CHILDREN OF EMPIRE

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point the phenomenon of child migration to Britain's White Dominions in the 1940s and 1950s to explore the ways in which the social was being governed in the immediate post-war years. Through this contested form of child welfare, it illustrates the deeply rooted, symbolic meanings and values attached to empire and religion and the role that these played in mediating the power and control of the state over its citizens in post-war British society. The article moves on to consider the power relations at play in the claims making activities of former child migrants in the 1980s and 1990s and, in turn, examines how these have come to haunt not only contemporary social policy but also more popular accounts of welfare and family life. Overall it argues that the spatial and temporal contexts in which knowledge about welfare subjects and phenomena is produced offer rich insights into the complexities of the past and their shaping of the present.

Keywords:

• children migration
• nation
• state
• empire
• religion

Notes

1. I am grateful to the audience at this seminar for their observations on the paper and to the audiences at the European Social Policy Research Network Annual Conference (Netherlands, 2002) and the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference (Finland, 2002) where I presented related papers. I would like to thank John Clarke for his generous and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

2. A detailed account of this early history of child migration together with the transportation of ‘juvenile delinquents’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be found in Gillian Wagner's (1982) Children of Empire. Barry Coldrey (1999) also provides a useful timeline of child migration from the seventeenth to the twentieth century in Good British Stock.

3. Those religious philanthropic organizations that continued to operate child migration schemes in the post-war years included, the Catholic Child Welfare Council, the Catholic Crusade of Rescue, Dr Barnardo's, the Church of England Children's Society, the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society and the National Children's Home.

4. This investigation coincided with the publication of a report by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), Bringing Them Home (1997), into the forced removal of Indigenous Australian children from their families; a policy which began at the turn of the twentieth century and continued to the 1970s. Here, too, the state and church's concern had been with securing the future of a ‘White Australia’. Since Aboriginal cultural identity was seen as ‘an insurmountable obstacle to the capacity to take a “normal” part in European-Australian social life’ (Van Krieken 1999, p. 298), the removal of individual aboriginal children – ‘the stolen generations’ – was promoted as being ‘in the best interests of the child’ and the state. It has since been defined as falling within the terms of the United Nations definition of genocide.