Download PDF | Nazan Maksudyan - Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire-Syracuse University Press (2014).
254 Pages
Nazan Maksudyan is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Istanbul Kemerburgaz University. Educated at Boğaziçi University and Sabanci University (Istanbul), where she earned her doctorate, Maksudyan was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow for postdoctoral research between 2009 and 2012 at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. She has published several articles on the social, cultural, and economic history of children and youth in the late Ottoman Empire, particularly on children with precarious means. Her essay “Foster-Daughter or Servant, Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire” appeared in the Journal of Historical Sociology 21 in 2008; and her article “Orphans, Cities, and the State: Vocational Orphanages (Islahhanes) and ‘Reform’ in the Late Ottoman Urban Space” appeared in IJMES 43 in 2011.
Introduction
Ottoman Children’s “History from Below” according to an orally transmitted family history, Haşim was born in the early 1890s somewhere in Rumelia.1 Unlike many children in this book, his parents were still alive and his basic needs were met. Still, he ran away from home as a six- or seven-year-old lad because his parents were reluctant to send him to school, despite his eagerness and insistence. As a solution, Haşim found a boat going to Istanbul at the port and hid in one of the coalyards. According to the story, when the ship arrived, he immediately went to Yıldız Palace and told the soldier at the gate to take him to the sultan. He said: “I want to be educated, I beg you to enroll me in school.” Curiously convinced, the soldier took the boy to the presence of his highness, Sultan Abdülhamid II. Showing a real interest in the boy, the sultan asked questions about his life and family. Haşim said that his great-great-grandfather, way back in his lineage, was Bayraktar Deli Hüseyin, who fought at the naval battle of Preveza in 1538.
Then, he kept telling all he knew about the war—about Hayreddin Barbarossa, Andrea Doria, and so on. Charming the Ottoman sultan with his knowledge of glorious Ottoman history, Haşim was assured that he would be educated thanks to the benevolence of the sultan toward orphans and destitute children. Consequently, Abdülhamid opened a vocational school for destitute children, and Haşim was registered there to be trained as a foundryman. A peculiarly similar story is also frequently repeated in a number of offi cial documents in the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives. According to this account, one day the sultan was returning from Hırka-ı Şerif Mosque in Fatih. On the Galata Bridge, and in other accounts simply on his way back to the palace, the sultan saw a number of vagrant boys idly strolling in the streets. Annoyed and depressed at the sight, he talked to a few of them and asked why they were wandering vainly. One little boy said that he was poor and destitute and lacked the necessary education and skills to lead him into a productive livelihood. Later, upon returning to his private chamber, the sultan decided to open an educational institution for needy children.2
This story was mostly recounted as the origin myth of Abdülhamid II’s Imperial Orphanage (Dar’ülhayr-ı Ali), which was opened in 1903 along the lines of a vocational school. It is curious that the implementation of a serious imperial educational policy has been referred to the active agency of ordinary children in both an oral account and several archival documents. Historians, however, do not traditionally interpret Abdülhamid II’s charity and welfare policies toward children as a “bottom-up” development or from the perspective of “history from below.” Historical writing is often imprisoned by a rigid conception of what is important and what is not. For most historians, wars, statesmen, and treaties are considered important. While they fi x their gaze toward the signifi cant, what is regarded as insignifi cant remains in the background, with a capacity to change the world secretly and by surprise.
The story of a destitute boy convincing the sultan to invest more on orphans’ education points not only to the neglected role of children in the making (and writing) of history but also to their increased political signifi cance in the period that is under analysis in this book. Though its scope has been enlarged, historical writing is still notorious for its disregard and ignorance of a wide range of social groups. Even today children are almost invisible in historical writing, as women, working classes, blacks, or ethnic minorities were disregarded earlier. Children’s history—their presence, experiences, and testimonies—is not considered to have historical signifi cance, so children are left out of the narrative. Their viewpoint as actors shaping important processes, as partakers of signifi cant events, and as witnesses of historic moments is simply overlooked. Historical and cultural studies tend to discount childhood as a signifi cant site of analysis because children are primarily seen as passive receptors. They are rarely recognized as cultural presences.
