The British Empire A Sketch Of The Geography Growth Natural And Political Features Of The United Kingdom Its Colonies And Dependencies

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Changes in the nature of knowledge production, plus rapid social and cultural change, have meant that the 'curriculum question' – what is to be taught, and by extension, 'whose knowledge' – has been hotly contested. The question of what to teach has become more and more controversial. This book asks: what is an appropriate curriculum response to the acute, renewed interest in issues of race and racism? How does a school subject like geography respond? The struggle over the school curriculum has frequently been portrayed as being between educational 'traditionalists' and 'progressives'. This book suggests a way out of this impasse. Drawing upon and extending insights from 'social realism', it explores what a Future 3 geography curriculum might look like - one that recognizes the importance of the academic discipline as a source of curriculum-making but at the same time avoids geographical knowledge becoming set in stone. The book focuses very sharply on issues of race and racism, enabling teachers to engage in curriculum making in geography that is racially literate. The Foreword is written by Julian Agyeman, a former geography teacher in the UK and now Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, USA.

The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners it more or less defined Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. It also had a great impact on Britain herself: for example, on her economy, security, population, and eating habits. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. Indeed, this has now become the conventional wisdom: that Britain was steeped in imperialism domestically, which affected (or infected) almost everything Britons thought, felt, and did. This is the first book to examine this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. Bernard Porter, a leading imperial historian, argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. Many Britons could hardly have been aware of it for most of the nineteenth century and only a small number was in any way committed to it. Between these extremes opinions differed widely over what was even meant by the empire. This depended largely on class, and even when people were aware of the empire, it had no appreciable impact on their thinking about anything else. Indeed, the influence far more often went the other way, with perceptions of the empire being affected (or distorted) by more powerful domestic discourses. Although Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society. As well as showing how this was possible, Porter also discusses the implications of this attitude for Britain and her empire, and for the relationship between culture and imperialism more generally, bringing his study up to date by including the case of the present-day USA.