The failings of British child migration schemes to settler colonies across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been well documented. However, little work has uncovered the emotional aspects of emigration from young people's perspectives. This article excavates migrants' voices and feelings to offer an affective history of juvenile migration that focuses on the emotional challenges of settling and remaking home in Canada. The article argues that juvenile migrants were required to undergo emotional conversion that encouraged them to think differently about their environment to feel "at home" in the empire. Drawing on correspondence written by Barnardo's migrants, this article adds complexity to stories of loneliness, trauma, and abuse that have come to dominate child migration accounts. This article also examines the important emotion work involved in the production of and engagement with the migrant periodical, Ups and Downs, which created an emotional community that shaped how readers made sense of their environments and experiences. The article analyses how young people wrote about "remaking" home in Canada that centered on affective responses inspired by new experiences on stolen Indigenous land, which was represented to (and by) migrants as full of promise. In offering an affective history of migration, it positions child migrants as important agents in processes of settler colonialism and demonstrates how their engagements with and representations of their new environments became significant tools of colonization. In doing so, this article makes an original contribution conceptually and empirically to the history of emotions, the history of childhood and youth, environmental history, and settler colonial studies.
This article examines how the October 4 observance of World Animal Day (WAD) in China during the 1930s and 1940s functioned as a multifaceted platform appropriated by various actors. Under the rhetoric of animal protection, WAD was mobilized to advance both discourses of Buddhist revival and the Nationalist Government's appeasement policy, while also creating openings for social commentary and critical reflection on pressing political and moral concerns. Initiated under the influence of L & uuml; Bicheng's early advocacy in 1931, the China Society for the Protection of Animals (CSPA), led by lay Buddhist elites, reinterpreted Buddhist principles of nonkilling and vegetarianism through the modern idiom of animal protection, positioning WAD as a central vehicle for advancing these ideals in public life. Between 1934 and 1937, the Nationalist Government formally endorsed the event, treating it as a tool for domestic moral cultivation and a symbolic demonstration intended to bolster its broader peace-oriented narrative during the appeasement era. Within this context, its ritualized and religiously inflected commemorations also provided a venue for alternative voices to express dissent and critique. Public criticisms targeted not only the CSPA's detachment from the practical challenges of animal welfare, but also the government's prioritization of performative gestures over addressing human suffering and its failure to respond decisively to Japanese aggression amid national crisis. Rather than generating a broad-based ethical consensus, WAD's ceremonial framework struggled to secure resonance among the wider populace. By the late 1940s, it had become largely confined to Buddhist circles and faded from national visibility.
