This special issue features new research on the history of education and settler-colonialism in Australasia and the Pacific during the first half of the twentieth century. The history of colonialism and the history of education have tended to be regarded as separate spheres of governance and scholarship. Our focus here, however, is on understanding the ways in which they are deeply connected, seeing them as sharing the goal of modernity that sought to transform individuals, states and society, including the modernisation of colonial relations.