British Imperialism and its Legacies: Children’s Literature, Empire and Racism

Comments

Glasgow Museums has a collection of several hundred children’s books and comics which can be used to explore the way in which children were exposed to ideas about Empire, race and colonialism. School textbooks are not included in this collection.

The books and comics were generally donated to the People’s Palace, Scotland Street School Museum or Hagg’s Castle Museum of Childhood (now closed). Some were originally birthday or Christmas gifts, others were school prizes or books from school libraries.

Most of the books and comics date to the 1800s and 1900s although some are reprints of books published earlier, such as Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. They are generally fiction.

Most of the authors accepted the values and language of the world in which they lived, and therefore the books reflect that. Racist terms, stereotypes and attitudes which are unacceptable today are used uncritically, even when an author is highlighting injustice, for example, when the system of enslavement is condemned in The Red Eric) by RM Ballantyne.

It is mostly taken for granted that the world and its resources are there for white men to claim and exploit (see, for example, the reasoning given for taking land from American First Nations peoples in In the Rocky Mountains by William HG Kingston, a keen advocate of emigration abroad). Soldiers, explorers and colonists are presented as heroes.

Even books which strove to make changes to the world around them, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a significant and highly popular anti-slavery novel in the 1800s, can now be seen as problematic.

There does not appear to be much ethnic diversity among the authors, with only one book by Alexandre Dumas, the famous French mixed-heritage writer. The main characters are usually white. One exception is Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, a fantasy novel from the late 1960s in which most characters are dark-skinned and few people are white.

Broader term

British Imperialism and its Legacies: Education and Colonialism