This accompanies Alice Byrne’s Contemporary European History article Sound Investment’? British Cultural Diplomacy and Overseas Students: The British Council’s Students Committee, 1935–1939

At the time of writing, students and universities across Europe are grappling to come to terms with the implications of the UK government’s decision to withdraw from the Erasmus exchange programme and to launch its own Turing Scheme intended to support “Global Britain”. Brexit is also likely to impact student mobility to the UK in other ways: while coming to the UK has become more difficult for EU students, au pairs and language assistants, Indo-British trade negotiations hold out the promise of a better deal for Indian students. It seems, therefore, an apposite moment to look back to the beginnings of the UK government’s involvement in bringing international students to its shores, which is the focus of my article in this special issue of Contemporary European History.

The first official body to encourage ‘overseas’ students to come to the UK was a committee established under the joint aegis of the Boards of Education and Trade in 1933, reflecting the government’s principal objective of helping Britain to compete in world markets. However, political and strategic considerations soon came to the fore, leading the Foreign Office to assume responsibility for the issue through the newly established British Council. The Council’s Students Committee was its first specialised department and received the largest share of the new body’s meagre budget. Guided by the FO, the Council offered bursaries to future teachers of English in priority countries (primarily in Europe and the Middle East), later adding postgraduate scholarships. Working in collaboration with existing bodies, notably the Universities Bureau of the British Empire, it began promoting UK universities across the world. It also took into consideration the welfare of overseas students and developed a partnership with the National Union of Students which, spurred by post-First World War internationalism, was active in the field of student exchanges.

The aims of this policy were multiple: facilitating trade connections, improving knowledge of the English language and courting the governments of strategic regions. But beyond this, the UK government’s push to increase the number of overseas students also sought to make an impact at an individual level as students came into contact with the British way of life and developed personal friendships and networks. Indeed, friendship did not only refer to the attempt to win allies as Europe moved closer to war, but also to genuine human relationships which, it was hoped, would have a cumulative impact on international relations. In this respect the student dimension to British cultural diplomacy of the mid-1930s combined elements of cultural internationalism with the pursuit of national interest.

Arguably more important than the internationalist faith in the value of cultural exchange, however, was the model of imperial exchanges. Fostering affective ties was integral to many programmes which sought to encourage educational exchange and student mobility within the empire, as was the emphasis on targeting future teachers. Government policy towards non-empire students was driven in part by the perceived need to extend to them services already available to empire students and to shift attention to those areas where British economic and political interests were thought to be most at risk. The pendulum swung back again after the Second World War when interwar experiments came to provide a model for Commonwealth exchanges in the period of decolonisation. The distinction between empire/Commonwealth and ‘foreign’ students is no longer valid today yet traces of these historical patterns of student mobility remain. The “Global Britain” to which the Turing Scheme refers is often defined in terms of a return or a re-emergence with an emphasis on the so-called Anglosphere and/or Commonwealth (see for example the FO’s website). The continuing decline in modern foreign languages at UK universities – itself the result of educational policy – will doubtless exacerbate this tendency as fewer and fewer UK students possess the linguistic skills necessary to study in neighbouring countries. Will future UK governments discover, as did their predecessors in the interwar period, that concern with promoting student mobility to English-speaking countries has obscured the needs and significance of students from closer to home?

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