Children and Youth in History

The website returns search results as captioned small thumbnails images that can be clicked through to the main image or conveniently enlarged on the fly by "mousing over them." There is also the option of viewing the results as a list or grid, and visitors who register with the website can save their searches to a "lightbox."

From an educational standpoint, the Images of Empire's only significant disappointment is that it appears to be intended primarily as a profit-making venture. The images themselves are watermarked with the Images of Empire copyright, relatively small, and scanned to only 72 dpi. These are sufficient for classroom use, but they are significantly inferior to the high resolution images offered by the RCS Photograph Project. For those wishing to acquire higher quality images there is a detailed licensing price list for a wide variety of media, but there is no discount for non-commercial educational use.

Nevertheless, Images of Empire is an impressive research tool and teaching resource. Its vast collection of images, advanced search options, and sophisticated tagging system provides access to hundreds of pictures and film clips of young people, students, and families that chronicle the changing experiences of childhood under the British Empire. In addition to documenting broad shifts in parenting, labor, schooling, and play over the past century, Images of Empire demonstrates that children played a central role in legitimizing, sustaining, and complicating systems of imperial rule.

Teachers can use images of Indian pageboys at a coronation ceremony, smiling Arab children in British Palestine, African Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in Kenya, a Methodist school for girls in India, a Chinese child freed from domestic slavery, and a British doctor treating a young African child for sleeping sickness to illustrate how imperial photographers used children to depict the British Empire as popular, just, and benevolent.1 In contract, pictures of a young Jamaican boy riding a donkey to market instead of school, a Kikuyu mother picking lice off her daughter's head, and naked and malnourished children in independent Ghana suggest that non-European peoples needed western supervision because they lacked the means to raise their children properly.

Alternatively, the collection also shows that children could be politically dangerous. To illustrate this, teachers can use the photographs of Boy Scouts and regimented Kikuyu boys exercising behind barbed wire in "strategic villages" during the Mau Mau Emergency to ask their students to think about why some young Africans enjoyed the privileges of being Scouts while their peers were confined in prison camps. These sharply contrasting images of voluntary and forced conformity demonstrate that the Kenyan authorities worried that uncontrolled African adolescents were a threat to British imperial rule. (See: African Scouting Teaching Module written by Tim Parsons.)

An equally interesting exercise would be to use the many images of European children in the collection to help students understand the dominant position of westerners in the British Empire. In contrast to pictures of poor, laboring, and impoverished African and Asian children, Images of Empire provides photographs and home movies of British boys and girls enjoying an idyllic childhood replete with attentive servants, exotic pets, comfortably safe houses and compounds, good schools, and loving parents.

In comparing these strikingly different photographic records teachers can ask their students to think about the inherent economic and social advantages of empire and the privileges of western notions of childhood. While imperial photographers often featured African and Asian children in imperial schools, the many images of poor and laboring children in the collection demonstrate that they were a small but fortunate minority.