Imperial Infinity, Project Futurity and Clockwork Discipline

Dissonant Temporalities in a British Child Migration Project

in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
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Katja Uusihakala Researcher, University of Helsinki, Finland katja.uusihakala@helsinki.fi

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Abstract

This article examines a British migration project – which sent select children to colonial Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962 – in order to analyse dissonant temporalities in projects of social engineering. The article focuses on three of the several complex and at times incompatible temporalities animated and juxtaposed by the project. First, it discusses ‘imperial infinity’ as the political temporality that framed the project. As ‘imperial investments’, the children were a means to securing colonial continuity well beyond project time. Second, it considers how temporal logics of social projects presuppose a rupture with the past, foregrounding their rationale of futurity. Finally, the article examines the sense of time of the migrant child placed in an institution, highlighting its clockwork discipline and spatiotemporal standstill. Through this case, the article reflects on antagonistic temporalities within social projects, as well as their long-lasting political repercussions.

Résumé

Cet article examine un projet britannique de migration − l'envoi des enfants triés sur le volet en Rhodésie coloniale du sud de 1946 à 1962 − afin d'analyser des temporalités dissonantes dans les projets d'ingénierie sociale. L'article focalise sur trois temporalités complexes et parfois incompatibles qui sont animées et juxtaposées par le projet. Premièrement, nous abordons ‘l'infinité impériale’ comme la temporalité politique qui a encadré le projet. Les enfants, considérés comme des ‘investissements impériales’, ont servi à sécuriser la continuité coloniale au-delà du temps prescrit pour le projet. Deuxièmement, nous examinons comment la logique temporale de projets sociaux présuppose une rupture avec le passé, pour mettre en avant leur logique d'avenir. En guise de conclusion, nous considérons le sens du temps chez l'enfant migrant, placé dans un établissement, pour souligner le discipline mécanique et l'arrêt spatio-temporel. Au travers ce cas d’étude, nous réfléchissons sur des temporalités antagonistes au cœur des projets sociaux ainsi que leurs répercussions politiques durables.

This article examines a post Second World War child removal and relocation project, which selected, shipped and permanently resettled British children to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), as an example for analysing diverse temporalities intertwined in projects of social engineering.1 Administered and funded by three parties – the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College Association (a charity based in London), the UK government and the government of Southern Rhodesia, the project migrated 276 British children between 1946 and 1962.2 The children (aged 4 to 13 at the time of their transportation) were emigrated unaccompanied by their parents and settled at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school and home for the children, established in a disused Royal Air Force airbase, outside the town of Bulawayo.

The migration project explicitly combined physical and social mobility. It aspired to rescue select children from predictably undesirable futures in Britain by sending them off to a settler colony, where they would be offered ‘a better life’– one with potential for social advancement. But the project's ambition was not just the salvaging of individual children. The children were emigrated with the intent that they would also secure the continuity of the racially segregated colonial order. Thus, the scheme was to have enduring effects in the society – effects that would reach far beyond the project's intended scope.

Yet, for the child migrants the imperative colonial perdurance sometimes came at a great personal cost. The children's removal fractured the continuity of kinship memory, often fragmenting their sense of belonging (Uusihakala 2015: 284). Thus, the children's removal and re-settlement to Fairbridge resulted not simply in successful social advancement and smooth integration into white Rhodesian middle class, but also in long-term experiences of abandonment, displacement and uncertainty (Uusihakala 2025).

In this article, I explore the complex and at times seemingly incompatible temporalities that delineated the Fairbridge child migration project and patterned the children's lives within. I analyse how the late colonial scheme was framed and rationalised by a political temporality of ‘imperial infinity’; how the children were moulded by the project's inauguration of a ‘new beginning’, which necessitated a rupture with the children's past; and how they were socialised and disciplined by managing their time within the educational institution.

Removing children from their families for institutional education – believed to sustain social class, offer opportunities for social mobility or reform children from unfortunate backgrounds into ‘decent’ citizens – is obviously a well-established strategy of socialisation in the British world. According to Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jensz (2022), from the nineteenth century onwards, boarding schools became a popular model with British social reformers, who attempted to rescue and remake both the children of the poor at home and those in the colonies. Children were extracted and at times excluded from their families and social backgrounds ‘in order to train, mould, and shape them, so that they could fit into their perceived position in the broader society’ (2022: 3).

Notoriously, in settler colonial contexts, such as Canada, the USA and Australia, residential schools have also been employed in governing indigenous peoples by removing children from their families and breaking connections with their communities. Removals were legitimated by an ideology, which considered that ‘“salvageable” children had their best interest met through education, “civilizing” processes, and their absorption into the modern nation’ (Rodriguez 2016: 157; see also De Leeuw 2009). Projects of children's forced migration and exile, as well as their fostering and adoption, are further cases of state intervention in de-kinning and re-kinning in the name of child protection and the promotion of ‘child's best interests’. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of examples, which range from the Australian stolen generations (e.g. Murphy 2011), Reunion Island children exiled and adopted to mainland France (e.g. Feldman and Mansouri 2021), to ‘The little Danes experiment’ – an attempt to re-educate Greenlandic Inuit children as Danes (Bryld 2010).

As a project of children's removal and reform, the Rhodesia Fairbridge scheme is exemplary of state-supported social engineering projects, which James Scott (2020 [1998]) considers the principal tools of modern statecraft. Scott suggests that late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and imperial planning mentality, was a particularly befitting temporal and social context for the flourishing of state projects and experiments of ‘welfare colonialism’. Although Scott's analysis concentrates on large-scale projects that have aspired to bring about extensive changes in people's work habits, living patterns, moral conduct and worldview, their logic of improvement and intervention, as well as the temporal imaginaries of planning and scheming, resonate well with the Fairbridge scheme as a ‘microsite of colonial governance’ (Stoler 2001: 831).

In this article, I attempt to unravel how a microsite of governance such as the Fairbridge project fused heterogeneous temporalities in its pursuit to raise ‘proper’ white Rhodesian citizens. In terms of the temporal logic of projects, I wish to show that although the child migration project was arguably modernist, teleological and progressive, it was also temporally far more complex than the seemingly rational and straightforward progression of time (Bear 2016: 488) assumed by the project form. The normative power of the project form, as Andrew Graan and Carl Rommel (2024, 8) propose in the introduction to this special issue, is distinct in its pervasive ability to order and organise time: ‘Projects . . . cast time in terms of a smooth progression where time-sensitive steps and stages culminate in a desired end. This ideal, normative model of projects’ sequenced temporal flow can be glossed as “project time”’.

