Global histories of education are necessarily colonial and postcolonial histories. Western education systems became the global standard in the age of empire, and unequal access to those systems and their uneven quality in the Global South were locked in during the late colonial period, sometimes through the decolonization process itself. Gutwrenching images of Black and Brown university students trying to flee Ukraine in March 2022 poignantly underscore the colonial roots of enduring global inequalities in education today. Close to half of the foreign student population in Ukraine before the war came from the ex-colonial world, including some 20’000 students from India and 15’000 from Africa.1 Why would tens of thousands of Africans and Indians, two decades into the 21st century, go to Ukraine to obtain degrees? Quite simply because there are still too few options for them in their homelands. As this timely volume shows, the unequal global distribution of educational opportunities is a hallmark legacy of colonial education the world over, a heritage of failure that cut across imperial borders and distinct colonial philosophies. Put another way, a deeper understanding of the transimperial dynamics of colonial and postcolonial education is critical to illuminate wider processes of «imperial globalization» (p. 18).
As Rebecca Rogers notes in her preface, the volume’s transimperial perspective is a welcome corrective to an entrenched historiographic association of the civilizing mission with France (p. 8). French empire builders in the late 19th century may have first propagated the civilizing mission as official ideology, but they were not the only ones to justify imperial expansion as a civilizing project or to exercise power through the projection of European systems of knowledge. They certainly were not the most effective in turning civilizing rhetoric into practice. As Sara Legrandjacques shows in her chapter comparing the development of higher education in colonial India and Indochina, British and French officials shared a desire to form local auxiliaries who would participate in the colonial system without throwing it into question, but the British pursuit of that objective preceded and dwarfed French efforts in colonial Asia. The British first established universities in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta in 1857; by 1942, there were 22 more across India. By contrast, the only university in the Indochinese Union (1887–1941) was established in 1917 in Hanoi, a «macrocephalic» strategy that reflected the cultural primacy accorded by the French to the Vietnamese over and above Cambodians and Laotians (p. 37, 42–43).
Despite these contrasting French and British approaches, Legrandjacques draws out significant similarities that substantiate «colonial higher education» as a meaningful analytical category across imperial borders (p. 39). In both cases, local universities were purposely designed to deliver substandard credentials that compelled the most ambitious students to complete their educations in the metropole. The paucity of opportunities also pushed colonial Asian students to seek out alternatives elsewhere. Young Vietnamese migrated to Japan, China, and the Soviet Union seeking advanced degrees; Indians went to Japan too and farther afield to the United States and continental Europe, including France (p. 48). In both contexts, the projection of European systems of knowledge also stretched beyond the bounds of empire; Hanoi attracted Chinese students and colonial Indian universities drew students from Iran and Thailand (p. 52).
Legrandjacques’ chapter opens the first section of the volume, which emphasizes comparisons, circulations, and connections within, across, and beyond European empires. Taken together, the chapters resoundingly show that empires were never closed worlds unto themselves but rather porous and connected. Essays by Yamina Bettahar on Algeria and Gwendal Rannou on Australasia in the interwar years, and a co-authored chapter by Hugo Gonçalves Dores and Miguel Bandeira Jéronimo on inter-imperial coordination in sub-Saharan Africa after World War II, all take a «connected history» approach. The contributions by Rannou and Gonçalves Dores and Bandeira Jéronimo pointedly home in on the complexity of the internationalization of the civilizing mission and colonial education. When Australia and New Zealand became stewards of a handful of former German colonies in the Pacific through the League of Nations’ mandate system, they had no intention to invest in indigenous education; the League imposed an educational and civilizing mission on them (p. 53–55). However, as Rannou shows, paternalist Australasian colonial authorities managed to shirk those responsibilities right up until the outbreak of World War II. In this case, then, we see the limits of internationalization before the war. World War II was a turning point in both Australasia and sub-Saharan Africa; colonial education then assumed new importance with the rebranding of postwar empires as spaces of social progress. And yet, as Gonçalves Dores and Miguel Bandeira Jéronimo show, while colonial powers acknowledged the need for universal basic education in their African territories, the philosophy of colonial education remained the same: a narrow focus on practical, technical education and steadfast discouragement of academic, intellectual instruction (p. 88–92).
