This dissertation charts the rise and fall of modern child emigration, a charity-administered, government-sponsored reform movement that permanently resettled poor British children in the settler empire. Based on primary research in government and philanthropic archives as well as oral history interviews, it follows the circulation of dominant conceptions of childhood, welfare, and empire—alongside the movement of children themselves—across an imperial network connecting Britain, Australia, and Southern Rhodesia.

Using the lens of juvenile resettlement schemes, the thesis illuminates the close intersection between the origins of modern British welfarism and the culture and politics of empire. It traces the turn-of-the-century emergence of child emigration as an "imperial social policy," which united the interests of needy British children with the developmental aims of the rural settler empire, and enabled reformers to conceive of poor boys and girls as imperial citizens-in-the-making. It then examines how the gradual devolution of the empire during the middle decades of the twentieth century weakened the ideological union between welfare and imperialism. The thesis highlights three main forces that contributed to this process: the changing politics of racial hegemony within the settler empire, the advent and dissemination of child psychology, and the development of settler nationalism. The combined impact of these forces, it demonstrates, increasingly led British, Australian, and Rhodesian policymakers to conceptualize the needs of children and the aims of social assistance in more explicitly national terms. By illustrating this shift from empire to nationhood in British child welfare, this dissertation challenges characterizations of the twentieth century as an era when the ideals of childhood grew standardized across political and cultural boundaries. Rather, it reveals how the forces of imperial devolution led to the steady fragmentation of models of childrearing and welfare across the Anglophone world.