Abstract. Save the Children was one of the world’s first self-styled ‘international’ humanitarian organisations. Founded in 1919, it sought to build internationalism via the creation of strong nation states, the promotion of global capitalism and the preservation of the British Empire. Humanitarians saw global stability as being vested in the bodies of the very young. While Save the Children proclaimed a doctrine of universal child rights, it valued children based on their perceived future contribution to global capitalism, and used racial and eugenic criteria to describe this. Told across eighteen counties and 50 years, my book, published in 2021, tells the story of international humanitarianism in  the twentieth century, examining the interplay of local welfare practises and international action. In this talk I argue that welfare practises designed for and gathered from European borderlands between the two world wars were exported by aid organisations into the decolonizing British empire after 1945, where they became a central pillar of imperial designs to halt the course of decolonisation. Doing so, I will illuminate the relationship between precarious nationhood and welfare not just in Europe’s borderlands, but the shifting borderlands of empire.