Change in the School Maps of the Late Ottoman Empire

Reviewed by: Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire by Nazan Maksudyan Heidi Morrison Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire. By Nazan Maksudyan. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 232 pp. Cloth $39.95. Historian Nazan Maksudyan breaks new ground as one of the first scholars to insert children into the Ottoman Empire’s historical narrative. Through the lens of meticulously collected archival records on orphans and destitute children, [End Page 327] Maksudyan argues that children are invaluable historical actors in the late Ottoman Empire’s process of modernization, including projects of urbanization, citizen formation, and welfare policies. As the multinational and decentralized late Ottoman Empire sought to transform to a centralized modern nation state, concerned parties saw the regulation of abandoned, vagrant, begging, and refugee children as a way to refashion religious and political identities, as well as create a new workforce. The state, foreign missionaries, and religious and civil leaders competed to save unfortunate children, who went from being once invisible, non-political members of society to prospective future subjects. Maksudyan’s book begins by making a generalized case for why it is important to write a “history from below,” then traces marginalized children’s activity from the innermost recesses of society to the international stage. Chapter one examines new state techniques for the governance of foundlings, which were propagated to advance the image of modernity. In reality, children in the institutions were ill-cared for, and non-Muslim communities felt alienated by the state’s intrusion into the care of its youngest members. Chapter two provides an intimate look at domestic servant girls’ resistance to abuse by fostering patriarchs. Government concern for these girls did not focus on abuse, but instead on using the girls as a means of policing sexuality and furthering its reach into the population. The third chapter argues that the expansive number of vocational orphanages at the heart of cities was linked to the process of disciplining urban centers and furthering industrial progress. The final chapter looks at the role that abandoned children played in international politics. Foreign missionaries rivaled the Ottoman state and local communal leaders in their thinly veiled proselytizing relief efforts for war-orphaned children. Overall, Maksudyan’s book shows that orphaned and destitute children were at the center of creating the new, modern social order of the late Ottoman Empire. Maksudyan’s book does not provide novel arguments about Ottoman history, nor does it purport to do so. Several historians have documented that the late Ottoman state, and other interested parties, sought to manipulate and control subjects in the modernization process. The contribution of Maksudyan’s book comes from the light it shines on destitute and neglected children as integral to the process of Ottoman modernization. (Historian Benjamin Fortna has already shown that mainstream schoolchildren were part of this process.) Maksudyan’s book successful rescues the most marginalized of children from the past and triumphantly reminds historians to pay attention to the human terms of modernization. From cries at the doorsteps of police stations to little dead bodies without registered names, discarded children are makers of history. It is up to future researches to take the torch Maksudyan has helped light [End Page 328] and move forward in discerning what new insights children can provide about Middle Eastern history. Beth Baron’s The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (2013) provides perhaps one of the first examples of how this can be done, albeit in the context of modern Egypt. Maksudyan’s book can be of interest to historians seeking to unearth the subaltern in the Ottoman past, and also to historians of other world regions seeking to compare care-taking systems for abandoned and orphaned children. Adoption is not legally possible in Islamic law, and hence unknown in Ottoman society. Heidi Morrison University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Copyright © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

<i>Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire</i>. By Nazan Maksudyan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 232. $39.95 (hardcover).

The historiography of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II’s long reign (1876–1909) was long mired in Orientalist and Turkish nationalist essentialism. Abdülhamid has typically been vilified as an anti-West and anti-Christian bloodthirsty tyrant and an Islamic reactionary autocrat. More recently, Selim Deringil (The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 [1998]), Benjamin Fortna (Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire [2002]), Kemal H. Karpat (The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State [2001]), Engin Deniz Akarlı (The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861–1920 [1993]), and others have revamped our understanding of this crucial period with more nuanced and unbiased studies. This revisionist historiography, largely but not exclusively focused on the Ottoman center, has been enriched by more specialized studies, to which Mostafa Minawi’s The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz belongs.

