As though his face had been white: Child rescuers, whiteness and the empire

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the increasing facility of travel collapsed the physical and imagined space between metropole and colony. The child rescue movement took advantage of this new mobility, blending travelling with fund-raising as a way of spreading their message throughout the Empire. Central to this mission was the contrast between the privileged and the deprived, the white and the non-white, the self and the other. This paper will explore how child rescue propagandists constructed and consolidated whiteness through these encounters. The cultural practices of the other constituted by child rescuers—such characteristics as their starved, emaciated bodies, their speech and physicality—operated to affirm the Empire, and the privilege implicit in whiteness.