Since childhood is legally and biologically understood as a period of dependency, it is usually easy to dismiss children as historical actors. The very belief in children’s specialness—their vulnerability, innocence, and ignorance—also marks childhood as historically irrelevant. Children are often presented as inchoate and not yet fully human so that the fi gure of the child demarcates the boundaries of personhood, a limiting case for agency, voice, or enfranchisement.3 The crucial matter concerns the politics of age relations, which is instructed by adultism. In this view children are seen as naturally “less” than adults, insofar as they are in a state of becoming (adults), rather than being seen as complete and identifi able persons.4
Consequently, in much of the published work to date, children have been denied both a voice and a rational standpoint (which is an essential feature of human identity).5 Changes in the status of children have usually been considered with reference to what they indicate about shifts in social priorities—that is, changes in the desires and experiences of adults. Much of the insightful work on children has seen childhood essentially as a discourse among adults. The study of childhood is inevitably enmeshed in this politics. All accounts of childhood are structured by the impossibility of fully separating children from adult desires and control.6
Recently, children’s studies became a separate field of inquiry, incorporating work in anthropology, education, history, literature, medicine, philosophy, popular culture, psychology, and sociology. New eff orts to construct a proper historical identity for children, one that recognizes their “agency,” are especially indebted to feminist historical scholarship. Historians of children and childhood learned a lot from their eff ort “to make women a focus of inquiry, a subject of the story, an agent in the narrative” and to construct them “as historical subjects.”7 Although sex and age diff erences cannot be seen as directly analogous, similarities between them suggest that studies based on age (or generations) suff er from the same sort of naturalist assumptions (in denial of socially constructed nature or relations), such that historical work predominantly reinforces and perpetuates the normalization of adult–child power inequalities. Therefore, the concepts of power, confl ict, and contest are crucial in writing about children as social actors.
Children need to be viewed as capable of social action. Since personhood is always associated with adulthood, children are excluded from the defi nition of rational capacity and thus denied agency. Yet, the agency of “ordinary people” has laid the foundations for a “new” social history. Recently scholars have tried to understand how children, and youth in particular, have exercised historical agency in the past. Within these perspectives, children are viewed not merely as appendages to adult experiences but as individuals who participated in and helped to shape the history of their time. There is a greater degree of commitment to children as social beings in possession of their own standpoint.
This book, focusing on orphans and destitute children in the late Ottoman Empire, strives to go beyond the “rigid boundaries of importance” for Ottoman history and regard children as “signifi cant”—as part of the history. The research behind attempts to see and listen to these habitually ignored and essentially invisible and voiceless actors. My work is based on the conviction that introducing a new angle of observation, that of children, into unexplored or even previously explored fi elds of study can expose and enlighten hidden or unseen parts of the phenomena. Voices of children in general—and, for purposes of this book, voices of orphan and destitute children in particular—can be treated as newly discovered sources or belated testimonies for writing a nuanced and alternative history of the late Ottoman era.
In parallel with a growing interest in the meaning of childhood during earlier time periods, the last three decades have produced discrete historical studies that provide richly detailed accounts of the lives of European and American children. Compared to many other fi elds of social history, the literature on the history of Ottoman children remains scanty. The researches on children and youth in the Ottoman Empire to date would not exceed a few articles and books.8 The growth of interest in the history of children and youth is, in part, due to the development of other related fi elds of research. Demography was one of the fi rst domains that provided signifi cant opportunities for the writing of a social history of childhood. Historical-demographic and micro-analyses based on such diverse issues as birth statistics, mortality rates, illegitimate births, and the prevalence of child labor off ered opportunities of study. Statistical information and studies on the Ottoman Empire remain scarce, but urban centers like Istanbul have been studied in greater detail.9
Monographs, including dissertations and books from an urban history perspective, which analyze the court records (sicils) of a single city for limited time periods, also provide numerical data on the number of children in households, the average age of orphans, and workshops in which children were employed as apprentices (çırak).10 Legal historians and also those focusing on court records in general have productively studied seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Islamic legal rulings outlining norms for custody of children who had not reached puberty, acceptable practices for “child marriages,” and the question of criminal liability for crimes committed by children who had not reached “the age of reason.”11 Social historians working on gender and the family have provided the greatest insight into understanding childhood in Ottoman society during the period from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.12 The more established fi eld of family history has contributed to the development of literature on the history of childhood through common themes and interests.