But in addition to the sequenced temporal flow expressed by projects’ assumed, standardised linear progression – their planning, launching, execution and goal-attainment (or, in this ethnographic case: the children's selection, emigration, education and aftereffects) – projects may also contain other potential, at times disorderly and dissonant, temporal scales and regimes. As Graan and Rommel (ibid. 9) put it, ‘the abstract, partible time of project planning rarely translates seamlessly into project completion. Complications arise. Plans fall apart. Deadlines are missed. . . . The process of realizing a project is a contingent one that inevitably requires accommodations and adjustments’.

In this article, my focus is on conflicting and unruly political and real-life temporalities rather than the neat and ordered project time. Thus, instead of focusing on a sequenced progression of project duration and goal-attainment, I shall explore three intertwining regimes, which constituted the Fairbridge project's particular temporal order and mediated action within it. First, I examine imperial infinity as the political temporality, which framed and rationalised the project. The children were regarded as ‘imperial investments’, a means of imagining and insuring the durability of colonial order. While the project suggested an unfaltering faith in a certain forever-ness of the Empire, there was, at the same time, a conspicuous anachronism about it. Successive British governments supported and subsidised the emigration of its children to cultivate them into permanent settler citizens in a white-run colony, at a time when the Empire was clearly coming to an end.

Second, the project's goal of achieving betterment and progress in the lives of individual children as well as the Empire required a discontinuation of time – a rupture with the past – fragmenting both kinship and memory. The evasion of the children's past for a re-start in life is indicative of projects’ more general tendency to re-institute a beginning of time at a project's launch. In the Fairbridge case, however, this disregard for the children's past was further underscored by a ruinous event at the end of the project. When the College was ordered to close in the early 1960s, the staff were also commanded to destroy the children's archive – an act of purposeful erasure of their past and an obscuring of their identity.

Finally, I analyse the sense of time of a displaced child placed and brought up in a boarding school, disciplined by the bell and shaped by its relative institutional seclusion and spatiotemporal standstill. Here, at this microsite of governance, the project form's ability to order time by tying activity to schedule is patently present. It casts a temporal template through which the project was to raise and reform the children by mastering their time. The Fairbridge case, therefore, highlights how a multiplicity of temporalities with distinct logics, scales and rhythms merge and diverge in the particular timespace of a colonial project, and the enduring repercussions such endeavours may entail.

The Rhodesia Fairbridge Migration Project

The Rhodesia Fairbridge scheme was a project combining child welfare with Empire emigration.3 To facilitate and execute the migration project, the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College was founded in 1946 in honour of Kingsley Fairbridge, a South African-born social reformer raised on a settler farm in Southern Rhodesia. His imperial vision was to colonise the ‘unpopulated and uncultivated’ African spaces with British children living in urban squalor in England (Sherington and Jeffery 1998: 5–6). To further his goals, he founded the Child Emigration Society (subsequently, the Fairbridge Society) in 1909, while he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. What set Fairbridge apart from other contemporary social reformers, Ellen Boucher (2014: 64) suggests, was that rather than framing his mission in terms of religious faith or social justice, his cause was the Empire. He sought to achieve his goals of child rescue and imperial reform through education – by establishing farm schools, which would train migrant children in agricultural and domestic skills. Although Fairbridge had wished to root his scheme in Rhodesia, it commenced in Australia, as British authorities regarded early twentieth-century Rhodesia ‘too primitive’ for white child migration.4

However, plans for a Rhodesian scheme re-emerged in the late 1930s.5 Although inspired by Fairbridge farm schools already running in Australia and Canada, it was soon concluded that their model could not be directly replicated in Rhodesia. The ‘political situation’ in Southern Rhodesia – a white-ruled government battling with what they considered a ‘demographic imbalance and racial vulnerability’ – was thought to demand a different type of project and different type of child migrant. The distinctness was explicitly expressed as one of the social class the migrants were expected to occupy in the colony. Whereas British children sent to Australia were trained as skilled farm and domestic workers, the migrants shipped to Rhodesia were to aim for higher professions. Boys were envisioned to serve in the police or the railways or take up jobs as mine engineers or farm managers, whereas girls would have opportunities in nursing, clerical work or civil service. ‘The difference symbolises the essential difference between Australia and Southern Rhodesia’, a publicity brochure explains. ‘In Australia all work is done by White men; in Southern Rhodesia, all unskilled and a good deal of the semi-skilled work is done by non-Europeans. The Whites, to hold their own, must be well-educated, trained and efficient’.6

While the Canadian and Australian programmes might be considered moral projects, which sought to benefit underprivileged children ‘deprived of a normal family life’ (Lynch 2016: 3), it was pivotal for the Rhodesian scheme that the selected children had a ‘reasonably secure and happy’ family background, for them to cope in their racially bestowed positions of privilege.7 The much stricter overall requirements for a potential child migrant further reflected the characteristics assumed necessary for maintaining ‘white prestige’ in the colony: the selected children needed to have an IQ in ‘three digit numbers’ and to be of sound physical and mental health.8 In practice, the re-evaluated qualifications meant that child migrants could no longer be recruited from care institutions (as they often had for Canadian and Australian schemes) but had to be appealed to by newspaper advertisements and promotional booklets, located through personal contacts or, for example, through the Boy Scouts.

The debates on the quality of the potential child migrant highlight the extent to which the maintenance of racial standards necessitated political protection, revealing, as Ann Laura Stoler (1989) suggests, how intricately entwined the colonial construction of whiteness was with class (Uusihakala 2015: 278). These concerns, and concomitant ideas of imperial endurance and refinement, also delineate the project's temporal frame, which I move on to discuss in the following.

