Many Rhodes: travelling scholarships and imperial citizenship in the British academic world, 1880-1940

Since its foundation in 1901, the Rhodes Scholarships scheme has been held up as the archetype of a programme designed to foster imperial citizens. However, though impressive in scale, Cecil Rhodes's foundation was not the first to bring colonial students to Britain. Over the course of the previous half-century, governments, universities and individuals in the settler colonies had been establishing travelling scholarships for this purpose. In fact by the end of the nineteenth century the travelling scholarship had become an important part of settler universities' educational visions. It served as a crucial mechanism by which they sought to claim their citizenship of what they saw as the expansive British academic world.