The study of family structures and of patterns underlying the organization and division of labor within the family raises numerous questions that have been studied from the perspective of history of childhood. The nature and actual time period of childhood and adolescence have also been subjects of considerable research. The eff orts of feminist scholars to give voice to a traditionally repressed group paved the way for other previously unheard-from members of households to take the fl oor. The emergence and growth of scholarly work on “children as social actors” is theoretically indebted to this body of knowledge. As an outcome of the development of neighboring disciplines, childhood studies became a part of Ottoman and Turkish Republican history as an independent area of research in the 1990s.
Approaches that combined history with sociology, education, and social anthropology proved extremely fertile for the history of childhood. Bekir Onur, a specialist in educational sciences, published much of the scarce literature on the issue. He contributed to the development of the history of childhood as a research fi eld through both compilations and original research.13 Leaning upon a rich secondary literature from various disciplines, Onur’s source material usually comes from the memoir genre. Mine Tan also works on the history of childhood in the Republican era.14 Her studies are especially important in methodological terms since, in addition to published material, she relies on oral history.
Tan argues that this method off ers an opportunity to contact “common people” and their versions of history. Although both these scholars’ primary concern is to write the history of Early Republican children, they provide remarkable information on Ottoman children. Cüneyd Okay, on the other hand, focuses on the history of childhood in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, largely on the Second Constitutional Period.15 The issues he has dealt with are changes in the conception of childhood in the late Ottoman Empire and the instrumentalization of children for nationalistic aims. Though strongly underlining the signifi cance of memoirs, Okay’s works mostly rely on children’s magazines of the period, which bring to light original primary material on the characterization of “ideal children” by contemporary political cadres and intellectuals.
The bibliography of Ottoman Turkish (Arabic script) children’s periodicals that he has compiled is an invaluable source for many researchers. The approach and objectives of these detailed childhood studies can be summarized roughly under two categories. First, they are written with a developmentalist attitude, taking childhood as a period in the life-cycle of every human being. In that sense, childhood is narrated as a duration with diff erent phases, such as infancy, weaning, circumcision, and going to school. Accordingly, these studies contain descriptive data on the growth of Ottoman/Turkish children from birth to puberty. Failing to consider children as historically active agents, these studies represent them as “becomings” who grow into adulthood (as transitional beings) and as objects who can be understood by simply activating images derived from developmental psychology and the sociology of socialization. Although this sort of information is valuable and rich in detail, enclosing the history of childhood within the frame of a life period actually limits the possibilities and richness that can be attained by studying children .
The second characteristic of studies on Ottoman/Turkish children and childhood is that they lean predominantly upon Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood (1962). This school of historiography argues that there was no concept of childhood before “modernity.” Before then, parents were distant and unapproachable beings and children were considered inferior, their demands and needs not suffi ciently valuable to be met. Yet, a very serious transition took place in the modern era as the family became child-oriented and aff ectionate, with a permissive mode of child care and recognition of the uniqueness of each child.16 Following Ariès, the abovementioned studies mainly focus on the transformation of the concept of childhood.17 These studies argue that at any one time throughout society there is a dominant and overreaching notion of childhood, albeit one that encompasses a variety of perceptions. Scholars such as Onur, Tan, and Okay emphasize their and the fi eld’s indebtedness to Ariès and consequently focus on the concept of childhood rather than on the lives of children. Theory on the “discovery of childhood” emphasizes the diff erences experienced in child-rearing practices, parent–child relations, forms of aff ection, and disciplining. A new generation of scholars, working with diff erent materials and on diff erent periods, have all in diff erent ways rebutted the assertions of Ariès. They have gathered copious evidence to show that there was a concept of childhood in earlier centuries as well.18
Taking either the Tanzimat or the Republican era as the crucial breakpoint, childhood studies in Turkey still rely on the “discovery” theory. It has been argued that the social meaning of childhood among Ottoman urban elites was undergoing a signifi cant transformation. Childhood was sentimentalized and idealized. The middle classes from various backgrounds started to realize the existence of diff erent products for children, including foods, clothing, toys, books, and other goods. Publications that primarily targeted parents emphasized “modern” child-rearing practices and through consumer advertising communicated new ideals of health and robustness in children.19 Works on the “discovery of childhood” dismiss another strong historiographical school emphasizing the worsening of conditions for children in modern times. Relying on the theoretical legacy of Michel Foucault, scholars such as Robert Jütte, Erving Goff man, David J. Rothman, and Jacques Donzelot emphasize the institutionalization of children under the inhumane disciplinary conditions of boarding schools, orphanages, and reformatories.20
