Abstract
Outside Buckingham Palace in London, a celebratory vision of the ‘British world’ is embodied in stone. On a central pedestal, a venerable Queen Victoria resides on her imperial throne, flanked by statues of Truth and Justice. A winged Victory, together with figures of Courage and Constancy, rises above, while the reverse of the pedestal displays Motherhood in the tender image of a seated woman — a youthful Victoria, perhaps? — sheltering three infants. Four bronze lions (a gift from New Zealand) stand guard at Victoria’s feet, alongside Naval and Military Power, in muscular yet effortless repose, and associated fountains and reservoirs. Across the water, some distance beyond, a series of concentric gates and allegorical statues by British sculptors depict imperial dominions.1 These outlying figures are all notably youthful, the Australia statues especially so. Animals accompanying each national child further emphasize the apparent rawness of the imperial offspring. Canada nurses a seal and a bulging net of fish, South Africa tackles an ostrich and monkey, West Africa escorts a cheetah and Australia coaxes a large ram and kangaroo. Such associations contrast with the stateliness and settled bearing of Victoria and her immediate companions, whom the callow youths presumably hope to emulate. Forever petrified as children, and positioned to face their ‘Mother Queen’, the dominions orbit the imperatrix.
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Notes
Rosalia Baena, ‘“Not Home but Here”: Rewriting Englishness in Colonial Childhood Memoirs’, English Studies, vol. 90, no. 4 (2009), 437.
Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 7,
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Ibid., article dated 24 May 1909, 13. On Empire Day in Britain and overseas, see Jim English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, The Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 1 (2006), 247–76; Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, 116–22;
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On play and appropriation, also see Megan Norcia, ‘Playing Empire: Children’s Parlor Games, Home Theatricals, and Improvisational Play’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4 (2004), 294–314.
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Exceptions to this rule are few, and include Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006);
Heidi Morrison (ed.), The Global History of Childhood Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012);
Paula Fass (ed.), The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (New York: Routledge, 2012).
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James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001); and Ballantyne, Webs of Empire.
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw and Stuart Macintyre (eds), Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2007).
John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xii.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
See particularly Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995);
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Imperial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
Compare Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985)
Berry Myall and Virginia Morrow, You Can Help Your Country: English Children’s Work During the Second World War (London: Institute of Education, 2011).
Hugh Cunningham, ‘Combating Child Labour: The British Experience’, in Hugh Cunningham and Pier Paolo Viazzo (eds), Child Labour in Historical Perspective, 1800–1985 (Florence: UNICEF, 1996), 41–56.
Also see Ellen Boucher, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Nelson R. Block and Tammy M. Proctor (eds), Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scouting Movement’s First Century (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009);
Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993);
Kristine Alexander, ‘The Girl Guide Movement and Imperial Internationalism During the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 2, no. 1 (2009), 37–63. A chapter by Mary Clare Martin adding to this literature features in this volume.
Fiona Paisley, ‘Childhood and Race: Growing Up in the Empire’ in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 240–59.
See, among many others, Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982);
Marjorie Kohli, The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants to Canada, 1833–1939 (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 2003);
Roger Kershaw and Janet Sacks, New Lives for Old: The Story of Britain’s Child Migrants (Kew: Simon Sleight and Shirleene Robinson 23 National Archives, 2008);
Roy Parker, Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917 (Bristol: The Policy Press, 2008);
A. Gill, Orphans of the Empire: The Shocking Story of Child Migration to Australia (Sydney: Random House, 1998);
Geoffrey Sherington and Chris Jeffery, Fairbridge: Empire and Child Migration (London: Woburn, 1998);
John Tosh, ‘Children on “Free” Emigrant Ships: From England to the Cape of Good Hope, 1819–20’, History Australia, vol. 9, no. 2 (2012), 5–26.
See, for example, Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995);
Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth; Jan Kociumbas, Australian Childhood: A History (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997);
Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850–1945 (London: Anthem, 2005).
In the case of South Africa, for example, the first dedicated doctoral study on South African childhood appeared as recently as 2010. Its author, Sarah Duff, features in the present collection. Also on Africa, see Paul Ocobock, ‘Spare the Rod, Spoil the Colony: Corporal Punishment, Colonial Violence and Generational Authority in Kenya, 1897–1952’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 45, no. 1 (2012), 29–56,
Saheed Aderinto (ed.), Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York and London: Routledge, 1993);
Kalpana Ram and Margaret Jolly (eds), Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Philippa Mein Smith, Mothers and King Baby: Infant Survival and Welfare in an Imperial World: Australia, 1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004);
Emily Manktelow, Missionary Families: Race, Gender and Generation on the Spiritual Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
Esme Cleall, Laura Ishiguru and Emily Manktelow, ‘Imperial Relations: Histories of Family in the British Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 14, no. 1 (2013), 1.
Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987).
Steven Mintz, ‘Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008), 91–94.
As cases in point, see M. Daphne Kutzer’s text, Empire’s Children: Empire and Imperialism in Classic British Children’s Books (London: Routledge, 2000)
Michelle Smith, Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). The latter uses literature to reveal how imperial concerns informed the ways in which girls were imagined as mothers and civilizers at home in Britain, and, in the colonies, as settlers, nurses and explorers who were integral to the Empire’s future.
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Sleight, S., Robinson, S. (2016). Introduction: The World in Miniature. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_1
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