Imperial Infinity: Politico-Temporal Frame of the Project

This is not a charity, it is an Imperial Investment! (Prince of Wales 1934)

With these words, the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII) endorsed British child emigration to the colonies and dominions and declared his support to the newly established Fairbridge Society.9 He personally donated £1,000 and with royal patronage encouraged further subscriptions to the Society. His inaugurating statement, replicated repeatedly in the Fairbridge Society's publicity material, indicates that the project was envisioned as an economic, political and moral investment with long-term percussions. Unlike charity – where material returns are not (or ideally should not) be the primary motivating force – this new form of children's migration was introduced as a rational, far-sighted and profitable enterprise.

In the Fairbridge vision of child emigration, the status of the child also changed from the preceding Victorian charitable projects. ‘Deprived children’, Boucher writes, ‘became political entities that held measurable imperial value’ (2014: 68). Veritably, in 1921 Kingsley Fairbridge evaluated the financial worth of child migrants at the farm school he ran at Pinjarra, Western Australia, and came at the sum of £1,000 per child migrant's head. ‘The quantification of children's worth’, Boucher concludes, ‘remains an uncomfortable reminder of the politicizing of child welfare. . . . Fairbridge and his supporters continued to appraise needy children's usefulness to the empire in precise economic terms’ (2014: 68). The migrant children, then, were regarded as calculable investments into the future, the profits of which were to benefit the Empire as a whole.

However, economic reasoning by which the project was envisioned as an investment producing future returns was just one dimension of its layered futurities. As with migration projects in more general, the Fairbridge scheme's future-oriented temporality was politically spatialised; not only was child migration an investment into the not-yet, but also to an out-there (Piot 2015: 792). In the temporal logic of migration projects, present sacrifices are thus made for the future good in the societal hope that spatial mobility will translate into social mobility in an elsewhere (Pine 2014: S102).

Furthermore, the Fairbridge project did not simply stretch onwards and outwards in time and space. It combined aspirations of spatial and social mobility with imperial cause in a way that comingled the immutability of future with venerated visions of the past. This backward-looking futurity is well illustrated in the scheme's advertising brochures. They paint to potential child emigrants, their families and possible sponsors, a prosperous future, articulating in enticing images the transition from spaces of hardship to those of hope. One iconic image, used on the cover of a promotional booklet of the Rhodesian scheme,10 epitomises how the not-yet-out-there is visually constructed and temporally layered. In the photograph, a white boy and a girl are staged as in a pastoral idyll laid over a polished version of Rhodesian rural landscape. The boy stands leaning against a tree, pointing his finger outwards and bending his head slightly to speak to the sweetly smiling girl kneeling at his feet. Before him lies a landscape of prosperous farmland, with grazing cattle and undulating, forested hills in the background – reminiscent of a pleasant summer's day in the English countryside. This colonial landscape vision, emptied of any other human presence or of political struggle (see Uusihakala 2019), presents a curious blend of nostalgia, which is not just retrospective in that it longs for a familiar European setting of a bygone era, but also prospective (Boym 2001; Hage 2020). The image projects a landscape where the temporal horizons of return and anticipation converge. Through the evocation of memory – of a homely past and a familiar landscape – it casts a recognisable future for the migrant children. However, in its invocation of social mobility, the image indicates an idealised upper-class past, which was one they were unlikely to reminisce.

The regimes of anticipation in a colonial order thus comprise socially patterned and culturally specific capacities to aspire (Appadurai 2004). In the migration project's imaginary, as the picture alludes, the future worth waiting for was built with visions of upper-class pasts of plenitude. The proverbial image casts a future not only located someplace else, but also in a temporality that fuses the not-yet with a past that could be aspired to, suggesting, as Frances Pine (2014) does, that migration is at once a future-oriented and a backward-looking process, which involves movement between different temporalities, spaces and regimes of value.

Furthermore, while the project's ambitions ooze anticipation and bold confidence in an unremitting, immutable future, it is evident that the scheme was anachronistic in its socio-historical time. As a political project, the Fairbridge scheme appears a perpetuation of a form well out of time, ‘a misplaced idea to commemorate a Victorian's vision’ as one former Faibridgian phrased it (Vivian Finn, Windows11 2001: 6). Continuing into the 1960s, the project proclaimed imperial infiniteness and envisioned settler colonial futures for the child migrants, while it was manifest that the Empire was crumbling and the consolidation of white minority rule in the colonies politically more and more unstable and suspect.

As a political temporality, imperial infinity framing and rationalising the child migration project bears resemblance to Alexei Yurchak's analysis of a sense of forever-ness in the late Soviet era. ‘There was a complete impression’, Yurchak writes (2005: 1), ‘that everything was forever in the USSR’; a feeling that people lived in an eternal, permanent and immutable state. And yet, although the political system's collapse had been unimaginable, it seemed unsurprising when it actually did. The system had been simultaneously ‘everlasting and steadily declining’, both positions equally real and mutually constitutive (Yurchak 2005: 282).12 Imperial durabilities, to use a term Stoler (2016) employs in examining colonial endurances in the postcolonial present, may thus be paradoxically porous. Despite an appearance of imperishability, the forms of ruination of colonial projects might in fact have been anticipated by their administrators (Weiss 2021: 496). The Fairbridge project endorsed such paradoxical fragility of imperial infinity and plotted the children's lives in its terms (see also Uusihakala 2025).

The sense of immutability – building in part on imaginings of upper-class pasts yet to come – combined with a premonition of collapse as well as an out-of-timeness, is captured sharply by Vivian Finn, who reflects on the mismatch of political temporalities in the lives of Fairbridge child migrants:

We lived in a microcosm that had likened itself to some form of English public school, we saw ourselves as special and an elite. But we were a part of an inappropriate experiment, placed out of step with time, in a society that still had colonial ambitions, whilst the Empire was being dismantled about us. (Windows 2001: 217)

Rupture with the Past

While imperial infinity may be regarded as a political temporality grounded on expectations for the future based on continuity of the past, the rationale of projects of social reform presumes a clear break with past practices, which are deemed undesirable and dysfunctional. Establishing a new beginning in a linear plotline, the disjuncture enables projects to forsake and forget the past and orientate anew towards future potentiality.