This article examines the treatment of Armenians by the late Ottoman and Turkish republican state with a special focus on the social and political roles of the Armenian clergy, especially the patriarch. After giving a brief account of the historical evolution of the millet system – the principles and practices applied by the Ottoman state in its treatments of non-Muslims – the article tries to understand whether the new regime kept it or adopted a modern approach during the transition from empire to nation-state. It concludes that the republican state has created a deliberate inconsistency in its treatment of the Armenian community and patriarch. Although it has avoided recognizing them as a group and their group’s rights it continuously discriminated against them because of their group identity. The republican state has tried to downgrade the patriarch to a mere religious figure without any social or political role which is defined de jure. However, it has continued to accept him as de facto leader of the Armenian community on some occasions.

Historians of the Ottoman Empire have up until now written extensively not only on the polyethnic and multireligious nature of the Ottoman Empire, but also on the specific ethnic and religious groups that made up this plurality. Yet, although the Gypsies were a part of this pluralistic society, they have not received sufficient critical attention from Ottomanists whether in Turkey or abroad. While a few important studies have recently been published on the Ottoman Gypsies, this scholarship, though indeed very useful as a guide to the rich materials available on the subject, are weakened by two competing arguments. The first of these arguments is that the Gypsies of the Ottoman Balkans provide a salient example of a group marginalized through stigmatization, segregation and exclusion, whereas the second maintains that Gypsies were benignly tolerated by the Ottoman state. These analyses however fail to take into account that the legal, social and economic status of the Roma people in the Ottoman Empire seems to have been, at different times and in different places, much more complicated than simple marginalization or toleration. The question in fact needs to be problematized through a consideration of regional, local and temporal differences. My previous readings of the kanunnames and the mühimme registers of the second half of the sixteenth century substantiate this view and demonstrate that the marginality of the Gypsies in the Ottoman Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was neither absolute and unchanging nor inflexible and complete. The interaction of the Gypsies both with the state and with Ottoman society at large was both hostile and symbiotic. Thus, the purpose of this study is to delve further into this topic and analyze how the Ottoman Imperial state dealt with what I call “community in motion” at various levels in the late nineteenth century. Through close reading of a layiha (memorandum) written by Muallim Sa’di Efendi, a college professor in the city of Siroz (Serres) in communication with other archival sources located in Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul, the paper attempts not only to understand the ways and techniques through which the late Ottoman state produced and governed the Empire’s subjects but also to show how Gypsies interacted with and were received by the local population in Serres, including Muslims and Orthodox Christians. My argument is that during the sixteenth century, the imperial state adopts residential and religious mobility of the Gypsies, albeit with certain restrictions. Yet, by the late nineteenth century, one of the most significant concerns of the late Ottoman state was to “reform” (ıslah) the Gypsies. Constants attempts were being made to deconstruct, normalize and eliminate differences of Gypsies, for instance, appointing imams to the Gypsy neighborhoods to “correct” their faith or opening new schools to “save” them from ignorance and poverty that lived in.

This chapter surveys developments within the late Ottoman state. It begins by exploring communal relations during the period of tanzimat reforms, going on to investigate how the takeover of the Ottoman state by a group of military politicians from Salonika, their attempted centralization and territorialization of the Ottoman state as a response to the Balkan losses, and the European ethnicization of imperial intervention—not yet fully evident in the Arab provinces but certainly becoming clear in the Balkans and the Caucasus—served to shape the consciousness of Arab political elites and formed the backdrop to later expressions of political violence in the Mashriq.