They argue that children were not objects of care in modern societies; on the contrary, they were kept under surveillance, disciplined, and indoctrinated. In sum, the general weakness of Ottoman/Turkish childhood studies is their neglect of the historical activity of children as a part of social, economic, and political processes, while concentrating on the conception and cycle of childhood. Childhood is not only an idea in adult minds, nor is it solely a cultural construction. As people, children are active historical fi gures who deserve a history of their own. Children are social actors and informants in their own right. The experiences and viewpoints of children have an unexploited potential to open new horizons on many signifi cant processes of the late Ottoman period, such as urbanization, industrialization, nationalism, and state-formation. Those fi elds of research have the potential to liberate children from their childhood. The intricate relationships among children, nationalism, sports, and Boy Scouts in the late Ottoman and Early Republican periods constitute an important fi eld in which children partially appear as actors.21 In parallel with this fi eld, some scholars have underlined the obsession of the founders of the Republic on the physical strength and health of Turkish children and youth who became symbols of the new nation.22 Another established and still growing area is the education, indoctrination, and socialization of children, who came to be conceived as future citizen-subjects deserving of special treatment.23 Factors such as modern educational reforms and opportunities, which resulted to a large extent from the emerging rival nationalist movements threatening the integrity of the Ottoman lands, together with the rapidly growing number of missionary-sponsored schools, are analyzed in a detailed manner.24 Other studies underlined the role of nationalist ideology, religious doctrine, gender roles and models, and militaristic/paternalistic idealizations in the formation of childhood identity.25
The growth of research on philanthropy, charity, and welfare is especially important for this book.26 These studies provide invaluable perspectives on the signifi cance of children for nineteenth-century philanthropists—religious men, state offi cials, and missionaries. Imperial concern for portraying an image of benevolence and care for the population led the Ottoman authorities to create new ceremonies, institutions, and regulations that addressed child poverty, orphanhood, and mortality in addition to other educational opportunities for children. From the perspective of philanthropy, children became more visible actors on the historical stage. Numerous tenets of the social history of childhood in the Ottoman Empire are still waiting to be written. More research is needed to uncover the lives of children in rural areas, juvenile delinquency, class variations in urban environments, and continuities and diff erences between confessional and ethnic communities. The gendering of childhood in each of these realms also merits much greater attention. Within this still-underdeveloped fi eld of the history of children and youth, marginalized children, working-class children, foundlings, orphans, and destitute children have attracted even less attention.
This book gives voice to destitute and orphaned children and lets them narrate their own versions of history. It directs attention toward previously unnoticed yet essential aspects of the late Ottoman era and modernization, since children were assigned signifi cant roles in this period. Specifi cally, during the nineteenth century child-related concerns entered the agenda of the Ottoman intelligentsia and policymakers. In the modern era, the ineluctable issues of children and childhood and how they functioned as relevant actors began to haunt adults. Child anxiety came to constitute a general trend of modernity, and by the 1870s it spread to all societies that perceived of themselves as part of that “modern and civilizing world.”27
While levels of industrialization, literacy, urbanization, and other measures of modernization varied considerably from place to place, accompanying social values spread more rapidly and with greater chronological coincidence. Therefore, despite the discrepancies in economic or demographic indices with regards to France or Britain, Ottoman reformers and intellectuals developed similar concerns toward children insofar as they constructed their legitimacy from within the larger Western modernizing discourse of the period. In addition to “concerned” discourses, newly emerging tools of governmentality were also directed at regulating the population and citizenry in a diff erent way.28 Late Ottoman modernization and centralization projects elicited the disciplinary implications of a modern state apparatus, which made use of microtechnologies of power in everyday social life.
Forsaken members of the population, including poor and needy children, all of a sudden became important. Destitute children and orphans had incremental value, as questions of citizenship and identity construction redefi ned the “control” over children as a modernist project. However, they were not only objects of social control and discipline. Kent Schull’s conceptualization of late Ottoman prisons as “laboratories of modernity” is a plausible perspective for understanding the elevated concern regarding children and youth.29 Many of the pressing questions of modernity, such as administrative effi ciency and centralization; economic reform and industrialization; new gender regimes; management of time and space; ethnic, religious, and national identities; and philanthropic state engagements were all refl ected in discourses and policies regarding children in need.
