Education and Empire takes the reader on a tour of different colonial settings with the main goal of exploring the educational policies considered, planned, attempted, challenged and implemented in the colonies of British settlers. Rebecca Swartz’s book examines the shifting process of governmental involvement and intervention in indigenous education in these colonies throughout much of the 19th century, between the emancipation of the slaves (1833) to the 1880s, on the eve of the so-called „new imperialism“ and the changes in imperial repertoires of governance and racial relations. It examines policies and practices of colonial education, following the transformation of educational concepts and purposes from differing points of view, diversifying actors through several layers of dialogue. Less interested in immersion in the multitude of school programs, Swartz is clearly more engaged with the debates and policies that fuelled the history of colonial education, which helped her to build an interesting transnational narrative focussing on the flow of ideas, concepts and even players.

The book explores three main case studies: the Caribbean, Western Australia, and South Africa. Although Swartz’s declared intention is to centre her study in those three places, she goes far beyond, exploring other frontiers of the British empire, reaching New Zealand, Ireland, and even metropolitan Britain. Her excursions to the latter have the main purpose, with interesting scholarly outcomes, of setting the scenario wherein one can find some of the debates about educational methods and goals that would be transferred to, or influenced by, colonial contexts. The author follows the movement of people and ideas on education through the networks of empire, underlining the continuities and differences within the concepts of education, essentially centred in the education devised for Indigenous children.

The book is divided in 8 chapters. The first chapter is a well-informed and comprehensive introduction to the main theme (colonial education) and the different issues tackled in the book. It sets the background and points out the main concerns and goals of the book. The three following chapters (2, 3 and 4) focus on the main case studies – West Indies, Western Australia, and Natal, respectively – underlining their particular and common contexts and processes. Chapter 2, covering the period between 1833 and 1847, a foundational time in shaping the thinking about the education of indigenous children, is a good example of Swartz’s traversal between colonial and metropolitan worlds, examining how the question of education informed each context. For instance, the reasonings that sustained prejudices towards poor people in Britain and Ireland at the time, based upon moral arguments that saw those groups of people as limited and immoral, were also reproduced in misconceptions regarding indigenous subjects across the empire. Centred in Western Australia, Chapter 3 shows the links between education and labour mingled with perspectives over land and colonization. The fourth Chapter goes to Africa during the 1840s and 1850s to examine the clash between settlers and local governments, backed by religious institutions, regarding educational policies.

The following chapters (5, 6, 7 and 8) have a more transnational scope, crossing imperial boundaries and connecting these different cases. Chapter 5 examines the increasing conflict between the colonial government, seeking the expansion of the educational offer, and the settler communities, concerned with the consequences of indigenous education. In Chapter 6, Swartz seeks to demonstrate that schools across the empire were important places for creating knowledge regarding indigenous peoples. Chapter 7 focuses on the increasing involvement of government in education, in Britain and overseas, exploring how legal changes not only affected colonial spaces, but also were affected by the ideas coming from the empire, to show to what extent educational concepts went in both directions. Finally, Chapter 8 (the conclusion) summarises the arguments Swartz lucidly addresses throughout the text. The chapter’s title („the ‚Chief Blessing of Civilisation, the benefit of Education‘“) crystallizes one of the most important features imprinted in imperial claims regarding colonial education: its supposedly civilizing merits, imbued with humanitarian reasons and justifications.

Following the recent approaches on colonial education in imperial historiography, Swartz goes beyond the conventional barriers of national histories of education to devise a coherent and appealing picture of the complex and multi-layered context of education in the British empire. Swartz argues that „to fully understand local educational experiences, we must pursue a comparative and connected approach that highlights the connections and divergences between policy, practice, and educational thinking“ (p. 3). This is her main argument and compelling approach. Swartz balances the local with the trans-colonial educational processes, highlighting a significant concern of imperial histories: “that of scale” (p. 133). She narrows her narrative to show how ideas on education that circulated across the empire can be better understood from a local point of view.

Swartz asserts that that governmental involvement in education often occurred in a „hesitant“ (p. 200), rather than linear, way towards full governmental control, therefore challenging some rushed and simplistic conclusions that tend to relativize the back and forth of administrative implantation in colonial territories. From a local perspective, the author demonstrates the importance of looking to colonial experiences as an on-going process of negotiation between different actors, from imperial officers, settlers, missionaries, to local communities. The crucial shift towards more fixed concepts about race, sustaining an important aspect of Swartz argument, was also an intermittent process, but one that had helped to cement further perceptions regarding indigenous populations. Schools were, therefore, places of colonial encounters, with different colonial actors interacting with one another and transforming worldviews on both sides.

Swartz’s thorough study may come as a challenge, necessitating the management of the endless array of politicians, missionaries, alumni, teaching institutions and political decisions that are nevertheless indispensable for her account. This helps Swartz book’s assumptions: the need to connect and understand the interactions between a diverse group of people, institutions, and decisions to uncover the multitude of ideas, plans, demands, concerns, and aspirations, some of them evidently contradictory, that built the different layers of the question of colonial education. It also allows most readers, usually focused on a specific place or individual, to see the links that are sometimes blurred in works less concerned with comparative possibilities.

Education and Empire’s comparative, transnational approach allows a comprehensive picture of how people, ideas and plans circulated throughout the empire, how they impacted locally, were appropriated and readapted within a local context, or were transferred from colony to colony. Swartz does more than simply put cases side-by-side, including them in the broader framework of the British Empire, also establishing the links with the metropolitan dimension, such as exemplified by chapters 5 and 7. This approach is one of the most appealing merits of Swartz’s book. It sheds a different light over the national histories that she did not intend to rewrite, by opening lines of communication among them and disclosing connections between distinct places and actors, and showing us how concepts of race and humanitarianism helped to devise educational strategies for Indigenous children and how those same concepts developed under the framework of multiple educational plans in the British Colonies between the 1830s and the 1880s.