Apart from English set texts, textbooks are the most widely read form of writing in schools, yet in the UK they have been virtually ignored as a subject of research. To an extent, William Marsden argues in this pioneering and highly accessible study, this is because British teachers have long had an extraordinary prejudice against them.

Although most are attractively produced and written by experienced and dedicated teachers, textbooks are still associated with a heavily formal, even authoritarian, style of teaching. Using your own handout, even if it is photocopied from a textbook, is still seen as an affirmation of professional autonomy. It is not a view, Marsden points out, with which pupils have ever had much sympathy.

British teachers have much to learn from practice in the United States and Europe; Marsden, an American, holds that British teachers are unnecessarily sniffy about American practice. In Germany, the Georg-Eckert Institute in Braunschweig has a large collection of history and geography textbooks which form the basis for important international research.There are good textbook archives in the UK, at the London Institute, at Liverpool University and at Sheffield in the Fleure archive of geography texts; it’s the tradition of studying them that is lacking.

Marsden is right to focus on history and geography, which are so open to manipulation by the state. He is strong on geography textbooks’ uneasy relationship with curriculum development; historians, while often wary of coursebooks, have been more prepared to use textbooks for their views and documentary extracts.

Early 19th-century textbooks were written in a simple catechism style, suitable for pupil “monitors” to drum into the heads of younger children. Later, academic experts took over, cramming indigestible reams of facts on to closely printed pages. But these facts carried a message - patriotism. British disasters in the Crimea were blamed on insufficient understanding of maps, so it was down to the nation’s geography masters to save the Empire.

Many Victorians understood imperialism as part of a wider citizenship of the world, and frowned upon chauvinistic or racist texts. C R L Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling’s notorious School History of England, which talked of black people as “lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement”, was condemned by the Educational Times as “uncontrollable and irresponsible”.

There were no such inhibitions in Nazi Germany, where textbooks enlisted all school subjects into the mission to instil militarism in the nation’s youth, nor in the Soviet bloc, where textbooks followed the party line, and altered with changes in the fortunes of the party leaders.

American textbooks through the Cold War and beyond took a patriotic line, while recent British textbook authors tend to be more questioning, inviting pupils to consider the Soviet perspective, or pointing out - unlike American authors - President Truman’s alternatives to dropping the atomic bomb.

Marsden argues that many of the accusations of bias and stereotyping thrown at earlier textbooks were unfair, and that despite our heightened awareness, current books are far from free of gender, class or age bias. He is also aware of the context in which books are used: the role of publishers in responding to the national curriculum, the many ways teachers use books, and the question of how books are chosen in the first place. Here we choose our own; in some countries the choosing is done by special panels. One American committee, unable to choose between two rivals, hurled them at the wall until one of the spines broke to see which was the most durable. You could try it.

Sean Lang teaches history at Hills Road sixth-form college, Cambridge, and is co-editor of Modern History Review (Philip Allan Publications)