In modern Turkey, male circumcision is so inextricably linked with Muslim identity that one may assume it a practice universally performed by them for centuries. However, a significant number of Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire were uncircumcised. This article argues that circumcision became a universal Muslim practice through the infrastructure and bodily surveillance of the Ottoman central state and modern physicians who considered circumcision a requirement for public health, rather than solely as a key religious practice. Through circumcision, the late Ottoman state not only aimed to crystallize the Islamic character of its Muslim population but also to secure its political loyalty through the link of religious and political identity. The growing state infrastructure, specifically modern education and conscription enabled the central state to interfere with the bodies of its population in a way previously impossible. This process, however, should not be understood as a mere state imposition on the society. Local populations usually welcomed the state-led circumcision campaign as it relieved them of a financial burden. Thus, circumcision became ingrained in Muslim life as a result of the Ottoman modernization in which state and local interests, traditional and modern elite interests, and religious symbolism and secular strategies overlapped.

Under the influence of popular history, recent historiography on the Ottomans has focused mainly on such subjects as the influence of women on politics and indirectly on issues of the harem. However, such a focus indicates limited information and an insufficient number of studies on the sons-in-law in the dynasty of the late Ottoman state. The purpose of this article is to develop a theoretical framework concerning sons-in-law in the dynasty of the late Ottoman state period by collating the related but limited references in the historical sources. In this context, such issues as the policy of marriage in the Ottoman dynasty, the status of the dynasty sons-in-law, and the privileges they had are studied in terms of the late period of the Ottomans. Thus, the study's major purpose is to discuss the late Ottoman history in the light of such an important but ignored subject.

Reviews 203 The First World War as a Caesura? Demographic Concepts, Population Policy, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg Spheres. (Gewaltpolitik und Menschenrechte, vol. 3). Edited by christin pschichholz. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020. 247 pp. €49.90. ISBN 978–3-428–18146–9. This thought-provoking volume is the product of a 2016 conference organized by Christin Pschichholz in conjunction with the University of Potsdam and the Lepsiushaus Potsdam. Its aim is to place the 1915–16 Turkish genocide against the Ottoman Armenians in a broader regional context while also examining the cross-border connectedness of radical population policies during what Ronald Suny, borrowing from Domenico Losurdo and Enzo Traverso, calls the ‘international civil war’ that began in 1914 (p. 13). All of the contributors — with the partial exception of Peter Holquist, who identifies 1905–07 as a significant moment linking Tsarist population policy and revolutionary, classbased violence in Russia in 1917–21 — agree implicitly or explicitly that the First World War was a caesura. Yet by comparing the ‘unprecedented dimensions of demographic engineering’ (p. 7) in the late Ottoman, Tsarist and Habsburg empires, they also tease out important differences between them. For Ottoman Turkey, as both Hans-Lukas Kieser and Oktay Özel show, the year 1913/14 was critical in terms of setting the political goal of ethnic homogenization of Anatolia as the heartland of a new, regenerated empire following the loss of the Sultan’s last remaining territories in North Africa and Europe (with the exception of Edirne, recovered from Bulgaria in July 1913 after the Second Balkan War). Talk of ‘microbes’ that needed to be ‘removed’ from the empire’s territorial ‘body’ emerged in 1913 and fed directly into the 1915–16 genocide. By then the entire Armenian population — women, children and older men as well as younger males — were identified as an internal enemy or ‘fifth column’ (pp. 89–90). In Tsarist Russia, there was no actual genocide, although Holquist mentions the Imperial army’s suppression of the 1916 Central Asian uprising as getting close to this. There were also the mass deportations of various population groups — Jews, Germans, Baltic peoples and others — from the western borderlands to the interior in 1914/15. What this had in common with policy in the Ottoman empire was the identification of particular ethnic communities as a permanent security threat, thereby legitimizing ‘exceptional’ state action, and — in wartime — the extension of violence to the entire ‘enemy’ civilian population, whether that population was to be found in home or occupied territory. This was as much a ‘western’ as an ‘eastern’ phenomenon, as Mark Levene, Arno Barth and other contributors stress. When British diplomats sought to restrain Russian violence against Jews in 1915, this was not a straightforward public-spirited gesture (as western criticisms of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 perhaps had been) but became entangled with narrative strategies that ‘securitized’ the Jewish question, in other words, turned it into a security Reviews 204 issue not just internally for Russia, but internationally too. New demographic concepts of borderland protection, cultural identity and world order — ‘often [expressed] in the most phobic and paranoid terms’, to quote Levene (p. 41) — meant that Jewish (and German) populations globally could now be seen and spoken of as a potential threat to the unity of the Allied cause. A similar dynamic was at work in the anti-German riots that took place in Moscow, in the UK and in many parts of the British empire, again in 1915. Where does this leave Austria-Hungary? Certainly the behaviour of the empire’s military leadership towards border populations in East Galicia and Bukovina, annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina and occupied Serbia, and on the frontiers with the Kingdom of Italy, especially in 1914–15, evinces a similar pattern of sanctioning ethnic violence under the guise of defending imperial territory. Internment camps such as Thalerhof near Graz, mentioned by Serhiy Choliy in his contribution, are a case in point. However, compared to the Ottoman and Russian spheres, there was no drive towards full-scale national/ cultural homogenization in the Dual Monarchy. True, as Hannes Leidinger argues, there was a ‘systematization of hatred’ against Serb ‘terrorists’, Ukrainian ‘russophiles’ and Italian...

