Epilogue: New Directions in the History of Boarding Schools

Abstract

In different times and places across the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries imperialists, missionaries, revolutionaries, entrepreneurs and a variety of defenders of tradition established boarding schools. They did so for strikingly disparate ends. Some schools were intended as engines of privilege, others as sites of eliminationist assimilation or accelerated state-building. Lurking on the edges of society they sequestered young people and applied to them a variety of exclusionary strategies. But their low-key appearance was deceptive. For boarding schools came to be entwined with, and played a role in, the epochal struggles that would reshape the world in a period defined by breakneck modernization. This chapter provides an epilogue that looks across the preceding chapters and draws together key aspects the discussion. It examines the contribution made by the collection in terms of its conceptual approach and sets out how the volume presents a research agenda that might inform wider scholarship.