The European imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries viewed their African and Asian subjects as children, as men not fully grown, whose destiny had to be guided by the presumably more advanced states of Europe. As a result European administrators consciously, or not, often extended overseas a system of rule which appears to have been patterned after the relationship of authority which existed in the metropole between parent and child and school and child. This essay explores the connections existing between child-rearing practices and formal education in Britain and France and the methods of rule used by these two powers in their overseas empires. In addition, this article suggests that some of the differences in the colonial rule of Britain and France are grounded in the divergencies of these two countries' patterns of child-rearing. Such an interpretation would, of course, be in agreement with the view of social anthropologists and social psychologists who have long argued that all forms of interpersonal and intergroup relationships are molded by early patterns of child-rearing.