The educational afterlife of Greater Britain, 1903–1914.

Following its late nineteenth-century emergence as an important element within federalist thinking across the British Empire, the idea of Greater Britain lost much of its political force in the years following the Boer War. The concept however continued to retain considerable residual currency in other fields of Imperial debate, including those concerning policies and practices of education across the Empire. This paper explores aspects of such debate by examining the intellectual contexts, theoretical assertions and conceptual formulations deployed in relation to questions about education, leadership, Imperial unity and racial identity in the early twentieth century. These issues are illuminated by an analysis of proposals by the Imperial theorist E.B. Sargant for the educational “colonisation” of the Empire of white settlement by “daughter” schools transposed from the traditional public schools of the metropole and staffed by teachers conceived as “the regulars of the State”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]