Kaiyi Li - Transnational Education between The League of Nations and China: The Interwar Period

We are very pleased to announce the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. The International Standing Conference for the History of Education has organized conferences in the field since 1978. Thanks to our collaboration with Palgrave Macmillan we now offer an edited book series for the publication of innovative scholarship in the history of education.

This series seeks to engage with historical scholarship that analyzes education within a global, world, or transnational perspective. Specifically, it seeks to examine the role of educational institutions, actors, technologies as well as pedagogical ideas that for centuries have crossed regional and national boundaries. Topics for publication may include the study of educational networks and practices that connect national and colonial domains, or those that range in time from the age of Empire to decolonization. These networks could concern the international movement of educational policies, curricula, pedagogies, or universities within and across different socio-political settings. The actors under examination might include individuals and groups of people, but also educational apparatuses such as textbooks, built-environments, and bureaucratic paperwork situated within a global perspective. Books in the series may be single authored or edited volumes. The strong transnational dimension of the Global Histories of Education series means that many of the volumes should be based on archival research undertaken in more than one country and using documents written in multiple languages. All books in the series will be published in English, although we welcome English-language proposals for manuscripts which were initially written in other languages and which will be translated into English at the cost of the author. All submitted manuscripts will be blind peer-reviewed with editorial decisions to be made by the ISCHE series editors who themselves are appointed by the ISCHE Executive Committee to serve three to five year terms.

Full submissions should include: (1) a proposal aligned to the Palgrave Book Proposal form (downloadable here); (2) the CV of the author(s) or editor(s); and, (3) a cover letter that explains how the proposed book fits into the overall aims and framing of the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. Proposals and queries should be addressed to bookseries@ische.org. Preliminary inquiries are welcome and encouraged.

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International organisations, such as the UNESCO, the OECD, and the World Bank, are playing an increasing role in the globalisation of education, from helping designing national policies to carrying out worldwide educational assistance programmes. However, even though the transnational is becoming a rubric in historical studies, and the historical rise of those international organisations and their works in the field of education has attracted many scholars attention, the role of the League of Nations, as a pioneer and far-reaching international organisation in the field of internationalising education during the interwar period, has not been very well explored by scholars so far.

The book is a study of how the League of Nations endeavoured to explore the field of education within the framework of technical cooperation between the League and China during the interwar period. Four cases are selected to be analysed in the book: teaching about the League of Nations in China, and the Leagues role in the development of Chinese educational film, which belong to the works of globalising educational concepts and methods; the education mission appointed by the League of Nations to China in 1931, and the Chinese education mission to Europe with the assistance of the League in 1932, which belong to the works of international educational assistance.

When the author started the topic as her PhD thesis, the main question she came up with was what did the education cooperation between the League and China bring to China. However, the outcomes of the four cases analysed in the book are not impressive. In the process of thinking about what led to such outcomes and doing the literature review, she entered the field of transnational history and found a new perspective to write and explore the meaning of the four cases. The book focuses on how and what factors influenced educational knowledge moving across different types of boundaries during the interwar period, and contains mainly three lines of analysis: the process the League normalised through its works in the field of education, the experts who travelled transnationally and their experiences, and the role of the Chinese government.

The book has used historical documents in different languages. Where necessary, the author keeps Chinese characters after the English translation. In the Romanisation of personal names and place names, simplified Pinyin are generally used. The only exceptions are the University of Nanking and Canton. The former refers to the university sponsored by American churches in Nanjing until 1952. In the cases that Wade-Giles has become the accepted standard, the index of the book contains both spellings. The city of Beijing, after the Beiyang government was placed by the Nanjing government, was named Beijing. The book uses the name Beijing.