The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the partial transformation of a communally segregated Ottoman society into a centrally administered polity. The multinational and decentralized empire was approximating to a centralized modern state. The attempts to “modernize” established regulations concerning population control with new administrative designs of governmentality challenged the customary autonomy of communal authorities. The central state could now penetrate into communal aff airs and have a presence in its workings. Non-Muslim religious authorities felt threatened, for they were losing their right to self-governance. Diff erent interested parties, the state, non-Muslim communities, missionaries, and the bourgeois public started to see orphaned and destitute children through diff erent lenses. The motivation and discourse, on the one hand, was based on the desire to save unfortunate children from the dangers to which they were prey. These dangers included losing or being alienated from one’s ethnoreligious identity, being sold into slavery, sexual abuse and exploitation, juvenile criminality, prostitution, health problems, death, conversion, and apostasy.
And it was not only children who were at risk. These unwanted phenomena would create new classes of children who would pose themselves as threats to the public in the future. The collection or “kidnapping” of abandoned children; the forced or inveigled emigration of little girls to urban centers or abroad; vagrant, idle, and begging children; juvenile crime in the cities; and missionaries’ ambitions over massacre orphans were all dangers that several interested parties fought against, either with defensive or off ensive strategies. The image of orphans and destitute children was that they were, fi rst, endangered by the modernizing world they were being raised in; and, second, that they themselves were new dangers engendered by that world. Still, a threat can always be turned into an opportunity.
Dangerous children—foundlings, street children, refugees, or “unchaste” maidservants—can always be refashioned as laborious workers, loyal citizens, or staunch religious believers. In the case of abandoned children, the protagonists of chapter 1, there were both sanitary concerns—infants were either found dead in public places or they had enormously high mortality rates—and political stakes. The religious and civil status of foundlings became a realm of rivalry for the state, non-Muslim communities, municipal authorities, the police department, and missionaries at the same time. The policies or strategies created toward foundlings were not only about saving abandoned babies from perishing in the streets but also about strengthening communities, constructing a modern image through new institutions, or raising religious or political adherents. Standard interpretations of the Ottoman reform era do not include less obvious actors, such as women, peasants, or children, as part of the historical account.
The focus is on the state and statesmen—in other words, to adult men—while the rest of the society is simply discounted on the assumption that they are extrapolitical, namely insignifi cant, invisible non-actors. Contrary to the neglect of present-day historians, nineteenthcentury adult opinion became well aware of the signifi cance of children and reassessed their role within adult male politics. This was especially due to the new meanings and identities children acquired in their relations with provincial and municipal authorities, foreign missionaries, religious and civil leaders of communities, and the state. As child philanthropy and child saving was embraced by large sections of the society, destitute children became a part of the political, economic, and social agenda, both in material and discursive terms. They were no longer outside the historical scene. On the contrary, children gained channels for being visible and loud. They assumed signifi cant roles, which left traces in the records. More than a hundred years later, it is possible to perceive how their part was crucial in enforcing, challenging, or rewriting history.
This book suggests an alternative vista of Ottoman modernization from within the viewpoint of orphans. Diff erent aspects of Ottoman modernization, such as industrialization, urbanization, economic development, welfare policies, educational centralization, and strengthening of nationalist ideologies, are analyzed through children’s lead. The book is divided into four diff erent categories of threatening (and also promising) children. Each chapter brings a diff erent group of destitute children to the forefront as the protagonist and discerns their subjectivity in the picture. A generalized concept such as “children in need” would suppress the agency of separate categories of children into a homogenized, ponderous, and dehumanized childhood. Each chapter delineates distinct inner dynamics and diff ering actors. Yet, all those individual accounts are parts of the same history. Whether portrayed as victims or perpetrators, children became the main targets of both modernization and reform agendas. The fi rst chapter dwells upon the foundlings, specifi cally the issue of child abandonment and provisions for them, while also addressing national identity, citizenship, and demographic politics.