The essays in Part II (which focuses primarily on the French empire), consider the place of education in the history and politics of mise en valeur and development. Stéphane Lembré examines the expansion of technical education against the backdrop of the global depression in French North Africa in the 1920s and 30s, while Simplice Ayangma Bonoho considers sanitary education in Cameroon in the same period. Thuy Phuong Ngyuen’s chapter explores the reformulation of colonial education from a tutelage model to development aid in Indochina after World War II against the backdrop of the First Indochinese War. He highlights the repackaging of mise en valeur as «development» as a critical element in the rivalries and intersections of decolonization and the global Cold War. In his chapter, Anton Tarradellas looks beyond France’s empire and takes a longer view, retracing successive waves of African student migration to the United States from the late 19th century to the end of the 20th . He highlights that at the moment of decolonization, there were only 8 universities on the entire African continent. In the 1950s, private foundations like Ford and Rockefeller built on earlier networks and launched their own programs to bring Africans to the US for higher education. When US policymakers lost confidence in the French and British after the Suez fiasco in 1956, the US government itself began to organize student exchanges with the continent (p. 165–167). Thus, while in 1949 there had only been 900 African students in the US, by the 1970s there were close to 40’000, making the US the second most popular destination for young Africans pursuing advanced study after France, which then had 55’000 African students, and well ahead of the USSR with 13’000, and the UK, which welcomed even fewer (p. 169).
The last section of the volume highlights trajectories, challenges, and the stakes of decolonization in the education space across the post-/colonial divide. State sovereignty is an obvious rupture, but many educational institutions and practices endured long after national independence. Sylvie Guichard’s contribution emphasizes the legacy of colonial education and cultural representations of the colonizer in postcolonial India, while Thomas Riot considers the devasting consequences of such legacies in the case of postcolonial Rwanda. The other chapters emphasize new possibilities and new actors in the late colonial and early independence eras. Aude Chanson underscores the role of education in postcolonial nation-building in the political program of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and Julius Nyerere’s vison of African socialism. Raphaëlle Ruppen Courtaz takes a biographical approach to consider the impact of new international organizations and initiatives through the figure of a Swiss UNESCO worker in post-independence Central African Republic.
For this reader, the volume’s primary shortcoming is the absence of any consideration of how the history and politics of empire and decolonization shaped the contours of education in imperial metropoles. It is vital to consider the development of Western education itself as part of the stories told here, a foundational element of the dialectical processes of «imperial globalization» that are the central preoccupation of this otherwise very compelling book. For more than a decade, a growing global movement to «decolonize the university» has risen to the forefront of wider struggles for social, racial, and epistemic justice around the world, a movement that increasingly includes student mobilizations in the Global North as well as the Global South.2 A truly global history of education should consider the colonial and postcolonial legacies that continue to shape Euro-American education systems as well as those in the ex-colonial world.
The volume’s greatest strength is its spotlight on the central role of colonial education in wider processes of globalization and the (re)production of global inequality. Histories of education are too often set apart or downgraded as a sideshow to the ostensibly distinct and more important realms of geopolitics and political economy. That is a disastrous misconception. Thankfully, some of the world’s most interesting thinkers today are challenging that notion. In a recent interview, Thomas Piketty put it quite plainly: «The true source of economic prosperity is equality, or at least relative equality in education.» «Broad access to education,» he then reiterated, «has been the true source of prosperity.»3 We would all do well to take the global history of education more seriously. Repenser la mission civilisatrice makes a significant contribution to that end.
Anmerkungen
1 Emmanuel Achiri and Hrishabh Sandilya, What’s Next for African and Asian War Refugees?, in: International Politics & Society, April 4, 2022, https://www.ips-journal.eu/topics/democracy-and- society/whats-next-for-african-and-asian-student-refugees-fleeing-the-war-in-ukraine-5870/ (11.7.22).
2 Gurminder Bhambra / Dalia Gebrial / Kerem Nişancıolu (eds.), Decolonising the University, London 2018.
3 Interview with Thomas Piketty, «Thomas Piketty’s Case for ‹Participatory Socialism›», The Ezra Klein Show (podcast audio), New York Times, June 7, 2022.
Zitierweise:
Marker, Emily: Rezension zu: Matasci, Damiano; Bandeira, Miguel Jerónimo; Dores, Hugo Gonçalves (eds.): Repenser la «mission civilisatrice». L’éducation dans le monde colonial et postcolonial au XXe siècle, Rennes 2021. Zuerst erschienen in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 72(3), 2022, S. 479-482. Online: <https://doi.org/10.24894/2296-6013.00114>.