In an influential analysis on the changing regimes of time, Jane Guyer (2007) suggests that economic theories and practices have shifted towards emphasising the achieving of stability over the very long term, which results in a relative evacuation of the ‘near future’ as a temporal frame. This time orientation, Guyer proposes, is mirrored by evangelical Christian prophetic temporality. In both, the distant future becomes a place of hope, dreams or intimations of some possible utopia (Guyer 2007: 210; Pine 2014: S98). Critically reflecting on Guyer's argument, Simone Abram (2014) charts the temporal frames of ‘planning and hoping’. She suggests that while state planning – an archetypally modern expression of time and space – continues to imagine ‘long-term futures . . . [it does] not evacuate the near future of intention or activity. . . . If anything, it is the near and medium past that are evacuated from the practices of planning professionals and bureaucrats [with] their relentless focus on worlds yet to be’ (2014: 130, my emphasis). In terms of effectively evacuating ‘the near and the medium past’, the Fairbridge project's strategy of child removal and relocation coheres with Abram's planning time logic. Yet, at the same time, the politico-temporal frame of imperial infinity orientates it towards the long-term that Guyer envisions. In this sense, the dislocated children's loss of past gives way to prioritising the expected long-term outcome – the perseverance of the colonial regime. A regime characterised paradoxically by a simultaneous faith in its endurance as well as a fear of its fragility, which the harnessing of select children as its upholders epitomises.

For Fairbridge child migrants, the rupture with their past meant a severance of family ties, which tended to fracture both kinship and memory (see Carsten 2007). Whereas the project's masterplan stressed the moral weight of the children's appropriate family background, kinship more or less vanished from the plot once the children left England and became officially re-kinned as wards of the Rhodesian state.13 The Fairbridge project thus appears a prime example of such processes of de-kinning, where the state plays an enabling and legitimating role (Thelen and Alber 2018). The send-off thinned the children's past effectively, more so because their sense of time and understanding of spatial distances were yet sketchy. It often left them confused, disconnected and disoriented, as Arthur's narrative below demonstrates.

Arthur was born in 1944 to a single mother serving in the voluntary forces of the British army. He grew up with his grandparents until his mother returned home. When Arthur was seven, his grandfather decided that the mother was not fit for parenting (perhaps for a reason, as she could be erratically violent towards her son), and that Arthur should be sent to Africa on a migration scheme, which would offer him better opportunities in life. Arthur soon found himself in London with a group of equally baffled children, all kitted in new uniforms, waiting to be shipped to Cape Town. He recalled the separation with his mother at Waterloo Station:

The next minute Mum was waving goodbye to me. I got on the train and then the train travelled down to the ship, and we got on this ship. She'd bought me a pair of slippers. I'll never forget the slippers that she bought – I treasured these. And I had new clothes. We had sort of a uniform, a blazer with Fairbridge on it. So, I knew I was going somewhere. I didn't know where. I was terribly [sea] sick from the very first day. It was only when we got to Madeira that I eventually got off the bed [. . .]. But by that time somebody had swiped my pair of slippers. So, I lost the connection with the family, sort of. And that was like the last thing that had connected me, and now I was in a new world.

In the children's recollections, the sea voyage forms a physical and temporal dividing break between the old world and the new. In Arthur's story, the loss of the slippers – a token of care symbolically connecting him to his family – emphasises the severity of the break with his kin, no matter how problematic and painful the family relationships had been. The fact that the slippers were stolen by one of his fellow child migrants indicated that his future companions could not be trusted, which further underlined Arthur's complete relational disconnection.

Reflecting retrospectively on the unintelligibility of their departure, the former migrants often stressed how confused they were about the spatial and temporal immensity of the emigration. At the time of their migration, the younger children, like Arthur, often had no clue where they were going. Although the departure was life changing for slightly older children as well, some of them were allured by the adventurous future prospects, so forcefully promoted in the Fairbridge project's advertisement material and the recruiters’ inspirational speeches. Vast open spaces bathing in sunshine, jungles with wild animals and the bountifulness of exotic fruit captivated the imagination of children, whose childhoods had been marked by deprivation and the rationing of wartime Britain.

Such possibilities and hopes enchanted Cecil, whose future in rural Scotland did not look too promising. ‘I was born on the wrong side of the blanket’,14 he began. This, in a small, secluded community was not a very wise thing to do, Cecil added. His mother had ‘repeated the mistake’ with his younger sibling, and the community turned its back on the family. Local welfare services intervened and together with Cecil's school's head teacher initiated the idea of sending him to Rhodesia. He recalled that there was ‘a certain amount of excitement’ about the opportunity of going out to Africa. However, retrospectively he thought that the authorities responsible for the children's selection process were possibly a little over-persuasive in embellishing the children's prospects:

They talked about oranges on the trees and the sun shining. You know they never told us that we'd get caned when we got naughty or anything like that. So, I think their whole idea was to hype it up a little bit and I swallowed it.

For the child migrants, their separation and departure constituted the beginning of a new life – glazed for some by prospects of adventure and shadowed for others by alienation and confusion. While parents and guardians might have optimistically envisaged their children's migration as a stepping-stone into auspicious futures, in terms of kin relations, it was an irreversible turning point, which further abstracted and thinned the children's past. This temporal and relational erasure, as I have suggested, was a prerequisite for the project to begin remoulding its subjects. The procedure thus epitomises an elemental rationale of projects of social engineering, in which the past is considered an impediment (Scott 2020 [1998]: 96). In their aspirational logic of improvement, projects therefore cast aside unfavourable pasts, often claiming their own starting point as the launch of a new era.

Institutional Microcosm and Clockwork Discipline

Remember the sense of time of a six-year-old? Now, imagine a little girl of six standing impatiently on a railway platform with her mother. The mother has told the girl that she will be going to Africa – first on a train, then on a boat and then on another train. She has never been on a boat and rarely on a train. But what is making her impatient is not the journey, but the fact that her mother has given her a parcel and cautioned her to open it only once she has boarded the train. The girl hastily bids good-bye and gets on the train. From her mother's explication, she has figured that the journey will last that entire day. However, she assumes she will be returning home in the evening – in time for tea. More than sixty years later, the former child migrant, Louise, reflected:

The next few years were a complete mystery to me [. . .]. I remember thinking, ‘What's going on?’ ‘What the hell’, I mean I didn't say ‘what the hell is going on?’ I didn't use hell or anything in those days, but I remember I didn't know what was happening. I didn't understand.

