This article provides an introduction to the two articles in this Special Theme on education, labour, and discipline in colonial Asia. It offers a brief historiography of education to indigenous children in the colonial context provided by non-state as well as state actors. We argue that while many studies have separated the motives behind, and actions of, these different actors in relation to education and “civilizing missions”, it is worthwhile connecting these histories. Moreover, apart from looking at motives, the articles in this Special Theme aim to show the value of studying educational practices in a colonial context. Finally, this introduction identifies several opportunities for future – comparative as well as transnational – studies into the topic of education, child labour, and discipline.

To this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.

This article addresses the colonial project of “civilizing” and educating indigenous people in the farthest corners of the Dutch empire – South Dutch New Guinea (1902–1942), exploring the entanglement between colonial education practice and the civilizing mission, unravelling the variety of actors in colonial education in South Dutch New Guinea. Focusing on practice, I highlight that colonial education invested heavily in disciplining the bodies, minds, and beliefs of indigenous peoples to align them with Western Catholic standards. This observation links projects to educating and disciplining indigenous youth to the consolidation of colonial power. Central to these intense colonial interventions in the lives of Papuans were institutions of colonial education, managed by the Catholic mission but run by non-European teachers recruited from elsewhere in the Dutch colony. Their importance as proponents of the “civilizing mission” is largely unappreciated in the historiography of missionary work on Papua.

The history of labour on public works construction is usually presented as a masculine experience, either because the workforce studied is mostly male, or because the labour of women remains unrecorded. Does the history of labour and wage on public works undergo change if we account for women labourers? This article examines this question in the context of famine public works in the second half of nineteenth-century India. State employment on public works was part of a famine relief programme and women, largely from agricultural labouring and small peasant families, worked on the construction of roads, railways, canals, and tanks. The article traces the development of task-gender association on famine public works both as a norm and in practice. Further, it analyses the evidence on negotiations made by women labourers themselves with the existing gendered notions of work and wage. This study contributes to the historiography of labour in a colonial context in two ways: first, it adds to the existing corpus on forms of labour extraction for construction work; and, second, it explores the question of women's work and remuneration outside factories, mills, and mines.

This review introduces the broad themes and methods of Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations and focuses on the author's portrait of actual practices of citizenship in early modern cities of Europe. It highlights the strengths of Prak's study in formidable archival work and broad comparative reading. It points out the central place of practices of poor relief to the building of urban networks of citizenship, drawing out the importance of women in participating in these informal yet critical practices of citizenship. Taking the relationship between provisioning for the poor and community building seriously, and building on Prak's view of Britain's relatively smooth transition from early modern to modern practices of citizenship, the essay speculates on whether England's unusual nationwide poor law (born in the early modern period and exemplifying ideals of citizenship usually associated with “urban republicanism”) played its own critical role in the rise of an integrated nation there.

Maarten Prak argues that urban citizen associations remained vigorous in the West from the Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, and that their support for commercial activity helped bring about that Revolution. That is half correct. During the two thousand years from 300 BC to 1750 AD, numerous societies had similar peaks of urbanization, commercial activity, and per capita income (often approaching, but never exceeding, a “peak pre-industrial income” level of roughly $1,900 in 1990 international dollars.) Vigorous urban societies produced repeated episodes of comparably high incomes, not ever-escalating levels of GDP/capita. What produced the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution was a particular manifestation of urban citizenship that occurred only in Great Britain – the victory of Parliament over royal authority creating exceptional religious and intellectual freedom and institutionalized pluralism. This was not common to urbanized, commercial societies except in rare periods; only in Britain did urban associations and culture blend with scientific culture, producing a broad surge of scientific and technical activity that overcame the prior limits on organic societies.

Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations merits praise for what he has added to our understanding of early modern and modern European history. He presents persuasive arguments and evidence for how variations among early modern European cities and their citizens together with subsequent variations among relations between cities and state shaped the modern relations between European national states and their citizens. Prak also extends the concept of citizenship to China and the Ottoman Empire where neither the ideological, nor the institutional features of European citizenship existed by discussing Chinese and Ottoman urban social, economic, and political practices that in early modern Europe relate to citizenship. Such a move makes invisible the early modern ideological and institutional foundations of the Chinese and Ottoman practices he recounts. It additionally creates the problem of determining how, if at all, what he calls Chinese and Ottoman citizenship mattered to nineteenth-century Chinese and Ottoman subjects as they encountered for the first time Western notions of citizenship. In order to write global history, we need more studies of Chinese, Ottoman, and other histories, which explain the changing political architecture of relations between people and those who ruled them to complement what Maarten Prak's fine study of citizens without nations gives us for European history.

In Citizens without Nations, I argued that national histories have overlooked a large and significant range of citizenship practices that can be found in towns and cities across the pre-modern world. These practices related to local politics (elections, consultations), to economic activities (guilds), to social policies (poor relief), and to military defence (civic militias). This rejoinder addresses three issues raised by critics Jack Goldstone, Katherine Lynch, and R. Bin Wong in relation to my book on urban citizenship in Europe, Asia, and the Americas: ideas, including religion, nations, and economic growth. All three have a lot to do with the implications of global comparisons. Ideas and nations have taken distinct forms in the various world regions. Foregrounding them makes comparisons more difficult. Urban contexts, on the other hand, can be more easily compared. Economic development was introduced in the book as a benchmark to see if and how citizenship arrangements might have impacted prosperity. The economic numbers are, however, still fragile for the pre-industrial era. Therefore, they will have to be supplemented with qualitative studies, which are slowly but surely emerging also outside Europe.