Abstract
Early scholarship on empire and exchange in higher education focused on the age of British empire, exploring tensions between imperial connections and local influences and the relations between the imperial center and colonies. Later work highlighted interactions among people, goods, and ideas, a process that brings the local and global together. While early accounts analyzed the significance of imperial connections, recent scholarship highlights the importance of transnational networks and the exchange of ideas. Scholars are beginning to use biographical methods to explore the roles women played in higher education and their significance for social and educational change.
In the years after the First World War, Britain as an imperial nation was in decline and the United States became an increasingly influential player in the field of higher education. While early scholarship considered the spread of progressive educational ideas within the United States, recent work demonstrates the way ideas are exchanged across national and conceptual boundaries focusing on the context of Carnegie travel grants in the former British colonies of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand during the presidency of Frederick Paul Keppel (1923–1942). New scholarship explores the value of biography for exploring the role key women and men played exchanging “a new American empire” of educational theories and practices across the field of higher education.
I think that historical studies in education need to pay a greater attention to colonial education; in fact, more than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism.
(Novoa 1995, 26)
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Collins, J. (2019). Empire and Exchange in Higher Education. In: Fitzgerald, T. (eds) Handbook of Historical Studies in Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0942-6_46-1
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