During our conversations, Louise spoke of her inability to understand and conceptualise her experiences as intimations of trauma and viewed it as a reason for why her memory of her childhood is so fragmented and confused. Her astute analyses of her battle to understand the situation of radical rupture in which she found herself, evidence how the project, in terms of temporal and spatial scales and scopes, made little sense to the smallest children at the initial stages of their displacement. They might have thought Rhodesia was ‘down the road’ or ‘on the other side of Brighton’, and the idea of emigrating permanently was unintelligible.15 However, as they arrived and were settled in the dormitories of the Fairbridge College, its institutional, microcosm-like order quickly took over. In no time, Louise was embedded in its disciplined routine:

The bell in the morning went at six o'clock. So, we were up at six o'clock and then you got dressed, you washed and brushed your teeth. [. . .]. We would walk down to the flagpole, and we used to stand in rows and have our nails inspected [. . .]. We would all stand in our line, the flag would go up and oh, it was all terribly colonial!

By governing the children's time and bodies with a monotonous repetitive structure materialised by the bell, the project sought to achieve its central aim: to morally transform the children into civilised colonial subjects, habituating them in punctuality and making them conscious of the value of time. Such ruling by the bell recalls E. P. Thompson's (1967: 90) classic analysis on the organisation of time in industrial capitalism: ‘the supervision of labour, bells and clocks . . . , preachings and schoolings’ were a means to forming new labour habits and internalising a new time-discipline. The organisation of time – the ability to order time within a presupposed rational progress of goal-attainment – is also a defining feature of the project form, as Graan and Rommel assert in the introduction to this special issue. In the Fairbridge scheme, the regimentation of time appears as an amalgamation of the project's ambition with its form. If we think of the children as projects within the project, time-disciplining was the key method through which the child-projects were constructed.

Indeed, the rigid routine of the bell, rituals of hygiene, corporeal propriety in posture and movement, inspections, line-ups and the persistent, regimented rhythm of these manoeuvres appear so anchored in memory that most former migrants have no trouble recalling their smallest details today (Uusihakala 2025). The bell – actually a piece of a railway line clanged at recurring intervals during the day – dictated the children's moves from one chore or compound location to the next in a repetitive daily and weekly cycle, as Archie, for example, recalled:

The bell. We worked on the bell. You lived by that. Dawn till dusk. The bedtime, mealtime, you know, the bell. Hey, you respond like Pavlov's dogs! You learned very quickly not to be late.

In his autobiographical text, Tony Holt (Windows 2001: 311) recalls the soundscape of his Fairbridge childhood, in which the bell, again, rose above all other sounds:

Very few sounds drift down to me across the years, but one that does is bells. Our daily routine – especially during the years at junior school – seemed to be governed by these bloody bells. Bells to get up. Bells to eat. Bells to go to church. Even bells to warn you there would soon be another bell!

At junior school, the day-to-day schedule remained constant and bound to the College premises, where the children slept, ate, played and were educated. After the wake up, the children made their beds, got dressed, washed up and paraded to the flagstaff, where they raised the Union Jack and sang the British national anthem. They then marched into the dining room for breakfast, where again, their demeanour was scrutinised, as Maggie reflected: ‘We sat on benches [. . .] and if we didn't sit up totally straight and if we put our hands on to the bench like this, Captain Guys [a school master] used to stamp on our fingers’.

After breakfast, the bell sounded the beginning of the school day for the juniors, while the seniors were driven into Bulawayo to attend secondary schools with other white Rhodesian children. They would return to Fairbridge after their lessons, sports and prep for the day were over. The smaller children schooled on the premises had lessons until lunch, followed by an hour of compulsory rest and stillness in the dormitories. In the afternoon, the children would return for more lessons or prep until teatime. After tea and sandwiches, the children were free, unless there were sports (football, cricket, athletics or swimming) or scheduled activities (Young Farmers’ Club, Cubs or Brownies). The housemother supervised the juniors’ baths or showers, while the prefects policed the seniors. Supper was at six, and the juniors’ lights out at seven, preceded by saying the Lord's Prayer.

The College, as an authority representing both the colonial state and British patriotic and imperial ideals, seized the children's time and compelled their bodies into particular, scheduled activities. Such seizures of time and the appropriation of bodies, as Katherine Verdery argues for socialist Romania, were displays of power ‘which was by that very fact further enhanced’ (Verdery 1996: 49).16 The children were governed by the bell, which prescribed the routinely rotating action the children were to be engaged in at any given time of the day; it dictated whether they ought to be mobile or immobile, speaking or silent, indoors or out. In boarding schools, very much institutions that Erwin Goffman (1961: 41) refers to as total,17 ‘authority . . . is directed to a multitude of items of conduct – dress, deportment, manners – that constantly occur and constantly come up for judgement’. The surveillance of proper performance of each such act was readily rectified by punishment. ‘Everybody and his brother could beat you’, Owen reminisced. ‘They ruled by the rod and by intimidation and shame’, Joyce contemplated. ‘They didn't ever make you want to please them, you just wanted to not displease’.

In her auto-ethnographic analysis of British boarding school education, Judith Okely (1996: 139) refers to the institutional training of children's bodies as the ‘curriculum of the unconscious’. She argues that bodily lessons may be taught without the pupils’ intellectual collaboration; they become firmly and adamantly embodied. Maggie referred to such incorporation of order as the abiding result of her regimented upbringing:

To this day, I eat on time. I do everything on time. Everything in order. My clothes are in order. Everything I do is in order.

On weekends, the schedule at Fairbridge changed. There were sports and games on Saturdays, followed by films or a dance in the evenings. On Sundays, instead of porridge, there would be cornflakes for breakfast, and ice cream or cake in the afternoon. But what dominated the former migrants’ recollections about weekends was their freedom; the children were free to roam about in the surrounding countryside without adult supervision. Oliver recalled:

Saturday was completely free unless you'd incurred penalties during the week, and you had to do some kind of manual work as punishment for minor infractions that didn't warrant getting hit with a stick. Most of us preferred to get caned rather than have our precious weekend time eroded by digging in somebody's garden. But we had a great deal of freedom outside the timetable. We could roam the bush. [. . .] Nobody supervised us. It was obviously a deliberate policy, letting kids learn for themselves how to fend for themselves.

