Researching Education: Florence Nightingale, British Imperialism and Colonial Schools

Swartz, Rebecca

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_6

Rebecca Swartz⁴

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

This chapter investigates the ways in which schools operated as sites of enquiry and knowledge production in the 1860s. The educational space provided an important source of information about Indigenous people. Schools were often the only point of contact between Indigenous people, particularly children, missionaries and the colonial state. School records and reports could be used to measure the progress of civilisation, but also to define and quantify racial difference. Schools were also critical to providing information to Indigenous people about what it meant to be civilised, Christian and British subjects. The chapter draws on Florence Nightingale’s correspondence and study on native colonial schools across the Empire, as well as on Robert James Mann’s writing on Africans in Natal.

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Notes

1.
Florence Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics of Native Colonial Schools and Hospitals (London: n.p., 1863).
2.
Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 11.
3.
Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010), 5.
4.
Rebecca Swartz, ‘Educating Emotions in Natal and Western Australia, 1854–65’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 18 (2017), n.p.
5.
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularisers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 296–297.
6.
Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 88.
7.
Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century’, in Missions and Empire, ed. by Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 261–284, 264.
8.
Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), 70.
9.
Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 220.
10.
Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 152.
11.
Tiffany Shellam, “‘A Mystery to the Medical World”: Florence Nightingale, Rosendo Salvado and the Risk of Civilisation’, History Australia, 9 (2012), 109–134.
12.
Lynn McDonald (ed.), Florence Nightingale on Public Health Care: Volume 6 of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004), 163. See Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 3.
13.
See Shellam, “‘A Mystery’”.
14.
Ibid., 117.
15.
Nightingale to Grey, 16.4.1860, Grey Collection, Auckland Public Library, New Zealand (hereafter GL) GL/N8.2.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Nightingale to Grey, 26.04.1860, GL/N8.3.
18.
Nightingale to Grey, 16.04.1860, GL/N8.2.
19.
Alan Lester, ‘Settler Colonialism, George Grey and the Politics of Ethnography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34 (2016), 492–507.
20.
She was also helped by ‘British sanitation and public health experts, John Sutherland, William Farr and Edwin Chadwick’. Shellam, ‘“A Mystery”’, 118. Nightingale’s correspondence with Chadwick shows another connection between metropolitan reforms in education and those in colonial contexts. See McDonald, Florence Nightingale, 165.
21.
Grey to Nightingale, 13.04.1860, British library manuscripts collection (hereafter BL MS) BL MS 45797, ff. 108–109.
22.
Nightingale to Grey, 12.04.1860, GL/N8.1.
23.
Grey to Nightingale, 27.04.1860, BL MS 45797, ff. 110–114. As Salesa shows, Grey was involved with education projects for ‘half-caste’ children in New Zealand, and this most likely led to his promotion of this line of enquiry. Salesa, Racial Crossings, 118.
24.
Nightingale to Newcastle, 22.05.1860, University of Nottingham Nec 10, 937, Newcastle Collection, as quoted in McDonald, Florence Nightingale, 189–190.
25.
Nightingale had hoped to get information from the Cape Colony, New Zealand and the other Australian colonies, but her surveys were not returned. Sir George Grey also suggested she send returns to the South Sea Islands, where there were over 800 schools in operation. See Nightingale to Newcastle, 15.06.1860, from a typed copy of a letter to the Duke of Newcastle, State Library of New South Wales 60/Q8107, in McDonald, Florence Nightingale, 191. See Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, Appendix 1, 20–26.
26.
Nightingale to Grey, 16.04.1860, GL/N8.2.
27.
Ibid.
28.
Shellam, ‘“A Mystery”’, 118.
29.
Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–1845: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 189.
30.
Ibid., 169.
31.
U. Kalpagam, ‘The Colonial State and Statistical Knowledge’, History of the Human Sciences, 13 (2000), 37–55, 43.
32.
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd edn (London and New York: Free Association Books, 1999), 6.
33.
Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 3. Nightingale also referred to the results of the survey as ‘scrofulous’ in a letter to William Farr. See Nightingale to Farr, 28.04.1860, quoted in McDonald, Florence Nightingale, 164.
34.
Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 3.
35.
Nightingale to Newcastle, 15.06.1860, in McDonald, Florence Nightingale, 191.
36.
Nightingale to Grey, 28.07.1863, GL/N8.4.
37.
Ibid.
38.
I have not been able to locate the circular itself, but it is mentioned in Scott to Newcastle, 01.05.1861, The National Archives at Kew, CO 179/58. Hereafter all CO sources are from TNA.
39.
Shellam, ‘“A Mystery”’, 110. Salvado to Newcastle, 19.02.1864, CO 18/135.
40.
Nightingale to Fortescue, 13.07.1861, CO 179/62.
41.
See Head to Newcastle, 04.06.1861, CO 42/627, No. 37. The original returns and reports were forwarded to Nightingale and do not appear in the Colonial Office correspondence.
42.
Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 8.
43.
Ibid., 17.
44.
