In this article we bring the records of Liverpool‐based child emigration agencies into conversation with the archives of ‘Home’ children held at Libraries and Archives Canada, the Archives of Ontario (Toronto) and the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto Archives. Our aim is to provide the first study to consider why the North West emerged as the British centre of child emigration during the period 1860–1930, and examine the shared emigration infrastructure between its institutions and agents with those in Canada, through which we hope to advance comparative transnational research into child separation as a feature of welfare systems since the late‐nineteenth century. Our key claims are the following: (1) that children and their families DID challenge, resist and question the system, though not always expressed through their limited ability to give consent to emigration; (2) that the purported welfarist impulses of child emigration schemes were frequently in tension with the everyday administrative and financial concerns that characterised exchanges over child migrants between state and institution, bespeaking a broader economy of child emigration schemes that has thus far been under‐examined in the scholarship.
This article explores the representations of burglary and burglars created by the burglary insurance sector in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Two lines of argument are developed: first, that the marketing strategy of the burglary insurance sector exacerbated existing fears about the nature and prevalence of burglary in a calculated bid to attract custom; and secondly, that the depictions of crime and criminal used in marketing this form of insurance were subsequently revised in the contracts issued to customers as part of the industry's commercial transactions, thereby securing against supposed ‘negligence’ by homeowners as well as malicious attempts to defraud insurers. As the self-styled commercial ‘protection’ against burglary, burglary insurance became an ordinary household investment. Its prosperity therefore enables us to identify certain ideas about crime and criminal then current. Crucially, this research highlights the intersection of media, state, and market discourse about crime in weaving a specific version of burglary into the very fabric of everyday life, uniting three domains that historians of crime have traditionally treated separately.
From the 1870's, children in the care of charities or state provided institutions, including workhouses and industrial schools, were subject to the practice of emigration to Canada, separating them from their parents and wider family. This was achieved ostensibly to secure the child's welfare, and provide opportunities in Canada beyond the poverty of the industrialising cities of the north of England. Using original archive material, this article examines the legal rights of parents of children identified for emigration, and how charities and state institutions obtained the authority to emigrate children. The lack of a clear basis for assessing child welfare led organisations to consider a broad range of moralistic considerations regarding the characterisation of parents and the child's circumstances in deciding whether a child should be emigrated. Despite these negative perceptions, it will be demonstrated that some parents exercised considerable agency in seeking to resist emigration of a child, and in attempting to maintain the familial relationship.
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