The freedom of movement further increased as the children got older, as Owen recounted:

In junior school you were locked in, you wouldn't even see Bulawayo, but high school, as soon as you got there, they almost encouraged you to go out and go camping. If you wanted to go camping, you just put your name down, said where you wanted to go, and you got given a kit bag and a tent, and off you went [. . .]. That's what kept me sane, was being able to get out of the place. [. . .] I think that Mister Robinson [the headmaster] felt that it was desirable and necessary for kids to be self-sufficient, independent. And it seems that he did whatever he could to try to encourage that. [. . .] It was fantastic: imagine, we were twelve and hitchhiking from Bulawayo up to the Victoria Falls!

Both Oliver and Owen regarded the freedom as a lifeline, something that ‘kept one sane’. However, they also perceived it as a deliberate educational policy seeking to foster a sense of independence and self-sufficiency in the children. The College thus institutionalised freedom into its curriculum; it encouraged exploration, resourcefulness, autonomy, courage and skills of survival – arts considered necessary for the child migrants’ future lives in the colony. Significantly, the licence to wander about freely enabled the children to forge affective relationships with the landscape. This helped to raise them into ‘committed Rhodesian settler citizens’ in keeping with the project's principal ambition.18 Yet, some of the migrants saw the cherished freedom simultaneously as a lack of care: a sign of indifference and abandonment. This left Felix, for example, wondering why the children had bothered to return from their expeditions at all, since no one seemed to care, one way or another. When I asked whether anyone had ever considered running away, Felix replied, ‘We sort of did, but we didn't know where to run to. We didn't know where the hell we were’.

Fairbridge College compound formed its own institutional microcosm particularly for the younger children, who spent their entire days at the premises for months on end. Running away, as Felix attested, was not much of an option, since the children had little idea of what lay beyond its borders. Michel Foucault (1995 [1975]: 141) notes that discipline sometimes requires an enclosure, ‘a specification of a place . . . closed upon itself . . . a protected place of disciplinary monotony’. A boarding school appears a prime example of such enclosure of spatiotemporal standstill, or rather, of a routine rotation of fixed components within perimeters. As with spatial limits and edges, the institutional temporality of the College suggested a curtailed future, an enduring repetition of established elements. Vincent captures this sense of time as he recalled once gloomily lamenting to a friend: ‘All I have to look forward to in life is ice cream next Sunday!’ The present at Fairbridge was thus in many ways overwhelming. It created an absence and unimaginability of the future. ‘And without future’, as Valeria Luiselli writes (2019: 103), ‘time feels like only an accumulation’.

As I have suggested, Fairbridge College as a microsite of governance instituted a temporal design and a time-discipline through which it was to reach its main objectives: the children's moral transformation into disciplined colonial citizens attuned to managerial logics. Thus, the broader aims of the project, which were to ensure the continuity and improvement of the white population of the colony, relied on manoeuvring individual children's life course through institutional socialisation. From the project's perspective, the temporal discipline governing the children was therefore a means to an end, which exemplifies how projects may indeed not only imply but also produce temporal structures.

Yet, the temporalities thus produced seem ambivalent rather than harmonious. While the project was grounded on imagined imperial infinity and progressive futurity, its goal was sought by establishing a temporal discipline, which rested on tedious repetition and a peculiar sense of life being suspended in captivity (Knight 2021: 7). Moral transformation – individual improvement and societal prosperity – was thus to be achieved by embodied repetition of the sameness. However, contradictory to the project's aims, as Vincent's lament above indicates, the monotonous routine may in fact have blurred the children's prospects, distorting their ability to imagine and envision life beyond the spatial and temporal frames of the institutional microcosm (See Uushihakala 2025).

Conclusion: The Project and its End

Alongside their internal temporal regimes, projects are always actualised in the context of temporal orders pertinent to a given historical time, which may pose competing demands on their logic and objective. While the Fairbridge project had a distinct starting point marking a far-reaching rupture with the past, there never was a pre-established end to the scheme, or an articulated idea as to when its goals would be reached, making the project itself unnecessary. Rather, the project dissolved as the socio-political atmosphere in both the UK and Rhodesia no longer made it sustainable. It became difficult to find available children who would pass the strict criteria of a high-enough intelligence and good-enough family background. Moreover, the ideological frames supporting the project began to crumble. From a child welfare perspective, removing and relocating children from their families no longer seemed an acceptable social policy. As for the white Rhodesian government, immigrating British children had become too expensive and insignificant as a population strategy. In short, by the early 1960s, the project had become out-of-place and untimely. It expired, not because it had failed as such, but because the imaginary of imperial infinity was fading fast, and the project could no longer be justified.

However, the scheme was not trusted to wither away unobtrusively. Its closure involved a ruinous erasure of the children's past. Allegedly, before the College closed in 1962, there was an order from the Fairbridge Council in London to destroy the children's archives, as the managers of the scheme no longer saw it fit for the future. According to the headmaster's widow, her husband, although ‘terribly upset and annoyed’, followed the order (Bean and Melville 1989: 98). The deliberate destruction of the children's archive – the documentation of their lives prior to migration as well as their project present – constitutes an eradicating end to the scheme. It suggests that projects may indeed facilitate their own forgetting and ruin of memory (Graan and Rommel this issue). For the former migrants, the destruction of the archive continues to haunt the present, having severed their ability to trace, reconstruct and understand their childhood prior to emigration.

In this article, I have sought to portray the complexity of project temporalities permeating the Fairbridge child migration scheme – from grandiose ideas of imperial endurance to project futurity demanding a discontinuation of time. I have further described the project's experienced regimented temporality, which fused bell time with rhythms of movement and action in a repetitive cycle. Set in a microcosm, which incorporated institutionalised freedom of movement with a sense of standstill and isolation, its routinised repetition created a perhaps unpredicted unimaginability of the future. Finally, the project's eradicating end eliminated the children's documented history, which – combined with the preceding evacuation of their near past – distorted the temporal and affective structures by which the migrants were subsequently to orientate their lives.