Nightingale to Chadwick, 16.02.1861, BL Add Ms 45770 f221, and Chadwick to Nightingale, 29.03.1861, BL Add Ms 45770 f222.
45.
Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 13.
46.
Ibid.
47.
Ibid., 8.
48.
A measles epidemic in 1861 contributed to the high mortality rates amongst the Aboriginal population. Tiffany Shellam, ‘“On My Ground”: Indigenous Farmers at New Norcia 1860s–1900s’, in Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, ed. by Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 62–85, 67.
49.
Florence Nightingale, ‘Note on the Aboriginal Races of Australia: A Paper read at the Annual meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held at York, September 1864’ (London: Emily Faithfull, 1865).
50.
See Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) on the Association.
51.
Tim Rowse and Tiffany Shellam, ‘The Colonial Emergence of a Statistical Imaginary’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55 (2013), 922–954, 927.
52.
Goldman, Science, Reform and Politics, 19–20.
53.
Rowse and Shellam, ‘The Colonial Emergence’, 953.
54.
Ibid., 928.
55.
Nightingale to Farr, 13.09.1862, BL Add MSS 43399 f77.
56.
I have written about Anne Camfield and her relationship with a particular pupil, Bessy Flower, in Swartz, ‘Educating Emotions’. I have also written about this school in Rebecca Swartz, ‘Civilisation and Colonial Education: Natal and Western Australia in the 1860s in Comparative Perspective’, History of Education, 47 (2018), 368–383.
57.
Kennedy to Newcastle, 24.12.1860, CO 18/114, No. 130.
58.
Memo from Camfield in ibid.
59.
Ibid.
60.
Ibid.
61.
Anne Camfield, ‘The Annesfield Native Institution: A sketch of its history and present condition 1868’, Information Respecting the habits and customs of the Aboriginal inhabitants of WA, compiled from various sources: Presented to the Legislative Council by His Excellency’s Command (Perth: Richard Peter, Government Printer, 1871), WASRO, Con.1067 1871/002, 23.
62.
On this aspect, see Swartz, ‘Civilisation and Colonial Education’.
63.
Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 7.
64.
Camfield to Nightingale, 26.12.1863, Encl. 2 in Hampton to Newcastle, 24.03.1864, CO 18/135, No. 34.
65.
Ibid.
66.
Ibid.
67.
Laicus, ‘Thoughts about Natives: Part 2’, Perth Gazette, 24.11.1865.
68.
Swartz, ‘Civilisation and Colonial Education’, 372–376.
69.
The APS was a metropolitan based humanitarian lobby group that advocated for the rights of Indigenous people in different parts of the empire. See Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Heathens, Slaves and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin’s Critique of Missions and Anti-Slavery’, History Workshop Journal, 64 (2007), 133–161, and James Heartfield, The Aborigines Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo, 1836–1909 (London: C. Hurst and Co, 2011) on the APS.
70.
Camfield to Fowler, 03.08.1864, Colonial Intelligencer or Aborigines’ Friend (London: Published by the APS, January 1863–December 1864), 386.
71.
Fowler’s response, ibid.
72.
Camfield to Fowler, 01.11.1865, in ibid., 489.
73.
Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 31.
74.
Swartz, ‘Civilisation and Colonial Education’.
75.
Colenso to SPG, 8 October 1857, SPG Collection, Rhodes House Library [hereafter RHL], Oxford, D8.
76.
Henry Trueman Wright Wood, ‘Mann, Robert James’, in Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1900, ed. by Lee Sidney, 36 (London: Smith, Elder & Co), n.p.
77.
Robert James Mann, Lessons in General Knowledge: An Elementary Reading Book (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856), vi.
78.
Jeff Guy, ‘Imifanekiso: An Introduction to the Photographic Portraits of Dr R.J. Mann’, Safundi, 15 (2014), 1–24, 2.
79.
Mann, Lessons, 270–271.
80.
Colenso to SPG, 1.04.1859, D8, RHL.
81.
Caroline Mann, A Sketch of the Life of Robert James Mann. Printed for private circulation (London: Edward Stanford Printers, 1888), 48–49.
82.
Ibid., 52.
83.
Natal Educational Return for 1864, CO 183/15.
84.
Natal Witness, 10.09.1858, 3.
85.
Shirley Hibberd, ‘The Work of the Year’, Intellectual Observer, 1 (London: Groombridge and Sons, 1862), 9.
86.
Here, Mann was engaging with contemporary theories regarding Natal Africans. Colonists promoted the idea that the majority of Africans in Natal had arrived there recently as a result of the mfecane.
87.
Robert James Mann, ‘The Black Population of the British colony of Natal, South Africa’, Intellectual Observer, 10 (1867), 184–193, 189.
88.
Guy, ‘Imifanekiso’, 12. See Robert James Mann, ‘Wild Kaffir Life and Wild Kaffir Intelligence’, Intellectual Observer, 10 (1867), 289–297.
89.
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 5–6.
90.
Robert James Mann, ‘Kaffir Promise and Capability’, Intellectual Observer, 10 (1867), 428–440, 435.
91.
Mann, ‘The Black Population’, 193.
92.
Mann, ‘Kaffir Promise’, 432.
93.
Ibid., 433.
94.
Ibid., 431.
95.
Ibid., 440.
96.
Ibid.
97.
Robert James Mann, The Colony of Natal: An Account of the Characteristics and Capabilities of this British Dependency (London: Jerrold and Sons, 1859), 188. Mann used different spellings of Kafir/Kaffir (sic) in different publications.
98.
Ibid., 210.
99.
Ibid., 217.
100.
Mann to Grey, 12.06.1869, MSB 223 3 (112), Grey collection, SAL.
101.
Mann, A Sketch of the Life, 87.

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Department of History, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa
Rebecca Swartz

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Swartz, R. (2019). Researching Education: Florence Nightingale, British Imperialism and Colonial Schools. In: Education and Empire. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95909-2_6
Published: 10 January 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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