Childhood in a Global Perspective. Karen Wells
the same clothes as adults, without any of the stylized features – chubbiness, large eyes, body–head ratios, smiling faces, small hands – that later artists used to depict children as different kinds of people from adults. Aries infers from this difference in how children are depicted that in the earlier period there was no such thing as childhood.
Historians have taken issue both with the limited sources that Aries relies on and the inferences that he draws from these sources (Vann 1982; Pollock 1983). Portraiture was expensive and the people who commissioned portraits of their families or themselves were a small elite whose attitudes to childhood and, for the children, experience of childhood were likely to be very different from those of the general population. Portraits are also highly stylized and use special conventions, so that how children are portrayed in these paintings cannot necessarily be taken as an indication of children’s experience of everyday life or their representation in more popular media.
Despite the lively debate about Aries’s work, the central contention of Centuries of Childhood, namely that the attitudes, sensibilities and experiences that we now think of as immanent to childhood are an invention of the modern period, is widely accepted by historians and social scientists. In their introduction to the important collection of papers on historical research into American childhood, Hawes and Hiner comment that ‘Aries has been justly criticised for his selective and sometimes uncritical use of evidence, but no one has successfully challenged his essential point that childhood is not an immutable stage of life, free from the influence of historical change’ (Hawes and Hiner 1985: 3).
Aries’s interest was in the impacts of modernity on social life. Already implicit in the establishment of Centuries of Childhood as a kind of foundational text for the history of childhood is the idea of modernity as a non-global time. The modern world, or modernity, in this discourse does not simply mean contemporary life; it specifically refers to the shifts in relations between the state and the people of a territory, the invention of the citizen and of the public life of the state/politics and the private life of the family/children (Aries 2003; Chakrabarty 1993). The ways in which modernity in this sense, and the childhoods it ushered in, were played out were of course different in the imperial heartlands and in the colonial territories (Balagopalan 2018).
Even within that territory that could loosely be called ‘the modern world’, that is to say the metropole and its colonial territories, differences in the organization of the state, of labour and family life make it difficult to argue for a global history of childhood; and moreover these two constructs (metropole and colony) do not begin to cover the multiplicity of planetary childhood from the fifteenth century. The central focus of Latin American history of (or, at least, including) childhood has been on family structures, with Freyre’s 1933 (1963) account of family life on a sixteenth-century Brazilian sugar plantation remaining a keystone of the literature. His ‘vivid portrait made it clear the Portuguese family [and the plantation it was organized around] was the dominant institution in Brazil for colonization, government, education, maintenance of order and economic investment’ (Kuznesof 2005: 862).
The emerging literature on African child labour (Swai 1979; Chirwa 1993; Hansen 1990) shows how important this labour was to the processes of capital accumulation for white farmers and the (colonial) state in East and Southern Africa. Beverley Grier’s 2006 Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe was the first book-length study of the history of child labour in an African country. Grier’s seminal contribution to the historiography of African childhood shows how African children ‘struggled to shape the circumstances of their own lives and . . . , in the process, helped to shape the history of the colony’ (2006: 2).
An organizing theme of Grier’s book is that childhood in Zimbabwe was a racialized concept that meant that the lives of Black children and white children and expectations placed on them by the colonial state, white farmers and their families were entirely shaped by racist ideology. In the areas of significant white settlement childhood was ‘racially based, with the childhood of settlers being organized in radically different ways from the childhood of Africans’ (Grier 2006: 18). This theme is also at the heart of Owen White’s study of the children of African–European parents, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895–1960. This is also one of the few histories of African childhood that does not take either school or work as its main focus (although it discusses both). It explores instead how the French state responded to African–European children or what they called ‘the Métis problem’ through strategies of separating in school, work and family métissage children from both African and European populations. Surprisingly, given the obsession during Apartheid rule with establishing degrees of Europeanness/ Africanness, there is no comparable history for South Africa.
The meanings of childhood and children’s experiences are inseparable from the ways that colonial rule was established over African territory. The colonial state and white settler capital utilized ‘[t]he belief that children should contribute to the material reproduction of their households [which] was a core aspect of the construction of childhood among the Shona and Ndebele people’ (Grier 2006: 29) at the end of the nineteenth century. This belief has to be situated in a context of labour-intensive agricultural production that meant all household members had to contribute their labour to the maintenance of the household. Children were no exception, and whilst boys and girls mostly took on different tasks, all children had to work. Colonization changed the organization of agricultural production and alongside it African concepts of childhood, particularly in relation to work and school (Grier 2006: 33–68). Ironically, as Africans started to seek out school education for their children in the belief that this might erode the material and status differences between themselves and the white settlers, the colonial state banned white children from work and made school compulsory for them but not for African children.
Jon Saari’s (1990) Legacies of Childhood: Growing up Chinese in a Time of Crisis, 1890–1920 is a study of how Chinese concepts of becoming human inflected concepts of childhood and attitudes towards children and parenting practices. He weaves Chinese ideas about becoming human together with a history of the lives of privileged young men in turn-of-the-century China. A much broader picture of Chinese childhood is to be found in Ping-Chen Hsiung’s A Tender Voyage (2005). Hsiung draws on twelfth-century sources to show that paediatric health care was well developed in China from a very early period and locates this as an indicator of the high cultural value attached to children. In an apparent, and rather surprising, echo of a Western binary between Romantic and Puritan concepts of childhood, Hsiung identifies within the Confucian tradition a neo-Confucian model that emphasized control, discipline and punishment and the Wang-ming school of awakening the child through education and self-reflection.
Hugh Cunningham’s (1995) Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 shows how middle-class childhood was generalized to the wider, working-class populations of industrial Europe. From about 1750, Cunningham argues, there was a great increase in state intervention in children’s lives, beginning with the gradual regulation of child labour in the nineteenth century and the introduction of compulsory schooling making school a common experience of childhood by the end of the nineteenth century. Colin Heywood’s widely cited A History of Childhood (2001) about children’s lives in North America and Europe contends that childhood (or the ‘concept of childhood’) is not a modern invention but that what people expect of children (‘conceptions of childhood’) has changed in response to wider changes in society, especially in the shift from agricultural to industrial economies. Heywood refutes the view, advanced most famously by de Mause (1988), that parents were abusive or neglectful of their children in the past. He argues that parental practices such as swaddling that might seem, from a contemporary viewpoint, abusive were motivated by care and concern. Linda Pollock’s Forgotten Children (1983) also finds evidence from diary sources that a concept of childhood is not a modern invention and that harsh treatment of children was not normative in the four centuries of her study (from 1500 to 1900). Heywood charts the fall in child mortality and the improvements in children’s health, the expansion of schooling and increases in state intervention, but stresses the persistence of inequalities between classes, regions and ethnic groups so as ‘to avoid an air of triumphalism’ (Heywood 2001: 145; 2018).