swain and Hillel, Child, Nation, Race, and Empire.
20 David Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 4.
21 For a discussion see: Laura Tisdall, ‘State of the Field: The Modern History of Childhood’. History, 107 (2022): 949–64.
22 Tisdall, ‘State of the Field’, 950.
23 Toby Rollo, ‘Feral children: Settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child’, Settler Colonial Studies 8 (2018), 60–79, 61.
24 For an overview of these historical developments and how they relate to British India see: Ishita Pande, Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age. Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
25 Tisdall, ‘State of the Field’, 953; Sarah Emily Duff, Childhood and Youth in African History (Cham: Palgrave, 2022).
26 Tisdall, ‘State of the Field’, 955.
27 Duff, Childhood and Youth, Ch. 2.
28 Paula Fass, ‘Is There a Story in the History of Childhood?’, in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula Fass (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–14.
29 Michael Bourdillon, Sylvia Meichsner and Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, ‘Reflections on Binary Thinking’ in Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, Michael Bourdillon, Sylvia Meichsner, eds., Global Childhoods Beyond the North-South Divide (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), 255–63, here 255.
30 See, for example: James Schmidt, ‘Children and the State’, in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, ed. Paula Fass (London: Routledge, 2021), 174–90.
31 Schmidt, ‘Children and the State’, 174.
32 Schmidt, ‘Children and the State’, 174.
33 See: H. Scholefield, A short memoir of William Wimmera: an Australian boy who sailed from Melbourne, April 1 1851, died at Reading, March 10 1852 (Cambridge, 1853), available on-line https://thewimmerastory.com/william-wimmera/a-short-memoir/ For how his story was constructed as the beginnings of mission work amongst the Wotjobaluk see: Felicity Jensz, Moravian Missionaries in the Colony of Victoria, Australia, 1848–1904 (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
34 R.E. Barwick and Diane E. Barwick, ‘A Memorial for Thomas Bungeleen, 1847–1865’, Aboriginal History, 8, no. 1 (1984): 9–12. Open-access: https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p71671/pdf/article012.pdfwill
35 Barwick and Barwick, ‘A Memorial for Thomas Bungeleen’.
36 First Report of the Central Board appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1861), 8.
37 First Report, 8.
38 See, for example: Julia E. Carr, The Captive White Woman of Gippsland: in pursuit of the legend (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).
39 First Report, 8.
40 Barwick and Barwick, ‘A Memorial for Thomas Bungeleen’, 9.
41 First Report, 8
42 Fifth Report of the Central Board appointed to Watch over the Interests of the Aborigines in the Colony of Victoria (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1866), 18.
43 Rollo, ‘Feral Children’, 63.
44 See, for example: Corinne T. Field, Tammy-Charelle Owens, Marcia Chatelain, Lakisha Simmons, Abosede George, Rhian Keyse, ‘The History of Black Girlhood: Recent Innovations and Future Directions,’ The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 9 no. 3 (2016): 383–401; Kirsten Kamphuis, ‘“Girls” Bodies as a Site of Reform: The Roman Catholic Boarding Schools in Flores, Colonial Indonesia, c.1880s–1940s’, in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, eds. Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 263–85.
45 Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 16.
46 May, et al, Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods; Swartz, Education and Empire; Felicity Jensz, Missionaries and Modernity: Education in the British Empire, 1830–1910, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).
47 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou De l’éducation (Paris, 1762).
48 Ranjit Ruberu, ‘Missionary Education in Ceylon’, in Educational Policy and the Mission Schools. Case Studies from the British Empire Reprint, ed. Brian Holmes (London et al: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2007), pp. 73–114.
49 Saheed Aderinto, ‘Introduction’, in Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories (Cham: Palgrave, 2015), 1–18, 4.
50 Schmidt, ‘Children and the State’, 174.
51 Stephen James Minton, ed., Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples. From Genocide via Education to the Possibilities for Processes of Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation, and Reclamation (London: Routledge, 2019).
52 Marijke du Toit, ‘“Mothers” Pensions and the “Civilised” Black Poor: The Racialised Provision of Child Maintenance Grants in South Africa, 1921–1940’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 6 (2018), 973–89, 977.
53 Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz, eds., Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
54 For the broader example of colonial schools see: Jensz, Missionaries and Modernity.
55 Siân Polley and Jonathan Taylor, eds., Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain (London: London University Press, 2021), see particularly the introduction.
56 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York, Doubleday, 1961).
