Imperial schools taught the colonized the empire’s own national liberation stories
Evidence
Vietnamese youngsters could not avoid learning about the philosophes and the Revolution, and what Debray calls ‘our secular antagonism to Germany’. Magna Carta, the Mother of Parliaments, and the Glorious Revolution, glossed as English national history, entered schools all over the British Empire. Belgium’s independence struggle against Holland was not erasable from schoolbooks Congolese children would one day read. So also the histories of the USA in the Philippines and, last of all, Portugal in Mozambique and Angola. The irony, of course, is that these histories were written out of a historiographical consciousness which by the turn of the century was, all over Europe, becoming nationally defined. (The barons who imposed Magna Carta on John Plantagenet did not speak ‘English,’ and had no conception of themselves as ‘Englishmen,’ but they were firmly defined as early patriots in the classrooms of the United Kingdom 700 years later.) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 457
Categorization
- CANDY: The Magna Carta barons didn’t speak English or think of themselves as Englishmen — yet were taught as early patriots 700 years later.
Related
- Language education sowed the ideals that ended the empires that spread it (similarity 0.79)
- Colonial languages taught for administration carried revolutionary ideas that doomed empire (similarity 0.79)
- An empire’s number of colonies shaped whether it trained administrators in native languages. (similarity 0.78)