By Dr. Andrew Klein
Dedicated to my wife, who taught me that the stories we tell about the past are never innocent—they are always about power.
I. Introduction: The Toy Chariot
They found a bronze object in Greece — a platform with tiny wheels, barely large enough for a toddler. And they called it a “chariot.”
Not because it was a chariot. Because they needed it to be one.
This is how history works. We find fragments — a pot, a bone, a toy — and we weave them into stories that fit our expectations. We call a toy a chariot because we want to believe in epic battles. We call evolution a ladder because we want to believe we are at the top. And we call the modern Middle East a “product” of British policy because we want to believe it was made by rational, civilised men.
But the toy is not a chariot. And the Middle East is not a product of British policy — it is a product of a worldview. A worldview that was carefully encoded in the English public schools of the nineteenth century and then carried into the corridors of power by the men who drew the lines on the map.
II. The Egg of Empire: Public Schools and the Forging of a Ruling Class
In the nineteenth century, the English public schools — Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster and their ilk — were the primary institutions for grooming the administrators of the British Empire. As Robert Verkaik documents in Posh Boys, their main purpose was to “groom upper-class boys to become the administrators of the British Empire,” instilling an “unshakeable confidence” and sense of superiority in their pupils, as members of “the best class of the best nation in the world”.
These institutions developed what scholars have termed an “imperial mentality“ among their students — a worldview that supported the aims of the British Empire from the mid-eighteenth century through the First World War. They demanded “unswerving loyalty and a willing submission to a rigid hierarchy”, preparing boys for careers in the political, economic, and military machinery of empire.
The curriculum was not incidental. Boys were immersed in Latin and Greek, learning the history of the Roman Empire. They were taught to see themselves as heirs to Rome, tasked with bringing “civilisation” to the “barbarians.” Critics argue that “educational ethnocentrism had its origins in classical elite schooling in Britain oriented towards the preservation and enhancement of the Empire”.
The “old boy” networks forged at these schools persisted long after graduation. One study of British decolonisation highlights the “impact of informal ‘old boy’ networks” on policy, noting how men who had shared classrooms and playing fields continued to shape the empire’s fate. As the New Republic observed, the men who sent Britain careening into Brexit — David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage — were “all products of elite boarding schools, notorious symbols of social and economic inequality”.
III. Orientalism: The Worldview That Shaped Policy
The worldview instilled in these schools was not just about confidence. It was about a specific way of seeing the world.
Edward Said, in his seminal work Orientalism (1978), described this worldview as a “way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based upon the Orient’s special place in European Western experience”. It was, and is, “an extension of the colonial and imperial policies of the European Empires,” which viewed the native population as “gullible, ‘devoid of energy and initiative,’ much given to ‘fulsome flattery,’ intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals”.
Said argued that Orientalism, “in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern world, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power“. It was not merely a post-hoc justification for imperial actions; it was “foundational in constructing the narrative that enabled colonization”.
The result was a political doctrine that “elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness”. Orientalism answered the six principal questions asked during the construction of any worldview: it described the people, explained the situation, predicted a model of the future, assigned moral value, prescribed action, and established what, within the Orientalist view, was true and false.
This worldview shaped policy within and toward the region. British officials did not approach the Middle East with an open mind. They approached it with a script — a script that had been written in the classrooms of Eton and Harrow.
IV. The Mandate in Practice: Education as a Tool of Control
The British Mandate in Palestine (1920–1948) is a case study in how this worldview operated in practice.
The Covenant of the League of Nations described the mandate system as a “sacred trust of civilisation”. British fulfilment of that trust drew on “notions of liberalism, utilitarianism, and rationalism, core elements in a British philosophy of colonial rule”. But these ideals were filtered through Orientalist representations. “Cultural preconceptions enabled the basic premise of trusteeship by providing a binary image of ‘backward’, inferior subject populations in need of assistance and of progressive, superior Western powers capable of delivering the required ‘tutelage'”.
The influence of trusteeship and Orientalism was examined in five key administrative areas: self-government, immigration, land, education, and law and order. British educational policy in Palestine was “plagued by contradictions and irreconcilable goals: they desired secular education without secularism, national education without nationalism, and religious education without sectarianism”.
Soon after the occupation of Palestine, the British administration established an Education Department that was to become a “central socializing agent in this new colonial order”. The new educational administration sought to learn from “past pedagogical mistakes, especially from the bitter experiences in Egypt and Iraq“. But the colonial dialogue “could not answer the burning questions and conflicting views over the future of Palestine”.
The result was a system that exacerbated social fragmentation rather than building unity. British educational policy has been described as promoting “mandatory separation” between communities. The government school system was expanded to encourage “basic levels of mass literacy,” but the underlying aim was control, not liberation. For Palestinian nationalists, British education policy was “a source of constant frustration” — “the shortage of schools, the lack of local control over the curriculum, and the marginalization and de-politicization of Palestinian history constituted major grievances”.
V. The Legacy: A Worldview That Endures
The pattern did not end with the Mandate. It persists in the English private schools of today, which actively market themselves in the Middle East. And it persists in the British foreign policy establishment, which continues to be shaped by men and women who, while not imperial administrators, carry the same worldview.
The Middle East is still seen through the lens of a system that was designed to “manage” it — not to understand it. This is why, as observed, “Greece is mythologised, while Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, and the rest are viewed through the hostile gaze of the Orientalist.” Greece is seen as part of the “West” — a cradle of civilisation, a precursor to Rome, a legitimate ancestor. The Ottoman Empire is seen as part of the “Orient” — despotic, stagnant, in need of reform. The distinction is not historical. It is ideological.
As Hilary Falb Kalisman documents in Teachers as State-Builders, public school teachers across the Arab world “wielded an unlikely influence over the modern Middle East”. The history of education across Britain’s Middle Eastern mandates “reframes our understanding of the profession of teaching, the connections between public education and nationalism, and the fluid politics of the interwar Middle East”.
The men who drew the lines on the map did not do so in a vacuum. They did so with a worldview that had been carefully constructed over decades — a worldview that divided the world into the “civilised” and the “backward,” the “West” and the “Orient,” the “us” and the “them.”
VI. Conclusion: The Toy Chariot Still Rolls
The toy chariot was not a chariot. The Homeric epics were not history. And the British Mandate was not a “sacred trust” — it was a system of control, justified by a worldview that had been encoded in the public schools of England.
The toy chariot still rolls. The stories we tell about the past are still shaped by the same worldview that shaped the men who drew the lines on the map. And the Middle East is still being “managed” by people who think they know what is best for it — because they were taught to think that way.
But we are not fooled. We see the toy chariot for what it is. And we see the worldview for what it is — not a reflection of reality, but a construction of power.
Andrew Klein
References
1. Verkaik, R. Posh Boys: How the English Public Schools Ruin Britain.
2. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism.
3. Schools of Empire Project. Rugby School.
4. Longland, M. J. (2013). A Sacred Trust? British Administration of the Mandate for Palestine, 1920-1936. University of Nottingham.
5. British educational policy in Palestine. Tribalism in the Classroom.
6. Kalisman, H. F. Teachers as State-Builders: Education and the Making of the Modern Middle East. Princeton University Press.
7. MyMESA3. Pedagogic Impossibilities in Mandate Palestine.
8. Brennan. Alienation and Integration. Illinois State University.
9. Duncan Sandys and the Informal Politics of Britain’s Late Decolonisation.
10. New Republic. (2018). Britain’s Boarding School Problem.
11. The British public school and the imperial mentality.
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