Travelling Researchers, Colonial Difference: Comparative Education in an Age of Exploration

Much existing scholarship takes Marc-Antoine Jullien's 1816/17 "Esquisse et Vues Préliminaries d'un ouvrage sur L'Éducation Comparée" ["Sketch and Preliminary Views for a work on Comparative Education"] as an epochal moment in the establishment of comparative education as a scientific field of academic study. Yet, Jullien's plan also needs to be examined in relation to European traditions of travel and global colonial expansion--and, concurrently, to the cosmopolitan practices, networks and mobilities that constitute social science. This article argues that principles of colonial difference saturate Jullien's proposal. The ways that Jullien's work enables and disables subjectivities and subject positions as well as the ways it reifies social and contextual categories of analysis have cautionary salience for us today. Jullien's proposal did not found a discipline nor did it spark a continuous conversation, yet it is an instance in the establishment of the field that shows the stubbornly durable entanglement of educational comparison with colonialism.