Decentering the colonial archive in histories of education: Cases from the everyday in the nineteenth century British empire

This research project aims to understand the complex nature of colonial education across the vast territory of the expanding nineteenth-century British empire by bringing non-traditional sources, such as textbooks and readers, into conversation with other historical materials. The research explores educational experimentation in South Africa (the Cape Colony and Natal), the Caribbean, and Sierra Leone in the first decades of the early nineteenth century. A core question is how our understanding of educational change shifts when utilizing archival materials from outside of the traditional colonial archive. Employing a multi-sited, comparative, and transnational methodology, the project examines educational phenomena and the movement of educational ideas beyond the borders of the nation state. It focuses on how individual actors, including teachers, pupils, officials, and missionaries, shaped education systems, and how tracing their personal networks sheds light on educational change. This approach is useful for highlighting the role of non-elite actors in the making of empire and offering a window into everyday educational practices, including how it felt to be part of emergent educational institutions. The project utilizes diverse non-traditional sources across four specific case studies: 1. The Cape Colony: Examines the emergence of the infant school movement through the lens of two families (the Buchanan and Tshatshu families), drawing on records primarily from the London Mission Society; 2. Natal: Focuses on shifting understandings of English and vernacular education through textbooks published primarily at mission stations after 1850, such as Bishop John William Colenso's First Lessons in Science Designed for the Use of Children and Adult Natives (1861), held in collections like the Colenso and Grey Collections; 3. The Caribbean: Uses the extensive archive of the Mico Charity to examine the circulation of educational objects between the West Indies and England immediately after slave emancipation; and 4. Sierra Leone: Draws on school ephemera collected by the Church Missionary Society missionaries. By utilizing overlooked historical sources, this project promises to open new ways of seeing the educational past in different contexts. It will produce a series of case studies that offer both methodological and empirical insights for scholars in the fields of history of education, histories of childhood, and British imperial history.