«Teach Them Their Farming in the Land Where They Will Farm»: Child Emigration in Early Twentieth Century Britain and America

Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, both Great Britain and the United States implemented large-scale child-emigration schemes aimed at relocating so-called «surplus» children – impoverished but considered «of good stock» – from major urban centres to rural households overseas or in the American interior. These programmes emerged from a shared diagnosis: industrial and agricultural economies in metropolitan areas were allegedly unable to absorb growing populations of poor children, who were framed as both a social burden and a latent threat to urban order. Emigration was thus promoted as a form of social reform – an intervention that would simultaneously relieve urban poverty and overcrowding while promising the children a healthier, morally improving environment on the farm. Central to this policy logic was the belief that agricultural labour and rural domesticity would function as vehicles of knowledge acquisition, moral rehabilitation, and civic formation. By learning farm work and rural norms, the children were expected to develop the dispositions necessary for productive adulthood and responsible citizenship, thereby securing redemption from an otherwise bleak urban future. Yet the historical record complicates this narrative of benevolent rescue. Although some children undoubtedly escaped severe deprivation, many migrant youths struggled to adapt to rural life, faced abuse, exploitation or isolation, and carried the consequences of these ruptures into adulthood. Rather than straightforward instruments of uplift, these schemes often reproduced existing inequalities under the guise of paternalistic reform.