This innovative, inter-disciplinary, cross cultural study contributes to understandings of both contemporary child welfare practices and the complex dynamics of empire. It analyses the construction and transmission of nineteenth-century British child rescue ideology, and the ways in which it shaped both popular and governmental discourses in Canada and Australia, exploring and explaining the attraction and failure of child removal policies and contextualises ongoing debates about the nature of children's citizenship and the rights of those harmed by practices of the past. Locating the origins of contemporary practice in the publications of the prominent English Child rescuers, Dr Barnardo, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, Benjamin Waugh, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf and their colonial disciples and literature written for children, it shows how the vulnerable body of the child at risk came to be reconstituted as central to the survival of nation, race and empire. In the process the now unquestioned, but in the nineteenth century very radical, assumption that the child, as potential citizen, had interests separate from his/her parents which could be best served, in some circumstances, by removal from the family of origin came to be central to good child protection practice. Yet, as the shocking testimony before the many official enquiries into the past treatment of children in out-of-home 'care' held in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada make clear, there was no guarantee that the rescued child would be protected from further harm.