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Reviewed by: Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869–1967 by Ellen Boucher Jordanna Bailkin (bio) Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869–1967, by Ellen Boucher; pp. xi + 292. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014, £69.99, £21.99 paper, $110.00, $32.99 paper. In 1949, John Bicknell, a nine-year-old boy in a Barnardo’s branch home in Sussex, heard an officer give an excruciatingly dull speech about the merits of child emigration. After hearing from another boy that Australian children rode horses to school and being asked by the officer if he was interested in the emigration scheme, Bicknell thought, “‘Bloody hell, I’d love a horse to ride to school on. So I immediately put my hand up . . . and everything went from there’” (196). This emigration became an opportunity for Bicknell to remake himself, insisting on changing his name from “Richard” to “John” and ultimately coming to label himself as an Australian. Such stories enrich and enliven Boucher’s Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869–1967, a well-crafted history of the roughly 95,000 boys and girls selected between 1869 and 1967 by government-funded charities for permanent relocation to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Rhodesia. The children were drawn from working-class households in Britain’s major cities and groomed in the settler colonies for a rural lifestyle. Boucher offers a nuanced [End Page 589] portrait of the complex identities that were forged through emigration: both in terms of how these children thought about themselves and with regard to how they were imagined by others. Her sensitive account helps us grasp the historically specific exigencies and ambitions that made parents and states believe that child emigration was plausible and even desirable. The book begins with an examination of the effect of child emigration on late Victorian culture, puzzling out what made this option acceptable (even if wrenching) for poor families. As Boucher persuasively relates, child emigration was a product of the prevailing Victorian tendency to understand Britishness as an ethnic and spiritual core that required careful cultivation to achieve its full potential. Emigration policies rested on a vision of mutual development in which needy children would grow fit and strong from the hearty, outdoor lifestyle of the settler colonies, while the reach of British settlement would be extended. As Boucher points out, such policies rested on a distinctive view of the settler Empire as a redemptive space, in which destitute children might attain a higher degree of social mobility than they would have in Britain. Boucher turns next to the interwar generation and to the shifts that took place in child emigration policies during the 1920s and 1930s. Emigration was spurred not only by a new vision of economic stabilization, but also by physiological claims that focused on children’s responsiveness to their environments. Sunshine and open air were valorized over emotional ties and parental nurturing. The objective of developing the British world superseded Victorian narratives about redeeming the children of the poor, and deprived children became political assets who held measurable imperial value—calculated, as Boucher tells us, at £1,000 a head. As Boucher rightly notes, medical praise for the rural life linked up neatly with the demographic imperatives of settlement. In subsequent chapters, Boucher focuses on the growing racial nationalism of Australia and Southern Rhodesia in the 1920s, and on the intersection between child emigration policies and eugenic discourses about “fit” children. She examines the deep contradictions of child emigration, in which children who were promised social mobility were in fact schooled to be compliant with orders and deferential to authority. Idealism about the social and professional opportunities for child migrants faded, and children who were sent to Australia were limited to manual work. Boucher offers a vivid portrait of life in schools and homes for migrant children, where, as one child migrant recalled, “‘always somewhere in the cottage somebody was being thrashed with a strap’” (113). Indeed, it would have been helpful to learn more about the perspectives of settler colonials, such as...

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