The nineteenthcentury developments on foundling care demarcate certain signifi cant traits of the political agenda. In the late Ottoman Empire, multilingual and multireligious urban centers shared certain aspects of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. In addition, there was a rather politicized and sensitive concern for strengthening the solidarity and integrity of communities that felt threatened about losing their members’ identity, language, and religion. The sentiment of dissolution was triggered by reforms for the modernization and centralization of the state. These gave way to many tendencies of a nationstate and threatened the relative autonomy of communities. Under these circumstances, questions of religion, nationality, and citizenship of abandoned children became contested terrain, over which arduous eff orts were spent by local authorities, missionaries, non-Muslim communities, and the central state. In an unexpected manner, these infants became the main characters in a politics of demography, conversion, and national rivalry. The leading role of the second chapter belongs to beslemes, foster daughters, taken into households in the form of domestic servants. In this part of the book, diff erent facets of urbanization, child labor, and youth sexuality are elaborated from the perspectives of gender and class. Deprived of the relatively protective environment of their own families, orphaned, destitute, and poor girls were under three orders of subordination and disadvantage. First, they were materially exploited and sexually abused by their masters, who neither paid them a fair wage nor showed respect for their bodily integrity. Second, they were put into a disadvantaged position by the patriarchal order of the society, which subordinated them as young women and specifi cally discriminated against them as working women. Third, they were left powerless in courtrooms as the sexist rulings of Islamic jurors and judges routinely favored their masters, relying on the well-established status of the latter in society as opposed to these usually rootless, destitute orphans. However, this is not to say that young beslemes were completely suppressed and silenced in the nightmarish environment that surrounded them.
The research points to the fact that they were able to fi nd strategies of resistance and ways of taking agency. The existence of escape stories, attempted suicides, and accusations in the court records is a clear sign of the assumed agency on the part of these girls, who took an active part in determining their life-course and writing their own history. Moving out of the private setting of late Ottoman households, the third chapter provides a detailed account of the emergence and expansion of a large network of vocational orphanages for orphans, street children, vagrants, beggars, and children of the poor and/or refugee parents in urban centers of the Empire throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. This episode underlines how children became both targets and actors of a politics of urbanity. As technicians and workers, they participated in the realization of aspirations for economic development and industrialization. The chapter also provides a novel and nuanced understanding of the Ottoman reform era. The birth of orphanages was linked to such immediate considerations as establishing order and security in urban spaces and rejuvenating local industries. The project was intrinsically linked to new defi nitions of vagabondage, vagrancy, and begging. New urban structures of provincial governments, municipalities, and the police were determined to solve these “problems.” The orphanages would help discipline the “outer space.” The emergence of a protectionist economic discourse, proceeding hand-in-hand with the heightened importance attached to industrial productivity of domestic producers, constituted the second layer motivating the opening of orphanages. Centrally planned vocational education would revive declining guild structures.
The institution was also a part of the larger context of the “Ottoman Reform” and the dissemination of Ottomanist ideals. The fi nal chapter deals with Armenian orphans of the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896 and how they became a matter of international dispute between diff erent religious denominations and self-interested philanthropy. Discussion in this part centers on conversion, international rivalry, and Ottoman attempts to prevent foreign intervention. The involvement of foreign missionaries and the Ottoman state in the relief of massacre victims suggests that crisis situations, such as wars, massacres, and armed confl icts, “invite” only certain parties to take philanthropic measures to help out some of the “needy.” In the aftermath of these events, diff erent actors fought for legitimacy, power, prestige, and hegemony over the seemingly philanthropic fi eld of the opening of orphanages. Orphans, whose lives were under threat and who were torn apart from their families and their social environment, were represented perfect opportunities for religious and nationalistic aims. In this picture, all sides—the Ottoman state, foreign missionaries, and the Armenian Patriarchate—were disturbed by the effectiveness of their rivals and attempted to compete with, block, or supersede each other. The fact that all actors had regarded the others as accomplices, despite their deeply felt animosities in general, also symbolizes the significance of diffidence, doubt, and rivalry in a seemingly philanthropic realm.
The history of childhood brings the historian into contact with many different disciplines, theoretical backgrounds, approaches, sources, and methods. Each chapter of this book is in close dialogue with other major fi elds. The fi rst chapter, for that matter, communicates with demographic studies, state welfare policies, and heightened concern toward health issues, such as hygiene, and infant and child mortality. The second part could be read as a chapter of Ottoman feminist history, family/household studies, domestic labor, or sexuality. The third chapter communicates with perspectives of labor studies, economic history, the reverberation of Ottoman reform in the provinces, the institutionalization of modern forms of order, security, and surveillance, or the centralization of educational policies. The last chapter constitutes a signifi cant part of nineteenth-century diplomatic history, with its emphasis on the extent of the missionary presence in the Empire, the discontent of the Sublime Porte, and the construction of modern ethnoreligious identities and/or states. From the perspective of the private/public divide, the chapters fl ow from the most inner/intimate sphere to the most global/international. The fi rst chapter is on pregnancy, birth, and infants. The second revolves around family and household structures. The third chapter focuses on domestic politics, provincial governments, municipalities, and “Ottoman reform.” Finally, the fourth chapter deals with diplomacy and international politics. The structure of the book, as a whole, is reminiscent of the nesting of Russian dolls but in reverse. Moving from the most intimate sphere of infant foundlings to the larger international context of missionary orphanages, the book off ers a rich and engaging history—not only through disciplined passion but also through meticulous research reproduced from one chapter to the next.
