Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World

by Robinson, Shirleene; Sleight, Simon

• ISBN13: 9781137489401
• ISBN10: 1137489405
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-11-17
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Age was a critical factor in shaping imperial experience. Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World is the first collection to investigate the lives of – and meanings attached to – children and youth within the context of the British world. Children and young people, both British and Indigenous, locally-born and migrant, embodied the hopes and anxieties of British colonists. Recipients of the decidedly mixed blessings of British rule, they were at once petty imperialists, migrant 'pioneers', active resisters and dispossessed victims. This volume locates children, childhood and youth in broader social contexts and acknowledges young people as historical agents, rarely operating within situations of their choosing, but nonetheless shaping their own lives. Their experiences and the ways in which they were represented exemplify the processes through which 'Britishness' was expressed and contested across the globe. This history illuminates social and cultural aspects of young people's pasts and tests the possibilities (and limitations) of the British world paradigm.

Author Biography

Shirleene Robinson is Vice Chancellor's Innovation Fellow in the Department of Modern History at Macquarie University, Australia. She is the author of Something like Slavery? Queensland's Aboriginal Child Workers, 1842–1945 and a range of other works that focus on gender and sexuality in Australian and transnational contexts.
 
Simon Sleight is Lecturer in Australian History at King's College London, UK and Adjunct Research Associate at Monash University, Australia. His work explores historical youth cultures, urban history and imperial history. His previous work includes Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870–1914.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The World in Miniature; Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson
1. A Motherly Concern for Children: Invocations of Queen Victoria in Imperial Child Rescue Literature; Shurlee Swain
2. Ayah, Caregiver to Anglo-Indian Children c. 1750–1947; Suzanne Conway
3. Babies of the Empire: Science, Nation, and Truby King's Mothercraft in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa; S.E. Duff
4. 'He is Hardened to the Climate and a Little Bleached by it's [sic] Influence': Imperial Childhoods in Scotland and Madras, c. 1800–1830; Ellen Filor
5. 'Dear Mummy and Daddy': Reading Wartime Letters from British Children Evacuated to Canada During the Second World War; Claire L. Halstead
6. East African Students in a (Post) Imperial World; Timothy Nicholson
7. Resistance and Race: Aboriginal Child Workers in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth- Century Australia; Shirleene Robinson
8. Health, Race and Family in Colonial Bengal; Satadru Sen
9. Race, Indigeneity and the Baden-Powell Girl Guides: Age, Gender and the British World, 1908–1920; Mary Clare Martin
10. Transforming Narratives of Colonial Danger: Imagining the Environments of New Zealand and Australia in Children's Literature, 1862–1899; Michelle J. Smith
11. The 'Willful' Girl in the Anglo-World: Sentimental Heroines and Wild Colonial Girls, 1872–1923; Hilary Emmett
12. Youth and Homosex: Danger and Possibility in Queensland, 1890–1914; Yorick Smaal
13. Leery Sue Goes to the Show: Popular Performance, Sexuality and the Disorderly Girl; Melissa Bellanta
14. Savage Instincts, Civilizing Spaces: The Child, the Empire and the Public Park, c. 1880–1914; Ruth Colton
15. Memorializing Colonial Childhoods: From the Frontier to the Museum; Kate Darian-Smith