Orphans And Destitute Children In The Late Ottoman Empire

History books often weave tales of rising and falling empires, royal dynasties, and wars among powerful nations. Here, Maksudyan succeeds in making those who are farthest removed from power the lead actors in this history. Focusing on orphans and destitute youth of the late Ottoman Empire, the author gives voice to those children who have long been neglected. Their experiences and perspectives shed new light on many significant developments of the late Ottoman period, providing an alternative narrative that recognizes children as historical agents. Maksudyan takes the reader from the intimate world of infant foundlings to the larger international context of missionary orphanages, all while focusing on Ottoman modernization, urbanization, citizenship, and the maintenance of order and security. Drawing upon archival records, she explores the ways in which the treatment of orphans intersected with welfare, labor, and state building in the Empire. Throughout the book, Maksudyan does not lose sight of her lead actors, and the influence of the children is always present if we simply listen and notice carefully as Maksudyan so convincingly argues.

Described by historians as a "total war," World War I was the first conflict that required a comprehensive mobilization of all members of society, regardless of profession, age, or gender. Just as women became heads of households and joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, children also became actively engaged in the war effort. Adding a new dimension to the historiography of World War I, Maksudyan explores the variegated experiences and involvement of Ottoman children and youth in the war. Rather than simply passive victims, children became essential participants as soldiers, wage earners, farmers, and artisans. They also contributed to the propaganda and mobilization effort as symbolic heroes and orphans of martyrs. Rebelling against their orphanage directors or trade masters, marching and singing proudly with their scouting companies, making long-distance journeys to receive vocational training or simply to find their families, they acquired new identities and discovered new forms of agency. Maksudyan focuses on four different groups of children: thousands of orphans in state orphanages (Darüleytam), apprentice boys who were sent to Germany, children and youth in urban centers who reproduced rivaling nationalist ideologies, and Armenian children who survived the genocide. With each group, the author sheds light on how the war dramatically impacted their lives and, in turn, how these self-empowered children, sometimes described as "precocious adults," actively shaped history.

This volume explores the variety of ways in which childhood was experienced, lived and remembered in the late Ottoman Empire and its successor states. The period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time of rapid change, and the history of childhood reflects the impact of new expectations, lived realities and national responsibilities on the youngest members of societies undergoing monumental change because of ideological, wartime and demographic shifts. Drawing on comparisons both within the Balkans, Turkey and the Arab lands and with Western Europe and beyond, the chapters investigate the many ways in which upheaval and change affected the youth. Particular attention is paid to changing conceptions of childhood, gender roles and newly dominant national imperatives. Contributors include: Elif Akşit, Laurence Brockliss, Nazan Çiçek, Alex Drace-Francis, Benjamin C. Fortna, Naoum Kaytchev, Duygu Köksal, Kathryn Libal, Nazan Maksudyan, Heidi Morrison, and Philipp Wirtz. This title, in its entirety, is available online in Open Access.

The Alawis or Alawites are a minority Muslim sect, predominantly based in Syria, Turkey and Lebanon. Over the course of the 19th century, they came increasingly under the attention of the ruling Ottoman authorities in their attempts to modernize the Empire, as well as Western Protestant missionaries. Using Ottoman state archives and contemporary chronicles, this book explores the Ottoman government's attitudes and policies towards the Alawis, revealing how successive regimes sought to bring them into the Sunni mainstream fold for a combination of political, imperial and religious reasons. In the context of increasing Western interference in the empire's domains, Alkan reveals the origins of Ottoman attempts to 'civilize' the Alawis, from the Tanzimat period to the Young Turk Revolution. He compares Ottoman attitudes to Alawis against its treatment of other minorities, including Bektashis, Alevis, Yezidis and Iraqi Shi'a. An important new contribution to the literature on the history of the Alawis and Ottoman policy towards minorities, this book will be essential reading for scholars of the late Ottoman Empire and minorities of the Middle East.

How do terms used to describe migration change over time? How do those changes reflect possibilities of inclusion and exclusion? Ella Fratantuono places the governance of migrants at the centre of Ottoman state-building across a 60-year period (1850-1910) to answer these questions. She traces the significance of the term muhacir (migrant) within Ottoman governance during this global era of mass migration, during which millions of migrants arrived in the empire, many fleeing from oppression, violence and war. Rather than adopting the familiar distinction between coerced and non-coerced migration, Fratanuono explores how officials' use of muhacir captures changing approaches to administering migrants and the Ottoman population. By doing so, she places the Ottoman experience within a global history of migration management and sheds light on how six decades of governing migration contributed to the infrastructures and ideology essential to mass displacement in the empire's last decade.

This innovative book reveals children's experiences and how they became victims and actors during the twentieth century's biggest conflicts.

In German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut. Competing Missions, Julia Hauser offers a critical analysis of the German Protestant Kaiserswerth deaconesses’ establishment in late Ottoman Beirut as situated within the larger field of educational development in the city.

By the early twentieth century, consumers around the world had developed a taste for Ottoman-grown tobacco. Employing tens of thousands of workers, the Ottoman tobacco industry flourished in the decades between the 1870s to the First Balkan War—and it became the locus of many of the most active labor struggles across the empire. Can Nacar delves into the lives of these workers and their fight for better working conditions. Full of insight into the changing relations of power between capital and labor in the Ottoman Empire and the role played by state actors in these relations, this book also draws on a rich array of primary sources to foreground the voices of tobacco workers themselves.