Sources Admittedly, unearthing source material on children and youth from the past is problematic. Although diff erent sorts of sources might be referred to, the evidence is not evenly distributed for all subject areas. Certain aspects of childhood, such as education, employment, and health, are better preserved in offi cial sources. Other aspects, which did not arouse offi cial or philanthropic interest at the time, are more diffi cult to trace. The inner lives of families, the extent and meaning of violence (including sexual abuse), and children’s own views on their life experiences, work, school, play, and their own childhood are not easy to discover.30 Children themselves leave few records, and artifacts designed for them, such as books and toys, have a poor survival rate. Literary texts, polemics, biographies, diaries, letters, advice books, paintings, and historical demography were the bedrock upon which the “early founders” of childhood history developed the classical ideas that still loom over the discipline. With regards to the Ottoman Empire, autobiographical material proves to be elusive and rare. Examples of the genre usually afford very small space to the childhood of the author. Furthermore, with regards to historical demography, sources for the Ottoman Empire are extremely limited. Most of the researchers were compelled to rely on children’s periodicals. Due to the range of topics and actors covered in the present study, the primary sources used for the book were multiple within and between the chapters.
The overall research of the book was undertaken in the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives (BOA), the American Board Archives (ABA),31 the Archives of Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABC),32 and the French Foreign Ministry Archives (Archives du Ministère des Aff aires Étrangères, AMAE).33 In addition, the Capucin Archives (Archives des Capucins, AC)34 and Lazarist Archives (Archives Historiques de la Congrégation de la Mission, AHCM)35 were also part of the research agenda. Several missionary periodicals were also among the primary sources consulted in this research. These weekly or monthly publications contained original letters and reports of the missionaries. For the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the monthly periodical The Missionary Herald was analyzed from the 1850s onward.36 Another periodical of the ABCFM was a weekly, The Orient, which was published from 1910 to 1922 by the Bible House of Istanbul. In addition, annual reports of the society were also studied for recapitulation of the yearly activities.37 In opposition to the relative monopoly of the ABCFM over Protestant missionaries, Catholic missionaries in the Ottoman Empire consisted of several more or less equally powerful groups. For that reason, three diff erent periodicals were analyzed. First, the bimonthly periodical Bulletin des Oeuvres des Écoles d’Orient published a wide range of reports from various missionary groups, dispersed into diff erent areas of the Orient.38
The weekly periodical Les Missions Catholiques was also very signifi cant since it was closely related to the papacy and the Jesuits.39 Third, the periodical of the Lazaristes, Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission, was studied due to the signifi cance of this missionary group, especially in the port cities of the Empire.40 The original attempt to hear the voices of the children themselves enforced the usage of diff erent source material, since children have been customarily underrepresented in records, archives, and documents. The fi rst two chapters on abandoned children and foster daughters in households rely on both literary and legal data in addition to archival sources. The third chapter benefi ts mainly from sources in the Ottoman archives along with yearbooks (Salname), compilations of regulations (Düstur), local periodicals, and memoirs. The fourth chapter is built upon archival material and periodical collections as well as a large body of missionary memoirs from the nineteenth century. A historian’s methodological stance defi nitely shapes the framing of questions and also the identifi cation of sources, as well as their subsequent interpretation. Scholars who deny that children have a voice, and see them only as passive fi gures, would not ask relevant questions relating to their presence and instead would render them as being outside of history. As a result, many sources should be read with a cautious eye visà-vis the intentions and prejudices of their authors, since in all probability they refl ect an adultist outlook.
Though traditionally disregarded and ignored, the history of children cannot be separated from political, social, economic, and cultural processes that were conceived as essentially pertaining to the lives of adults. This book is written with the conviction that historically relevant developments and discourses of the nineteenth century, such as urbanization, welfare policies, the growth of urban workshops/factories, along with domestic labor, imagined statehood, and nationhood, can be reconceptualized, rewritten, and better comprehended if children are rescued from oblivion.
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