In Raised to Obey, Agustina Paglayan challenges conventional interpretations of the spread of mass education since the late eighteenth century, which have been based – particularly within economic history – on arguments such as increased returns to human capital due to industrialization and growing democratization. Instead, the book defends a political-economy argument according to which elites expanded schooling not primarily to foster growth or equality but to contain social unrest and inculcate obedience among potentially rebellious populations. Mass education emerged as a substitute for repression: an investment in social order that, in the long run, would be less costly and more sustainable than mere coercion – a thesis that, in different forms, has long been debated, not least within economics (Bowles and Gintis 1976). The scope of the book is impressive. Drawing on a wide range of historical and quantitative evidence, Paglayan traces the expansion of primary education across Europe and the Americas from the late eighteenth century onwards, combining cross-country analysis with detailed case studies, such as those of Britain, France, and Chile, among others. Although the argument is not original per se, the core contribution of the book is providing compelling evidence that conflict and elite fear played the most important role in the long-term diffusion of mass education and literacy – at least for Europe and Latin America, questioning the assumption that schooling was designed to empower citizens or enhance productivity. The book is an excellent read for academics and policymakers alike and provides a lot of food for thought concerning historical education and its relationship with society and the economy. Interestingly, the book looks at the history of education to question today's educational practices across countries. Are present-day education systems, which arose from the attempt of nineteenth-century elites to control potentially threatening populations, the best way to really stimulate democratization, free thinking, and the growth of useful knowledge? While this question remains valid, Paglayan's reinterpretation of the historical factors that sustained mass education sits uneasily with parts of the existing scholarly literature. The core argument of the book seems to rest on the implicit assumption that education was mainly a state-level phenomenon and that national education acts passed by the central government exerted an immediate (and homogeneous) impact across all regions and social strata within the same country. Indeed, the most used indicator to capture central governments acting to improve primary education is whether they have passed a national school law. Yet, recent evidence, particularly on countries that are not discussed within the book, such as Italy (Cappelli and Vasta 2020) and Spain (Beltrán Tapia and Martinez-Galarraga 2018), shows that national legislation concerning primary schooling was likely ineffective in fostering education alone, which was primarily due to the way the primary-school system was designed, that is, as primarily decentralized. The government set the rules of the game, but local authorities implemented them (p. 108) – the extent of which depended on local democratization, fiscal and administrative capacity, inequality, and existing schooling rates, among the others. Paglayan's claim that administrative form (centralization versus decentralization) does not matter for her argument (p. 118) is not fully convincing, particularly considering known historical variations across Europe (Westberg 2020). Another broad concern is the treatment of confounding factors in the quantitative sections. For example, changes in the trends of enrolment rates are interpreted as responses to unrest (p. 79), yet alternative explanations – such as economic performance or state capacity – receive more limited attention. Similarly, though wars (external conflict) are mentioned in the book, their potential state-building implications are not fully integrated into the analytical framework. This may be problematic, as warfare has long been central to explanations of the expansion in fiscal capacity (Dincecco et al. 2011; Sabaté 2016). A related issue concerns some of the variables used to capture structural change in phenomena potentially associated with education. Industrialization is measured using broad indicators (p. 66), while the diffusion of education is proxied by the passage of national education legislation – as mentioned earlier. One may argue that these measures do not always capture the underlying phenomena convincingly, particularly given recent work showing the importance of gradual, locally driven schooling expansion (see above), as well as existing estimates of industrial value-added and/or per-capita GDP figures across most of the countries included in the book's analyses. Indeed, one may argue, economic growth might pull the expansion of education through the service sector, too, or even when new technologies are introduced within the primary sector. The book's empirical strategy is more convincing in some contexts than in others. The analysis of Chile, particularly the Atacama rebellion, stands out as a compelling case in which a clear core–periphery conflict aligns well with the theory. By contrast, evidence from Europe would benefit from replication using alternative datasets. Recent work, including Adrien Montalbo's research on nineteenth-century France, suggests that there is more to the expansion of mass education than just a disciplinary channel, including demand for education fostered by industrialization (Montalbo 2020). The discussion of nineteenth-century Britain and, differently, Sweden and France, further illustrates some of these issues and brings about others. Paglayan notes that around 1850 Britain exhibited relatively low enrolment ratios compared with continental Europe (pp. 62–63). Yet, for matters of human capital accumulation, literacy – regardless of how it was acquired – arguably matters more than formal enrolment. On this metric, Britain does not appear particularly backward. England and Wales displayed the highest literacy rates among European regions in the second half of the nineteenth century (Mitch 1984), and gross enrolment rates did not lag much behind those of Central and Northern Europe (Cappelli, Ridolfi, Vasta, and Westberg 2025). The book also tends to interpret curricular differentiation between urban and rural areas as a deliberate strategy to immobilize rural populations (p. 68). While this may be consistent with the core argument of the book, an alternative interpretation is that simplified rural curricula lowered barriers to entry, allowing basic schooling to take root where resources and demand were limited, as it seems to have been the case in nineteenth-century Sweden (Westberg 2022). The French case also exposes some tensions in the core thesis. Paglayan shows how elites oscillated between repression and educational investment in response to rural unrest (p. 139). Yet, early primary education itself involved some forms of coercion, such as compulsory attendance, linguistic standardization, and moral discipline, that may not have been perceived as fundamentally different from other instruments of state power. Moreover, the long and uncertain horizon of educational returns complicates the notion that schooling was a clearly superior alternative to repression from the perspective of national and/or local elites. Raised to Obey is an important and stimulating book. It forces historians and political economists alike to confront uncomfortable questions about the political purposes of schooling and the relationship between education and power – potentially making room for future empirical studies on the matter that adopt a historical perspective. The book succeeds in broadening the debate and in challenging complacent narratives of education as an unambiguous public good. It will be widely read and discussed, and rightly so.
Gabriele Cappelli (Tue,) studied this question.