Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850-1939

Citation

Schreuder, D. (2016), "Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850-1939", History of Education Review, Vol. 45 No. 2, pp. 257-260. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-01-2016-0003

The End of Empire should have been fatal to imperial studies. Instead, as the remarkable Manchester University Series edited by Emeritus Professor John Mackenzie attests – and of which this current book by Dr Tamson Pietsch is a stellar example – the reverse has been true. Where the iconic Professor Jack Gallagher could once laconically remark that “the sun never set on the problems of the British empire”, so a new generation of remarkable scholars has “problematized” the very nature of that extraordinary political and cultural phenomenon of “Empire” – by asking new questions about ideology and culture, institutions and networks, gender and patronage, nationality and identity. Above all perhaps, “empire” has been integrated into global connections and social transformations. Beyond revisionism of old orthodoxies, here has evolved nothing less than a new narrative of historical understanding. Knowledge and education has been integral to that process.

Empire of Scholars is the evocative title to frame a rigorous and innovative analysis of a major lacunae in the formation of a “British World” overseas – namely, members of the imperial “Bureau” of universities, later the “Association of Commonwealth Universities” (ACU) The focus is specifically on aspects of university education and research, together with the social history of those who formed them. As the author states boldly: “This study focuses on the elite world of universities in the United Kingdom and the settler colonies, and on the white, middle-class men who inhabited them. As instruments of culture and expertise, these were institutions that helped extend colonial rule, and the knowledge produced by those who worked in them was dependent upon a host of situated relationships with loyal agents and actors whose participation has since been erased”. And yet this is no guide-book to the more traditional making of empire through transplanted institutions: “My focus […] is not on these expanding and expansionist aspects of universities, but rather on their internal practices, structures and organisation” (p. ix).

It certainly does that. Within nine elegantly written analytic chapters – based on exemplary research, as befitted an original Oxford DPhil – an “Anglo” project of Britannic education and training is seen to take shape, falteringly at first but ultimately transforming colonial societies, as well as the metropolitan hub of empire itself through the nineteenth century. Colonial knowledge and research (especially in the natural sciences) is harnessed as a key force for Empire in the Great War. And yet, within decades of a new century, more exogenously dynamic of growth saw the so-called colonial “periphery” creating intra-colonial, and then international linkages.

These webs of connection soon evolved into becoming nascent networks of association and knowledge, with significant movement of peoples, the transfer of ideas and the emergence of collaborative research projects. A final chapter accordingly explores the complex and nuanced issue of “alternative ties” – how the “local” became the “global” without losing a sense of colonial genesis. “When scholars travelled on academic exchanges, took up their travelling scholarships or attended international conferences”, as the author writes, “they did so not as members of the expansive British academic world, but rather as representatives of national scholarly communities” (p. 193).

A pattern of macro historical change is boldly mapped by the author covering the last two centuries or so, which is expressed in four organising sections: early nineteenth century institutional foundations up to the formative empire changes of the 1880s (involving the “localising of universal learning”); the building and exploitation of intra-colonial connections prior to the Great War; the remarkable migration of peoples, learning and skills in the decades before the Second World War (and which ultimately shaped the Empire of Scholars) – “a world in which experiences of study and travel, and the strong personal connections forged during them, created shifting social landscapes of intellectual production and exchange” (p. 120).

Two excellent documentary appendixes (pp. 202-212) chart the foundation dates of these universities established in the UK and overseas empire up to the Second World War; and also usefully offer a separate timeline for the various higher education institutions granted “affiliated status” at the University of Oxford from 1888 – a critical dimension of what became a prototype for distance education. In conjunction with these tables, it would also have been valuable if Dr Pietsch had been able to draw further from her rigorous researches to offer a data appendix setting out the statistical profile of the institutions within the time-scale of historical sample involved. This might include metrics on staffing, gender and levels of qualifications, student numbers (with graduate and post-graduate outcomes), funding allocations and discipline spread. Such data would give an even greater sense of scale and proportionality in social and institutional change over time.

Several issues of universal scholarly interest also emerge from this pioneering book. The first concerns how to evaluate these developments against a contemporary fascination with “the transnational” in writing the history of modernity. “The categories of national history do not help us make sense of this world”, as the author reflects. “Segmenting the story of universities in Britain and the Dominions was part of the post-war project of nationalising knowledge. It fragmented the long-distance connections that had shaped settler institutions and the lives of those who worked in them”. On the other hand: “[…] to cast these connections as transnational is also misleading. It ignores the racial and imperial imperatives that, as late as the 1960s, still framed what R.B. Haldane in 1903 called ‘the British nation in its parts’ […]”. We are left with subtle theorising which invokes “our need for at-once more capacious and demarcated way of thinking about British settler universities in this period” (p. 201).

The other broader, sociological issue that arises relates to the rise and the professions within higher education. Here is a micro case-study of just how “academe” in settler universities emerged through a remarkable reliance on British trained scholars; “trust systems” of personal acquaintance in the taking up references and in the filling appointments; the nurturing networks of familial associations with overseas study leave and exchanges; and adoption of metropolitan cultural norms of distinct and genderised social classes in forming the collegium, thus effectively excluding those of other backgrounds and other broad ethnicities. It was not quite “the perfect circulation of elites”, as the famous idiom has it, but it represented a relatively closed social system of affinity and cultural identity involved in the shaping, rise and demise of the “settler universities” in the older colonies of migration.

It was ultimately to take the “academic revolution” of the later twentieth century – a mixture of micro-reform in liberal capitalist states within a rising engagement with internationalisation – to see these social and cultural formations be swept away in favour of a new post-modernity which challenged gender, class and ethnicity.

This historical study offers a satisfying and elegant inner account of that complex story, while leaving open that remarkable, sequential growth of mass higher education – outside the settler colonies and across the broader “empire-commonwealth”. The Centenary of the ACU (2013) recently highlighted this under-researched dimension of international higher education. British post-war reconstruction incorporated a revivified Empire, with the new public university foundations across Afro-Asian, Caribbean and Pacific island domains. These tertiary initiatives were then to be massively expanded with decolonisation, notably through private providers. The settler university members who once dominated the club-like ACU were increasingly to be swamped by new members and new networks from around the globe. (There are now some 700 members of the ACU with an “associate member” category open to non-Commonwealth institutions.) This new “network of higher education” largely belongs to the “South” – populous developing societies who were soon making their own claims for skilling and social advancement in a post-imperial world order of nations. As historians of education we have great opportunity to explore that theme more closely, while taking inspiration from Dr Pietsch’s bold analytic study.

In short: this important first book does more than fill a major lacuna in the place of “settler universities” within the educational history of Empire. It powerfully interrogates assumed historical orthodoxies together opening new questions and perspectives. Readers will here indeed encounter revisionism at its measured best: “Not all readers will be sympathetic to this endeavour, but I hope this book will encourage them to think in new ways about the history of subjects and institutions they know well” (p. ix). That it certainly does, while also strongly announcing the arrival of an original and creative scholar. Dr Pietsch is surely set to change the way we think about higher educational history.