This paper traces the ways in which representations of race and racism have changed or remained the same in English commercial history textbooks from 1991 to the present day. In particular, the paper focuses on how colonised peoples are represented in 20^th century history, and the tensions inherent in textbooks’ efforts to ‘include’ colonised peoples in the British historical canon (or ‘canonise’ them).

Research in the UK on race and history education tends to focus on curriculum policy (Haydn 2012; Faas 2011), the experiences or agency of teachers and/or students (Bracey 2016; Doharty 2019; Woolley 2019; Henry 2020; Huber & Kitson, 2020; Smith 2017, 2020; Hart 2021), or on teachers’ curriculum decision-making (Harris & Reynolds 2018; Harris 2021), leaving educational materials such as textbooks underexamined. When textbooks are the object of research, the approach taken is descriptive (Grindel 2013). Descriptive studies are less likely to consider the overarching ethico-political consequences of race-based representations and thus are limited in their analysis. Although there is a tradition of more critical research into processes of racialization in education (materials and practice) coming from the US (Epstein 2000; Mattias 2013; Chandler & McKnight 2009; Brown & Brown 2010; Brown & Au 2014), Canada (Montgomery 2006; Stanton 2014), Ireland (Bryan 2012), the Netherlands (Weiner 2014, 2016; Sijpenhof 2020), Portugal (Araujo & Maeso 2012), South Africa (Teeger 2015; Wilmot & Naido 2011; Subreenduth 2013), Israel (Nasser & Nasser 2008; Sheps 2019) and Hong Kong (Lin & Jackson 2019), it is considerably less prominent in research on England and its statutory history education.

It is well established that education, and history education in particular, is a core site for maintaining (and challenging) the status-quo (Gramsci 1971; Au & Apple 2009). In the UK, education reproduces and reinforces norms of whiteness and racial superiority (Bhopal 2018). The production of racial hierarchies (racialization) is an enduring modern process, but one that is iterative, fluid and slippery, becoming ever more entrenched, “submerged and hidden” with each iteration (Ladson-Billings 2009: 18). Today, we can understand racialization in terms of ‘postracial’ logics of racelessness, colour evasiveness, individualism, legal regimes of equality, and racial denial (Goldberg 2009, 2015; Lentin & Titley 2011) and, increasingly, the “post-postracial” resurgence of racial science (Lentin 2020: 25), both of which work to maintain and extend oppressive racial structures and hierarchies while shielding them from view.

To provide a nuanced and robust understanding of evolutions in processes of racialization and the shifting faces of racisms in statutory history education in England, this paper journeys through each iteration of the National Curriculum (1991, 1995, 1999, 2007, 2014) and its interactions with 14 history textbooks published between 1991 and 2023. A historical tracing approach to Critical Discourse Analysis across this period was used. This enabled for more continual and subtle changes in discursive techniques to be observed across the period 1991-present, than simply comparing two distinct timepoints would allow. As such, both textbook progress and limitations can be acknowledged (Brown & Brown 2010), as well as an understanding of how symbolic and cosmetic changes are enacted, often packaged as structural and impactful change.

This paper explores one, more hopeful, theme that has emerged from the wider study: the canonisation of colonised peoples into British narratives of the First and Second World Wars. Analysis demonstrates a slow, non-linear process of representing colonised peoples in a variety of ways. What appears begrudging and obligatory, at times self-aware and performative, transforms, most recently, into celebratory and restorative tones. I show how textbooks move between dehumanisation and near total exclusion from the canon, to segregation from the canon, ad-hoc and superficial inclusion (footnotes to the canon), assertions of authorial innocence at ‘forgotten’ histories, and moves, in 2023 textbooks, to directly confront and counter certain racial issues. First, the overwhelming whiteness of the canon is challenged. Second, certain textbooks are, to a degree, racially literate and acknowledge racial structures above and beyond the individual. Third, and in opposition to literature demonstrating binary, oversimplified individualising narratives of race/racism in textbooks (Chandler & McKnight 2009; Hutchins 2011; van Kessel & Crowley 2013), more recent individualised narratives take a detailed, humanising life-history approach. However, there remains a hesitance to meaningfully interrogate whiteness and tensions in understanding and disrupting racializing processes.

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