Children and Childhood in the Ottoman Empire: From the 15th to the 20th Century ed. by Gülay Yılmaz and Fruma Zachs

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children and Childhood in the Ottoman Empire: From the 15th to the 20th Century ed. by Gülay Yılmaz and Fruma Zachs Nazan Maksudyan Children and Childhood in the Ottoman Empire: From the 15th to the 20th Century. Edited By Gülay Yılmaz and Fruma Zachs. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. xxii + 408 pp. Cloth £90.00. Gülay Yılmaz and Fruma Zachs's edited volume is a welcome contribution to the field of history of children and youth in the Ottoman Empire. Opening with a foreword by Suraiya Faroqhi, the editors' introduction as well as a comparative introductory article by Colin Heywood, the volume is then divided into five main parts: Concepts of Childhood; Family Interrelationships; Children Outside Family Circles; Children's Bodies; and Children and Education. Within Part 1, two chapters canvass underlying concepts. Cahit Telci's essay problematizes the age difference across regions in the conscription of unmarried adolescent boys based on peasant militia registers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Eleni Gara's chapter then discusses the childhood and boyhood memoirs of Panagis Skouzes, set in late eighteenth-century Athens, together with providing a broader methodological overview of life narratives as sources. Part 2 opens with an essay by İrfan Kökdaş, which focuses on the correlation between wealth and the surviving number of children in its investigation of the historical roots of the nineteenth-century demographic transition in Ottoman lands. Then Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik delineates the imagined ideal relationship between a child and a father in early modern Istanbul through an advice manual. Finally, Nicoleta Roman provides a comparative analysis of legal [End Page 458] regulations concerning juvenile delinquency, as well as a discussion of changing attitudes toward children and youth in post-Ottoman Romania. The third part goes beyond family settings and starts with Fırat Yaşa's chapter on child slaves in seventeenth-century Crimea. Yahya Araz's chapter then elaborates upon the highly interesting issues of gendered labor mobility between the provinces and Istanbul, government efforts to control and standardize this migration pattern, and the relationship of the girls with their host families. Mahmoud Yazbak's essay completes this part: well-known for his significant and pioneering works on Muslim orphans in Ottoman Palestine, Yazbak describes the social status of Muslim orphans and regulations with regard to guardianship according to Islamic law. Part 4 opens with an essay by Gülay Yılmaz, whose contribution addresses the recorded physical descriptions of the boys in two child levy registers from 1493–94 and 1604. Didem Yavuz Velipaşaoğlu deals with the architectural characteristics of an imperial factory by shedding light upon accommodations, living standards, sanitary conditions, and recreational facilities for its child workers. Nazan Çiçek eloquently examines the persistence of beating children as an esteemed child-raising practice in the Turkish-speaking Muslim community by bringing to light children's voices (and screams). The final part brings together three chapters on education. Elma Korić provides a panorama of educational institutions for Muslim children and youth, also bringing to light hiring and enrollment criteria, curricula, bonds between teachers and students, and educational techniques. Ruth Lamdan relies on sermons, books of ethics, and extensive legal literature to analyze concepts of childhood, education (institutions and theories), and the religious obligation of society and the family to educate children. Fruma Zach's final chapter in the volume highlights the transformative role of education for the family and nation, as well as its emancipatory aspect for the lives of women and children. The prominence of the early modern era (with nine chapters) in the volume's chronological focus is worth stressing, as the research on Ottoman children to date has been confined mostly to the nineteenth century. By the same token, wide geographic coverage of the book, going beyond the Balkans and Anatolia to Wallachia, Crimea, Palestine, and Egypt, has the added value of facilitating comparisons. From a critical perspective, the volume offers more content on "childhood," which is often a discourse among adults, than research on actual "children," bringing to the fore children's perspectives, experiences, and voices. In my Orphans and Destitute Children in the Ottoman Empire (Syracuse...