When Dame Gillian Wagner published Children of the Empire in 1982, she and others may have thought a chapter of the British Empire's settlement had been closed forever. In reality, however, post-Empire controversies over child migration would only intensify in the following years, spurred on by government and other enquiries as well as academic historical reviews of child migration. Ellen Boucher's Empire's Children: Child Emigrants, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869–1967 is part of this reconsideration of child migration, which she rightly portrays as part of a strategy of creating a “Greater Britain” in the Empire of Settlement.

Previous research on British child migration has often focused on the “child rescue” philanthropic organizations. From the mid-nineteenth century many in the area of “child welfare” came to see migration as a strategy of removing from Britain children of the poor to become part of the peopling of the emerging settler societies in Canada, Australasia, and Africa. Boucher has drawn on such studies but is more concerned with ideas and discourses of childhood as well as the policies of both British and Dominion Governments in such areas as eugenics and race. But this is not just a study of policy from above. Accounts of oral history and experiences of child migrants are drawn on throughout the book, as Boucher both conducted interviews and used the oral history created from the research of previous scholars—a good example of how oral history accounts can now form archives for future generations of historians.

The book is well grounded in the recent extensive literature on ideas of the British Empire and “Greater Britain” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular there is a focus on the British Conservative politician Leo Amery and the South African Kingsley Fairbridge, both of whom promoted ideas of child migration as a way of extending the British race. The first chapter, on nineteenth-century ideas of child welfare and the potential of the British Empire is thus in many ways a prelude to the overall discussion on the period of state-sponsored Empire Settlement from the early twentieth century. Boucher gives only brief attention to Canada, which received most of the child migrants in the nineteenth century but only very few between the wars because of the decision taken in 1925 that migration was no longer in the interests of the children or the Canadian nation.

Child migration in the 1920s and 1930s was principally a matter between Britain and Australia. Here Boucher extends previous research in a number of ways by examining how child migrants were both labeled and formed in character. Specifically she points out how Australian perception of child migrants was based not so much on philanthropic concerns but on fears of race degeneration, which seemed to be revealed through intelligence testing. Deporting to Britain unfit and “undesirable” child migrants became a strategy to ensure continuing British and Australian government support for the principle of child migration throughout the 1930s Depression.

After Australia, the new settlement of Southern Rhodesia showed the greatest interest in the idea of child migration in the 1930s. As in Australia, Fairbridge's idea of the farm school became part of the way to sell the notion to white settlers among an essentially black African population. While British child migration had seemed a way to preserve “White Australia” against Asian migration, the “psychology of whiteness” became a way to justify child migration to “Black Africa” on the grounds that white settlers would become better farmers than would the indigenous populations.

The final quarter of the book outlines changing ideas of family, child welfare, and citizenship in Britain in the postwar world and the subsequent effects on ideas of empire and nation. Once an initiative from Britain, child migration now came to be part of the migration policies of former Dominions of Empire. This was particularly so in the case of Australia, leading to a changed understanding of empire. In the wake of the welfare state and new forms of child psychology, some British authorities became attached to the idea of children remaining with their mothers rather than being sent overseas to an institutional life far from home. In contrast, Australian governments still remained committed to the farm school idea and overall child migration as part of their postwar migration programs. According to Boucher, this disagreement led to Australian resentment at being lectured by British authorities on the right course for the future. Here I would suggest Boucher exaggerates some of these differences in the 1950s, when child migration was still conceived by interests across both Britain and Australia as part of the old remembered idea of Empire Settlement of the interwar years. And a government department such as the Commonwealth Relations Office in Britain was still prepared to sponsor child migration as part of continuing ties that would transform Empire into Commonwealth.

Boucher's final chapters raise the question of the identity and national attachments of the child migrants in a period of the “twilight” of the British Empire and “post-imperial belonging.” These are major issues and probably deserve a separate work that would go beyond the limits of this historical study. There are, for instance, questions about the ways that recent government commissions, as well as the media and organizations such as the Child Migrant Trust, helped to reframe ideas about child migrants. Such questions are not pursued here. But through oral history accounts, Boucher does raise some very significant issues about the ways that the search for family and place of birth survived the end of the British Empire. In the end, personal affections and attachments are strong forces, as is the need to have a sense of place to call “home”—particularly, perhaps, for those once exiled from where they were born.

This book will probably not be the last word on the history of British child migration, but it is certainly the most comprehensive account to date.