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Liberal subjects: elementary education and native agency in the British West Indies, c. 1834–1860

ABSTRACT This article argues that missionaries in the British West Indies conceived of elementary education as a key element of the transition from slavery to freedom in the 1830s and 40s. They suggested that elementary schools and teacher training colleges could not only teach Christianity and literacy, but also create a black middle class, inculcate the values of capitalism in the free black population more broadly, and even lay the foundation for an educational and religious mission to Africa led by free blacks. However, these utopian hopes were short-lived. By the 1850s, frustration and anger over the perceived slow pace of change and financial difficulties set in among both missionaries and the black teachers who had once been so central to missionaries’ hopes for the future of the Atlantic world.