Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T12:02:49.300Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The importance of Macaulay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Kenneth Ballhatchet
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In J.R.A.S. 1988/2 Robert E. Frykenberg assails what he calls the “myth” that Macaulay's minute on education in British India was the occasion for a radical change in policy which imposed English education on an unwilling people. He puts forward three main arguments. First, there was no radical change in policy, for the government continued to support “Oriental” education and scholarship as well as English education. Secondly, Macaulay's advocacy of English education was a recognition of the views of “forward-looking gentry in India”. Thirdly, his minute was “one more salvo in a long and running set of encounters in which the positions of some protagonists were often much more blurred than has been properly realised by later generations of historians”. What is new in all this?

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 122 , Issue 1 , January 1990 , pp. 91 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 “The myth of English as a ‘colonialist’ imposition upon India: a reappraisal with special reference to South India”, J.R.A.S. (1988/1992), pp. 305–15Google Scholar.

2 Thompson, E., Life of Charles, Lord Metcalfe (London, 1937), p. 302Google Scholar.

3 Spear, T. G. P., “Bentinck and education”, Cambridge Historical Journal, VI, no. 1 (1938), pp. 78–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ballhatchet, , “The home government and Bentinck's education policy”, Cambridge Historical Journal, X, no. 2 (1951), pp. 224–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Sinha, D. P., Some Aspects of British Social and Administrative Policy in India during the Administration of Lord Auckland (Calcutta, 1969), pp. 67–82Google Scholar.

6 Rosselli, J., Lord William Bentinck: the Making of a Liberal Imperialist, 1774–1838 (London, 1974), pp. 214–25Google Scholar.

7 Ahmed, A. F. Salahuddin, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal, 1815–1835 (London, 1965)Google Scholar, passim.

8 Spear, op. cit.

9 Kiernan, V. G., The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 41Google Scholar.

10 Clive, J., Thomas Babington Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (London, 1973), pp. 378–9Google Scholar.