This article highlights the continuities and discontinuities between the settlement policies of the late Ottoman state and early Republican Turkey. It argues that although there was a certain degree of evolution in the language employed by the state between the late Ottoman and Republican periods, there is a significant amount of overlap between the policies pursued by the Committee of Union and Progress which seized power in 1913 and the Kemalist regime established in the early 1920s towards the Kurds. In short, the emergence of settlement policies aimed at assimilating the Kurds into the Turkish nation are not an innovation of the Kemalists; it is possible to trace them to the late Ottoman period. This is substantiated through a comparison of two laws relating to settlement; the 1916 “Ordinance Outlining the Transfer and Settlement as well as the Sustenance and Maintenance for Refugees arriving from Conflict Zones” prepared by the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Tribes and Refugees and the Settlement Law of 1934, which was implemented in Republican Turkey and which remained on the statute books until 2006.

Reviewed by: Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia by Ayşe Özil İpek K. Yosmaoğlu (bio) Ayşe Özil, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia. New York: Routledge. 2013. Pp. xv + 186. 11 Illustrations, 5 maps. Cloth $140. Appearing almost simultaneously with Nicholas Doumanis’s Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford, 2012), this book is a welcome addition to the growing English-language literature about the Greek Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire. Özil taps into a rich selection of primary sources, including the collections of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens; the Greek Foreign Ministry and State Archives; Archives of the Greek Educational Association; the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives; Ottoman Court Records; and the British National Archives. Some of this material had remained virtually untapped, and the author does an admirable job of parsing these sources to further our understanding of what she calls “the notion [of community] in practice” (15)—specifically, in this instance, the koinotites of Greek Orthodox Christians in northwestern Asia Minor and not the Orthodox Christians, writ large, of the empire, despite what the title suggests. The author’s focus is on the province of Hüdavendigar that extended from the shores of the Marmara Sea in the north to the west-central Anatolian hinterland in the south, including a stretch along the Aegean around the town of Ayvalik (Kidonies). Building on the work of scholars such as Richard Clogg, Haris Exertzoglou, Socrates Petmezas, Eleni Frangakis-Syrett, and Edhem Eldem, among others, Özil acknowledges, and proceeds to challenge, a common misperception in conventional narrative histories of the Ottoman Empire, namely that the (Greek) Orthodox mainly comprised a class of “merchant bourgeoisie.” She emphasizes the diversity and social stratification within the Greek Orthodox community, not only across the empire, but also in relatively more homogenous administrative entities such as the Hüdavendigar province. Moving beyond the well-worn paradigm of a monolithic Rum milleti, the book, in the author’s words, “tries to understand what the community was about by exploring the notion in practice. … [It] takes a relational approach and treats the Christian presence under the Ottomans as a variable set of contexts and situations” (15). In order to accomplish these objectives, Özil turns her focus to “institutions,” an understanding of which, she argues, is necessary to make sense of communal relations (17). The book is organized in five chapters following this institutional framework, in the following order: local administration; local finances and taxation; legal corporate status; law and justice; nationality. Özil’s most significant contributions are in the sections where she carefully defines the post- Tanzimat (administrative reforms staring in the 1840s) koinotita as a vital institution of local governance for the Greek Orthodox subjects. While discussing at length its membership structure and relationship with the church, the author nevertheless notes the limitations of the koinotita and the simultaneous existence of other, less formal ways of communal organization. Another important intervention of the author is her discussion of the “legal corporate status” of non-Muslim millets in the Ottoman Empire, including Orthodox Christians, which presumably allowed their highest-ranking religious authority to govern these groups with a great degree of autonomy, easily lending itself to the construction of a sense of collective identity. These assumptions were central to the static and old-fashioned view of millets and [End Page 203] the millet system—to the extent that one can speak of a system as such—as the kernel of nations and national resistance to the Ottoman yoke. Özil does not merely add to the old discussion of whether or not there were autonomous millets in the Ottoman Empire; instead, she directly tackles questions concerning the authority accorded to communities in addressing internal legal disputes. By using examples of such disputes over communal ownership of real estate, she demonstrates that any notion of communal “corporate legal status” is false. Furthermore she shows that until the legislation of March 1913, which allowed “the registration of immovable property in the name of institutions,” communal property was deeded to individuals—a...