I have suggested that imperial infinity was the political temporality, which grounded and rationalised the child migration project. Not only did it organise the scheme by enabling the plotting of children's lives and futures in its terms, but the project itself further contributed to reproducing its imaginary, despite the changing realities of late colonialism. As a temporal regime, imperial infinity was constituted on paradoxical envisionings of future. In its terms, the project regarded the children as literal investments, whose economic and political dividends were to be collected in the more distant future. Conjointly, by interlacing social mobility with spatial futurity, the project was simultaneously backward- and upward-looking: it was built on the immutability of a British upper-class past emplaced and enacted elsewhere. Imperial infinity was further reproduced in the project's visual imaginaries as well as in the institutional means of seizing the children's time and disciplining their minds and bodies. In this sense, the Fairbridge scheme is a case example of the way projects may operate as generative sites of ideological reproduction. Yet, the sense of forever-ness and endurance was combined with anxiety: a premonition of the imminent downfall of the political system and an acknowledgment of the anachronism of the migration project instituted to sustain it. This suggests how both projects and the political structures and programmes they are meant to promote may appear simultaneously solid and eternal as well as permeable and fragile, further exemplifying the normative ability of projects to assemble and mobilise mismatched and dissonant temporalities.

The enormity of the Fairbridge project's political ambitions might differentiate it from the perhaps more standard project form. Rather than addressing problems deemed as ‘technical’ and manageable in the project timeframe (cf. Li 2007), it attempted to generate profound structural change in terms of child welfare and imperial rejuvenation. However, the way the Fairbridge project sought to reach its exaggerated goals was by ground-level moral transformation of individual children as projects within the project. In that sense, the scope of the project stretched from the relatively short-term socialisation of each child within the institutional system to its anticipated, longstanding effects.

As with many other projects of social reform, the repercussions of the Fairbridge scheme did not end with its withering. While the residues of projects may linger as ruins, debris and scars in the landscape long past projects’ ends, so too may their affective remains haunt those the projects subjected, and persistently echo in the present. For the child migrants, one lasting aftereffect is tied to the way projects are temporally structured on a disruptive futurity. The sense of elimination of the past was further intensified by the destruction of their documented history. Sometimes the cancelled past, however, refuses to let go. It permeates and haunts the present as an absence – a sense of abandonment, displacement, severance of kin relations and of a sense of belonging. The weight and duress of the disrupted and wilfully silenced past is thus one grievous example of the abiding consequences that projects’ manipulation of time may have.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere thanks to the editors of this special issue, Andrew Graan and Carl Rommel, for inspiring discussions throughout the project and for insightful and generous comments on versions of this article. I would also like to thank the editor Dimitra Kofti and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback. All your comments have greatly improved the article. Finally, I am particularly indebted to my interlocutors for sharing their analytical and perceptive reflections and making this work possible.

Notes

1

The data for this article is grounded on ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2023) with former Rhodesian child migrants in their current locations: UK, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The research explores the long-lasting political, social and emotional repercussions of colonial childcare policies and projects of social engineering on the lives of former migrants today. Analysing child migrants’ experiences in a situation where family and kin relations are rupturedor altogether lost, where children were disciplined into silence and suppression, and where the public recognition of their past has been minimal, the research seeks to contribute to the ways of thinking about the formation of memory through its gaps and silences. In addition to interviews, casual conversations, e-mail exchanges and my participation in the former Fairbridgians’ get-togethers and reunions, I draw on personal materials provided by my interlocutors: letters, photographs, diaries and autobiographies. I have also conducted archival research at the British National Archives (TNA), the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives (ULSCA) and the National Archives of Australia. The research has been funded by The Academy of Finland and the Kone Foundation.

2

Boys always outnumbered girls in the project, with the first seven child migrant groups consisting of boys only. The first girls arrived at the College in 1948. According to student lists compiled by the former migrants, the identities are known of 271 migrants: 59 girls and 212 boys.

3

Ellen Boucher (2014: 3) estimates that between 1897 and 1967 roughly 95,000 British children were sent permanently to settler colonies by government-funded charities. A higher number, 130,000, is often used in the public, including the state apology to child migrants in 2010.

4

Outline of the Scheme, 1939. D296/K2/4/2, ULSCA.

5

The Second World War postponed the project until 1946.

6

Publicity brochure, May 1948. D 296/K2/3/2, ULSCA.

7

Proposed Establishment of a Fairbridge Farm School, 3 Sept. 1938. DO 35/697/5, TNA.

8

The re-modelled selection procedure included a medical examination, an IQ test, a psychological evaluation and an assessment of the family situation by a social worker, as well as the child's interview before the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College Committee.

9

D296/B4/1, ULSCA.

10

RFMC Outline of the Scheme c. 1946, D 296/K2/4/2, ULSCA. Boucher uses this image as a cover of her book Empire's Children (2014).

11

Windows is a collection of Rhodesia Fairbridge autobiographies. For published texts, I use the authors’ real names. Otherwise, I use pseudonyms to protect my informants’ identity.

12

My intention is not to equate socialism with (settler) colonialism, which would be ahistorical and politically problematic. However, the parallels between these systems’ political temporalities – their modernities’ progressive futurity and all-encompassing infinity combined with a nostalgic stance and palpable fragility – would merit a closer analysis than is possible here, as would the comparison of British colonialism with the imperial characteristics of Soviet rule (e.g. Annus 2017; Boym 2001; Ssorin-Chaikov 2006; Verdery 1996).

13

Although the disconnected kinship was institutionally maintained by mandatory letter writing at the College, the letters were censored by the staff, and this form of ‘enforced kinning’ was rarely able to sustain an emotional relationship between the children and their parents (see Uusihakala 2025).

14

An idiom indicating an illegitimate child.

15

It is also doubtful whether all the parents realised the immensity or perpetuity of their separation from their children. One social worker, with an active role in the selection of the RFMC migrants, recalls meeting many parents ‘who had little idea where Rhodesia was’ (quoted in Bean and Melville 1989: 99).

16

Katherine Verdery (1996) employs the term ‘etatization’ of time to explain how the socialist Romanian government seized its citizens’ time, creating disciplined, institutionalised bodies and minds. In such a temporal regime, Verdery argues (1996: 57), time becomes a medium of subjection, where ‘becoming is replaced by unending repetition [and] history itself becomes atemporal’ (Campeanu 1986, cited in Verdery 1996, 57).

