Reviewed by: Empire’s Children: Child emigration, welfare, and the decline of the British World, 1869–1967 by Ellen Boucher Kristine Alexander Empire’s Children: Child emigration, welfare, and the decline of the British World, 1869–1967 By Ellen Boucher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. In Empire’s Children, Ellen Boucher examines a series of understudied connections between child migration and the end of the British Empire, by tracing the nineteenth-century rise and mid-twentieth-century fall of the British child emigration movement. The movement’s origins, she writes, lay in the Victorian belief that sending poor children out to the healthy, “empty” spaces of the settler empire would redeem individual young people while strengthening and unifying the British “race” and the global community of Greater Britain. The book’s most important contribution is its argument that this optimistic understanding of poor children’s potential and the strength of imperial ties was ultimately undone by a potent combination of factors, including dominion nationalism and the growing influence of child psychology after the Second World War. Looking at child emigration, Boucher argues, is a particularly useful way to trace “the rise, reconfiguration, and lasting effects of the concept of imperial Britishness” between the 1860s and the 1960s (21). Empire’s Children is a dense, nuanced and well-written study. It draws on an impressive array of sources including oral history interviews conducted by Boucher and others, as well as written evidence produced by reformers, voluntary organizations, politicians, medical and psychological experts, and former migrants in Canada, Australia, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Britain. The book also includes nearly a dozen photographs (publicity images as well as snapshots of child migrants), but they are not analyzed with the same rigor that Boucher applies to her textual sources. The book begins by discussing the child emigration movement between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, a period in which over a dozen British agencies sent some 80,000 children to live and work on family farms in Canada. This first stage of the movement combined Victorian child rescue discourse with the belief that every British youngster “contained the seeds of future greatness” (42). Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century migration schemes understood young people as particularly malleable, and assumed that moving poor children away from their families and into settler societies would improve individual life chances while strengthening White racial ties across the British World. While Barnardo’s and all other child migration charities suspended their efforts during the First World War, the aftermath of that conflict only heightened British support for the movement. By the interwar years, Boucher writes, child emigration had changed “from a philanthropic endeavor into an imperial social policy, one in which the twin aims of reinvigorating the empire and uplifting poor children were closely intertwined” (69). Yet despite increased British state support for child emigration, Boucher reveals that dominion responses to the practice were neither uniform nor wholly positive. In Canada, for example, eugenicists and doctors had been asking for screenings and inspections of child migrants since the late nineteenth century—a development that challenged the metropolitan assumption that “British blood” was the most important criterion for migrants. The bulk of the book discusses the still greater fissures in the child emigration movement and the ideal of a united British World that appeared between the 1930s and 1960s. Since child emigration to Canada ended during the interwar years (for reasons discussed in Chapter Two), Boucher focuses on Australia and Southern Rhodesia, two very different settler societies that she claims are especially revealing of mid-twentieth-century debates and disagreements about whiteness, dominion identity, and the potential of poor children. Boucher describes how Australian officials, reflecting a particular version of White racial nationalism, used IQ testing to screen migrants and regularly repatriated “problem” youngsters. In Southern Rhodesia, by contrast, government officials were unsure whether poor British children were fit to rule over that country’s Black majority population. In this context, poverty and family instability—the very factors that had inspired the first wave of child emigration charities—were recast as grounds to exclude young British migrants from the Rhodesian settler community. These developments, which undermined the ideal...