Although the establishment of history as a discipline has been examined extensively for European, North American, and, partly, Asian contexts, the Ottoman case still constitutes a neglected issue in the study of the global history of historiography and, in broader terms, of modern intellectual history. The present article focuses on the late Ottoman intellectual world and explores the making of the historical discipline in the Ottoman Empire. It argues that this transformation was the consequence of a number of interrelated factors, such as the turbulent developments in late Ottoman politics, Ottoman(ist) efforts to forge a “national” historical master narrative after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, and Ottoman historians’ engagement with European historical thought and writing. Besides examining these factors and the ways in which they interacted, the article deals in detail with the works of late Ottoman historians to probe the Ottoman case of the professionalization of history.

Objective - An individual improves his/her cognitive level by implementing terminal behaviour changes to his/her own life through educational institution located in his/her living space. In this context, the education system of a country is very important in terms of mental development and how people perceive the world. Developments in the world after the French Revolution had influenced Ottoman. Various institutional reforms had been required because of repeated military defeats in the late Ottoman period. In this regard, renovation of educational institutions modelled on Western-based was thought as a saver solution for the empire in period of regression but this modernization process also brought many problems with it. We can understand the approach to education of societies by way of literary works such as novels written in that period. Methodology/Technique - In this study, the late Ottoman education system is examined by the critical review of through novel. It is narrated the late Ottoman fall reflecting in the field of education. The irregularity system of that period is criticized. It has been adapted to Turkish cinema especially by adhering to the novel which is a remarkable reference about the history of Turkish education system. Findings - The quality difference in education between centrums and suburbans shows administration of suburban was omitted by Ottoman. Besides, the inequality between man and woman can be observed. It was emphasized that, in Ottoman, men is always right and strong and women are useless and not able to consider. Republic let the woman to arm their rights and gave us the belief that women can be powerful and right. Novelty - The study reviews the education system of Ottoman empire based on the novel. Type of Paper: Review Keywords: Late Ottoman; Modernization; Westernization; Education Problems. JEL Classification: I21, I24.

The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Kemal H. Karpat. The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State. (Studies in Middle Eastern History.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 533. $49.95 Get access Karpat Kemal H.. The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State. (Studies in Middle Eastern History.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 533. $49.95. Donald Quataert Donald Quataert State University of New York, Binghamton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 107, Issue 4, October 2002, Pages 1327–1328, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.4.1327 Published: 01 October 2002