Baughan’s Saving the Children is a scrupulously well-researched and fascinating study of the Save the Children organization (hereinafter Save), started in 1919 in the United Kingdom by the sisters Dorothy Buxton and Englatyne Jebb. Existing scholarship focuses heavily on the early years when these fascinating and indefatigable activists were Save but seems to have lost interest after Jebb’s death in 1928. But Save did more than survive. It recently celebrated its centennial and is one of the world’s largest aid agencies. Baughan’s narrative nicely demonstrates how grand forces such as internationalism, capitalism, imperialism, and decolonization intersected with personal and organizational elements to produce a Save that is never too far from the center.The book is divided into eight chapters, including an introduction that is the scene setter and a conclusion that attempts to tie a bow on the story. Chapter 1 places the origins of Save in its colonial, imperial, and internationalist contexts. Buxton and Jebb came from slightly different wings of internationalism. Buxton was the more political of the two, a pacifist and peace activist, working to end famine after the war and focused on giving star treatment to the youngest and smallest victims for instrumental and moral reasons. When Buxton left Save, Jebb established its foundations and created the Save the Children International Union in Geneva as an umbrella body of existing European child-welfare societies. Jebb craftily used her social and material resources to build a highly visible organization. Children were both means and ends; by rescuing children, Save could also begin to transform the world.The next big moment, the subject of Chapter 2, occurred in 1924 with the creation of the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child and Stateless Children. The origin story marries charismatic and theological tropes: Jebb, as a Moses figure, ascends a mountain with a simple lunch, sits on a rock, and descends with a draft of the document. During this propitious time for the organization, all the major refugee crises in Europe came to an end, humanitarian sentiments were in decline, and the League of Nations ran aground. According to Save’s ideology, children could help to save humanitarianism and re-energize the League. As Baughan writes, “Many prominent feminists and humanitarians shared Jebb’s belief that the League [of Nations] needed children more than children needed them” (64).Save’s debate about the Declaration revolved around the relationship between rights, protection, and civilization and led to a plan to bring stateless children into the civilized world order by ripping them from their “backward” homelands and parents. Baughan closes with a chilling description of the biological racism that dominated Save at the time; although Jewish children were in grave danger, Save decided that they were not worth saving. Whether Save’s disregard for Jewish lives stemmed from its prejudices, from British anti-Semitism, or from a combination of the two, Baughan does not say.Chapter 3 follows Save into Africa, covering the undercurrents of colonialism at a moment when the British Empire’s sun was setting. As an organization and staff dedicated to reform within a traditional British imperial and international system, it struggled to navigate between a colonialism defined by exploitation and a British internationalism based on a humanitarianism that would legitimate it. Save was twisting in the winds of change. Chapter 4 examines Save’s inadequate response to the interwar period and the Holocaust. Forced into the double bind of growing fascism and impending world war, Save made various compromises, some that no doubt reflected the same prejudices that Baugham recovers in Chapter 3. The reasons for Saves choices might be questionable (anti-Semitism or pragmatism?), but most aid organizations acted expediently.In Chapter 5, Save enters the new international era and a much-diminished British Empire. Baughan focuses on Save’s new marketing campaign organized around welfare and development. This strategy was not outside Save’s wheelhouse; Save had a long-standing concern with social welfare and turning children into responsible adults. Baughan’s fascinating, detailed discussion follows Save’s deep dive into juvenile delinquency, theories of child development and attachment theory, and the role of education in creating responsible citizens for the workplace. Save developed a growing expertise in these matters; one of the interesting tensions that ensued was how to reconcile its new agenda with its colonial past. Child-centered actions that were intended to create stand-up citizens and contributing members of the economy might not appear “colonial” when applied to Britain, but they assumed a different gloss when applied in a colonial and postcolonial context. The extent to which this agenda resulted in a major or minor tension is unknown, because Baughan says little about the importance of this agenda abroad.Chapter 6 mixes early postwar history with developments in the 1960s, before entering into an extended look at Biafra. Baughan argues that events in Biafra changed almost everyone and everything in the aid sector but not Save, which conducted business as usual, with its comfortable ties to the British government. Baughan’s account winds down in the 1970s, which she marks as the end of one era and the beginning of another (206). Why stop now? What is this new era? Readers want to know.That the introduction and conclusion, combined, are shorter than any of the other chapters is too bad because Baughan leaves much unsaid. For instance, how does Save compare with other humanitarian organizations of the time? Because Baughan’s reliance on imperialism and decolonization, internationalism, and capitalism suggests that Save might be similarly constituted and constrained, we should not see much difference between it and other aid agencies. She writes, “British imperialism has been cast as inherently humanitarian” and “with the collusion of humanitarian agencies, its postcolonial foreign policy would be presented this way too” (209). Did all aid agencies become a fig leaf? The early history of Oxfam suggests otherwise. Save also evolved, as Baughan describes, from a biopolitical agency to a standard relief agency (not everyone will accept that relief agencies are not also biopolitical). How did this change happen, and was Save moving with the times? In general, a more comparative analysis might provide leverage over Save’s choices and organizational evolution.Lastly, a statement in the introduction demands clarification: “It is difficult to determine what Save the Children was and did” (12). Baughan’s support for biopolitical and other critical approaches suggests that Save’s function and effects are related to the broader order. But, if she is really uncertain about what Save was and did, she has missed an opportunity to say why she cannot pin it down after years of intense study. Perhaps her ambivalence says something about the ontological ambiguities and precarities of humanitarianism? Baughan might have used the conclusion to return to this observation.Despite these concerns, and a few unforced errors (like the erroneous founding date of 1853 for the International Committee of the Red Cross), Baughan’s contribution to our understanding of the life and times of one of the world’s premier aid organizations is well worth reading and pondering.