ABSTRACT
Edinburgh Public Schools Were Noted for the academic and social training they provided. Edinburgh schools acted as places of refuge for girls and boys sent back ‘home’ from India, as well as acting as agents or intermediaries, preparing Scottish boys for careers within the Empire. Using a wide variety of school histories, old-boy-directories and other published sources covering all the major boys’ schools in Edinburgh and surrounding Midlothian, this chapter focuses on the nature of their former pupils’ individual involvement with colonial India. It considers how many of them had links to South Asia, and then describes how India compared through time to other career goals. The chapter addresses the impact British imperialism in India had on the schools as institutions. Secondary education was new in nineteenth-century Scotland. In the smaller towns and the rural areas, schools would teach boys at all levels, preparing the more academically gifted for university entry, sometimes as young as thirteen or fourteen.
