Colonialism and Childhood

Colonialism encompasses a range of practices and policies which support the expansion of a polity’s territory to incorporate other lands and involves various forms and degrees of domination of the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands already. Children and childhood have been affected by colonialism in diverse ways: As a globalising movement that has transformed lives, colonialism has had distinct impacts on children within both colonising and colonised populations but also modern understandings of childhood have been formed in the context of imperialism and were implicated in the rationale for colonialism. The period of great expansion, dispossession, and economic change that marked the Modern era of colonialism serves as the context in which modern concepts of childhood were shaped, alongside understandings of individual liberty ...