The Gospel of Work and Money

"The Gospel of Work and Money brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to explore practices and legacies of industrial education across modern global history. At its core, industrial education was a project of imperial modernity that sought to reform marginalized populations towards the extractive ends of empire and capital. Its architects and practitioners identified interlocked civilizational and financial benefits of these practices. Its classrooms were spaces where children and youth learned to labor in ways designed to transform them into pliant and mobile workers. The Gospel of Work and Money is the first collection to explore forms of coercive labor education as connected global phenomenon across modern history and foreground the many ways that 'work' remains the primary pedagogical lens of capital in our present era. It thus links practices of industrial and imperial modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to a host of projects across an ostensibly decolonized world. As a set of critical histories, it is valuable to scholars studying capitalism, empire, education, and labor"--Publisher's description.