‘I was a stranger and ye took me in’: Adopting the Enemy

Russian boys ‘Alma and Inkerman’ gaze stolidly at the viewer of Roger Fenton’s 1855 photograph of their ‘adoption’ by Colonel Brownrigg in the Crimean War. Similarly haunting are the expressions of Ethiopian Prince Alemayehu in the range of photographs that record his guardianship by a British Officer following the punitive Napier expedition (1867–1868). Their deeply emotive stories are bound up in wider, politically and personally fraught questions of the adoption of children in wartime, with motives and effects ranging from the preservation of life to genocide. The adoption of the boys in these photographs became popular good news stories in Victorian Britain, used to exemplify an imperial ideology of benevolent, paternalistic improvement. I consider the history of international adoption from the late eighteenth century, looking back to the British taking hostage the young sons of Tipu Sultan to establish the significance of paternalism and sentimentality within imperial affect. Racist assumptions of white European superiority, which underpinned the extreme violence of empire, structured the presentation of British guardianship as an unambiguous cultural benefit for enemy children adopted in wars through the long nineteenth century. Beliefs in imperial benevolence, though, were unsettled by repeated engagements with the suffering of those children. Stark imperialist binaries of civilised/savage, humane/brutish, could be undercut by the powerful emotions that circulated around the figure of the vulnerable child. This chapter brings together work on the violence of empire with studies of adoption to consider the emotional history of this form of enemy encounter.