A landmark work from the author of Orientalism that explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the Western powers built empires that stretched from Australia to the West Indies, Western artists created masterpieces ranging from Mansfield Park to Heart of Darkness and Aida. Yet most cultural critics continue to see these phenomena as separate. Edward Said looks at these works alongside those of such writers as W. B. Yeats, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie to show how subject peoples produced their own vigorous cultures of opposition and resistance. Vast in scope and stunning in its erudition, Culture and Imperialism reopens the dialogue between literature and the life of its time.

This volume concentrates on the processes and practices of formal education, which shaped, and were shaped by, imperial values, attitudes and behaviour. It is concerned with: The myths and visions of imperialism; The nature and extent of ethnocentric attitudes, declared and undeclared; The use of education as a means of disseminating and reinforcing imperial images; The changing concept of imperialism as reflected in the emphases of educational literature The different perceptions of imperialism in the various social and ethnic strata of metropolitan and overseas communities and education systems The assimiliation, adaptation and rejection of metropolitan educational models The issue of imperial education as enlightenment, hegemony and control. The book features chapters by educationalists, historians and sociologists on education as a cornerstone in the construction of imperial control.