57 See Lewis A. Coser, Greedy Institutions. Patterns of Undivided Commitment (New York: The Free Press, 1974) and Philinie Erfurt, ‘Organisation Matters (1). Führung als Hyperinklusion‘, Geschenkt wird einer nichts – oder doch? Festschrift für Gertraude Krell, Programmatisches, Personalpolitik, Gender, Diversity, diskursive Anknüpfungen ed. Renate Ortlieb and Gertraude Krell (München: Hampp, 2012): 91–6.
58 See: Schmidt, ‘Children and the State’, 174–75. The ‘static’ nature of adulthood is critically disputed.
59 Penelope Edmonds and Jane Carey ‘A New Beginning for Settler Colonial Studies’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1(2013): 2–5.
60 Janne Lahti, ‘Introduction. Settler Colonialism and the American West.’ Journal of the West, 56 no. 4 (2017: 8–12.
61 Edmonds and Carey ‘A New Beginning for Settler Colonial Studies’; Natan Sznaider, Fluchtpunke der Erinnerung (München: Hanser, 2022).
62 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
63 See Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettlebeck, Intimacies of Violence in the Settler Colony: Economies of Disposession around the Pacific Rim (Cham: Palgrave, 2018); Swartz, Education and Empire; Ben Silverstein, ‘Throwing Mud’ on Questions of Sovereignty: Race and Northern Arguments over White, Chinese, and Aboriginal Labour, 1905–12, Australian Historical Studies, 53, no. 4 (2022), 564–83.
64 Carey and Silverstein, ‘Thinking with and Beyond’. p. 14.
65 Carey and Silverstein, ‘Thinking with and Beyond’.; Amy Fung ‘Is Settler Colonialism Just Another Study of Whiteness?’, Canadian Ethnic Studies 53, no. 2 (2012): 115–31; Shino Konishi, ‘First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History’, Australian Historical Studies 50, no 3 (2019): 285–304, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2019.1620300
66 For an example from another context, see E. Buettner, ‘Problematic spaces, problematic races: defining “Europeans” in late colonial India’, Women’s History Review, ix (2000), 277–98, 288–9.
67 David Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-Colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 4. For an overview of ‘new’ imperial histories, see Stephen Howe (ed) The New Imperial Histories Reader (London: Routledge, 2010).
68 Carey and Silverstein, ‘Thinking with and Beyond’. p. 14.
69 See for example: Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (eds) Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).
70 Deborah Levison, Mary Jo Maynes, and Frances Vavrus (eds) Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects, Agents. Innovative Approaches to Research Across Space and Time (Palgrave Macmillan. E-book, 2021)
71 Mona Gleason, ‘The Archived Child: Strategies for Amplifying Children’s Contributions to History’, Qualitative Inquiry (online first, October 2023).
72 See Melissa Freeman and Elliot Kueker, ‘Children’s Creations and Archiving Practices: Methodological Matters Special Issue Introduction’ Qualitative Enquiry (online first, October 2023).
73 John Wall, ‘From Childhood Studies to Childism: Reconstructing the Scholarly and Social Imaginations’, Children’s Geographies 17, no 1 (2019): 1–14.
74 For an overview, see: Nell Musgrove, Carla Pascoe Leahy and Kristine Moruzi, ‘Hearing Children’s Voices: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges’, in Children’s Voices from the Past. New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Nell Musgrove, Carla Pascoe Leahy and Kristine Moruzi (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 1–29.
75 Freeman and Kueker, ‘Children’s Creations’.
76 For an overview, See Field et al, 'The History of Black Girlhood: Recent Innovations and Future Directions’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 9, no. 3 (2016): 383–401.
77 Gleason, ‘The Archived Child’.
78 Gleason, ‘The Archived Child’.
79 See, for example, Marleen Reichgelt, ‘Revisioning Colonial Childhoods. A Photographic History of Papuan Children in Missionary Networks, 1890–1930’, Doctoral Thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, 2023.
80 Karen Sáchez-Eppler, ‘In the Archives of Childhood’, in The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, ed. Anna Mae Duane (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 213–37, 216.
81 Emily Gallagher, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Child-Authored Material in Australian Museums and Archives,’ Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3 (2023): 384–419.
82 Mona Gleason, ‘Avoiding the Agency Trap: Caveats for Historians of Children, Youth, and Education,’ History of Education 45, no. 4 (2016): 446–59, 458.
83 Gleason, ‘Avoiding the Agency Trap’, 458.