17

A total institution, Goffman defines (1961: xiii), is ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’.

18

Holidays in white Rhodesian families filled the same purpose. Most children spent at least some of their holidays in families around the country. While many recall their experiences, particularly on the farms, very fondly, for others the practice was grimmer; the families were not vetted and ‘some children drew fairly short straws’, I was told (Uusihakala 2025).

References

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  • Uusihakala, K. 2019. ‘God's own country’: temporalities of landscape in postcolonial nostalgia, in A. Lounela, E. Berglund and T. Kallinen (eds.), Dwelling in political landscapes: contemporary anthropological perspectives, 213234. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

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    • Export Citation
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Contributor Notes

KATJA UUSIHAKALA is a University researcher in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki. Her main research interests focus on the politics and practices of memory in (post)colonial migrant communities, questions of silence and silencing, colonial legacies and politics of reconciliation. She is the principal investigator of a collaborative research project ‘Postcolonial Apology and Legacies of Problematic Pasts’ funded by the Kone Foundation. She is also finalising a monograph Imperial Investments: Legacies of displacement in British child migration to Southern Rhodesia, forthcoming in Palgrave Macmillan, in 2025. Email: katja.uusihakala@helsinki.fi; ORCID: 0000-0001-6432-6323.

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  • Abram, S. 2014. ‘The time it takes: temporalities of planning’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 129147.

  • Annus, E. 2017. Soviet postcolonial studies: a view from the western borderlands. London: Routledge.

  • Appadurai, A. 2004. The capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition, in V. Rao and M. Walton (eds.), Culture and public action, 5984. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Bean, P. and J. Melville 1989. Lost children of the empire: the untold story of Britain's child migrants. London: Unwin Hyman.

  • Bear, L. 2016. ‘Time as technique’, Annual Review of Anthropology 45: 487502.

  • Boucher, E. 2014. Empire's children: child emigration, welfare, and the decline of the British world, 1869–1967. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Boym, S. 2001. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

  • Bryld, T. 2010. I den bedste mening. Atuakkiofik.

  • Carsten, J. 2007. Introduction: ghosts of memory, in J. Carsten (ed.), Ghosts of memory: essays on remembrance and relatedness. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • de Leeuw, S. 2009. ‘“If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young”: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia, Canada’, Children's Geographies 7: 123140.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Feldman, M. and M. Mansouri 2021. ‘The impact of breakdown in filiation: the instance of children exiled from Reunion Island to mainland France between 1962 and 1984’, Frontiers in Psychology 12: 623653.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Foucault, M. 1995 [1975]. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.

  • Gerster, D. and F. Jensz 2022. Global perspectives on boarding schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in D. Gerster and F. Jensz (eds.), Global perspectives on boarding schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 133. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums: essays on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates. New York: Anchor Books.

  • Graan, A. and C. Rommel 2024. ‘Projects and project temporalities: ethnographic reflections on the normative power of the project form’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 32 (3): 119.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Guyer, J. 2007. ‘Prophesy and the near future: thoughts of macroeconomic, evangelical and punctuated time’, American Ethnologist 34: 409421.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Hage, G. 2020. Afterword. The ends of nostalgia: waiting for the past-to-come, in M. Janeja and A. Bandak (eds.), Ethnographies of waiting: doubt, hope and uncertainty, 203208. London: Routledge.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Knight, D. 2021. Vertiginous life: an anthropology of time and the unforeseen. New York: Berghahn.

  • Li, T. M. 2007. The will to improve: governmentality, development, and the practice of politics. Durham, NC: Duke University.

  • Luiselli, V. 2019. Lost children's archive. London: 4th Estate.

  • Lynch, G. 2016. Remembering child migration: faith, nation-building and the wounds of charity. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

  • Murphy, F. 2011. ‘Archives of sorrow: an exploration of Australia's Stolen Generation and their journey into the past’, History and Anthropology 22: 481495.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Okely, J. 1996. Own or other culture. London: Routledge.

  • Pine, F. 2014. ‘Migration as hope: space, time and imagining the future’, Current Anthropology 55: S95S104.

  • Piot, C. 2015. ‘Comments to Peter Pels: modern times: seven steps toward an anthropology of the future’, Current Anthropology 56: 779796.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Rodriguez, N. 2016. ‘Translating “best interest”: child welfare decisions at the US–México border’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39: 154168.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Scott, J. C. 2020 [1998]. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Sherington, G. and C. Jeffery 1998. Fairbridge: empire and child migration. London: Woburn.

  • Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2006. ‘On heterochrony: birthday gifts to Stalin, 1949’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 355375.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stoler, A. L. 1989. ‘Rethinking colonial categories: European communities and the boundaries of rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 31: 134161.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stoler, A. L. 2001. ‘Tense and tender ties: the politics of comparison in North American history and (post) colonial studies’, The Journal of American History 88: 829865.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Stoler, A. L. 2016. Duress: Imperial durabilities in our times. Durham, NC: Duke University.

  • Thelen, T. and E. Alber 2018. Reconnecting state and kinship: temporalities, scales, classifications, in T. Thelen and E. Alber (eds.), Reconnecting state and kinship, 135. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Thompson, E. P. 1967. ‘Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism’, Past & Present 38: 5697.

  • Uusihakala, K. 2015. ‘Rescuing children, reforming the empire: British child migration to colonial Southern Rhodesia’, Identities: Global studies in culture and power 22: 273287.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Uusihakala, K. 2019. ‘God's own country’: temporalities of landscape in postcolonial nostalgia, in A. Lounela, E. Berglund and T. Kallinen (eds.), Dwelling in political landscapes: contemporary anthropological perspectives, 213234. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Uusihakala, K. 2025. Imperial investments: legacies of displacement in British child migration to Southern Rhodesia. Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Verdery, K. 1996. What was socialism and what comes next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

  • Weiss, J. 2021. ‘Not built to last: military occupation and ruination under settler colonialism’, Cultural Anthropology 36: 484508.

    • Search Google Scholar
    • Export Citation
  • Windows: Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College autobiographies 2001. Christchurch: Fairbridge Marketing Company.

  • Yurchak, A. 2005. Everything was forever, until it was no more: the last Soviet generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

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