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

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>Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity</i>. By Kent F. Schull. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 226. £70.

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...

Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798–1864

Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 3–5 Copyright © 2017 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.4.1.01 Crime, Punishment, and Social Control in the Late Ottoman Empire: An Introduction Ufuk Adak The idea of publishing this special issue entitled “Crime, Punishment, and Social Control in the Late Ottoman Empire” edited by Kent Schull (Binghamton University, SUNY) and guest editor Ufuk Adak (Istanbul Kemerburgaz University) emerged following a stimulating workshop held at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin in the summer of 2015.1 The workshop provided us with an opportunity to present and discuss recent scholarly work on security, crime, and punishment in the late Ottoman Empire, leading us to offer new insights into Ottoman social and legal history. Five of the seven contributing authors in this issue participated in the productive presentations and long discussions of the workshop. All seven respond to and join a growing interest in crime, punishment, and social control in the Ottoman Empire, reflected in a bourgeoning literature and academic conferences ,2 by rethinking the interconnected historical relations between reform, law, penal policy, and security. Although each article in this issue approaches its respective subject different methodologically, all share similarities and connections; each author conducts extensive analysis of archival sources and 1. The ZMO, now the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, and the Forum Transregionale Studien, Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME) deserve special thanks for their generous support in organizing this workshop. Ufuk Adak, “Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire, 9 June 2015, Berlin Zentrum Moderner Orient,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2, no. 2 (2015): 447–49. 2. Avi Rubin, “Modernity as a Code: The Ottoman Empire and the Global Movement of Codification,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59, no. 5 (2016): 828–56; Kent F. Schull, Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Noémi Lévy-Aksu, Ordre et désordres dans l’Istanbul ottomane (1879–1909) (Paris: Karthala, 2013). The most recent international conference on punishment, particularly prisons, entitled “The World of Prisons: The History of Confinement in a Global Perspective, Late Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Century” organized by the University of Bern was held in Switzerland 7–10 September 2016. 4 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 4.1 provides much-needed analytical and empirical frameworks for the legal and security policies of the empire. The promulgation of the Tanzimat hastened the implementation of legal reform in the Ottoman Empire. The codification process included new criminal codes, regulations, and ordinances issued in the nineteenth century. The Ottoman reformers sought ways to standardize crimes—their definitions, scopes, and typologies—and also attempted to provide limits and uniformity for the forms of punishment that would be applied throughout the empire. The nineteenth-century Ottoman legal reforms encompassed new judiciary processes and established new legal and penal institutions such as Nizamiye courts and prisons on the basis of new criminal codes. The implementation of new penal law and the standardization of law enforcement for all of the subjects living in the empire was not an easy task for Ottoman officials throughout the empire. For instance, in regards to the imposition of the death penalty in the late Ottoman Empire, Ebru Aykut illustrates how the new criminal justice system and the dual trial procedure constrained the Ottoman judiciary in their rulings. Examining several cases drawn from archival sources, Aykut analyzes the complex structure and processes of nineteenth-century Ottoman judicial decision-making through a discussion of the Tanzimat’s judicial reforms, legality , and procedural correctness particularly regarding the death penalty. This shift in Ottoman conceptions of crime and punishment resulted in the construction of a new relationship between the state’s political power and its legitimacy. İbrahim Halil Kalkan argues that banning torture in criminal investigations and as a form of punishment in the mid-nineteenth century provides a stark illustration of this new relationship, particularly in regards to the state’s aim of treating all Ottoman subjects equally. Kalkan explores this ban as...

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.

Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire 9 June 2015, Berlin Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) The bourgeoning literature on security, crime, punishment, and prisons in the Ottoman Empire presents opportunities to explore not only new archival investigations and methodological discussions about the notions of criminality in the Empire, but also encourages us to re-think the interconnected relation between law, security and penal policy in the Empire. This one-day workshop entitled “Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire” was a chance to present and discuss some recent examinations of the triangle of security, crime, and punishment in order to offer new insights into Ottoman social and legal history by providing case studies from throughout the Empire. As in many contemporary states, the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire saw the institutionalization of security forces and also the expansion of surveillance mechanisms, such as passport regulations in order to track population movements. More importantly, these mechanisms focused on hastening the process of surveilling criminals as defined by the State. Furthermore, through administrative and infrastructural urbanization attempts, particularly in the imperial center, which aided in regulating street life, new understandings of criminality generated novel relationships between Ottoman cities and their residents. This relationship was expressed through adherence, or not, to policies and the eventual construction of new prisons throughout the Empire. The workshop had three sessions and overall seven papers were presented during these sessions. In the first session of the workshop, Ebru Aykut (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) examined the practice of the death penalty and the meaning of justice in the late Ottoman Empire. Aykut argued that for the local authorities, the death penalty was a necessary instrument to deter criminals and maintain public order and security, which could be accomplished only if the punishment was inflicted immediately without delay. Aykut stated Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 447–449 Copyright © 2015 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.2.2.19 that according to the State, the principle of legality and procedural correctness was more important and necessary than deterrence by punishment. Thus, there was a gap between the local understandings of justice, which were concerned more with the promptness of punishment than procedures and written law, and what justice meant for the central government. In this respect, Aykut elaborated that the death penalty turned into a contested and in some cases negotiable issue between the central and provincial authorities in the late Ottoman Empire. As the second presenter of the first session, Noémi LévyAksu (Boğaziçi University) focused on the use of martial law (örfi idare) in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78 in various districts of the Balkans and Eastern Anatolia. Lévy-Aksu discussed and posited that banditry, gangs and ethno-religious tensions were the main reasons behind the application of martial law in these districts. By presenting many case studies from the late 1870s to early 1880s, Lévy-Aksu argued that martial law turned into a tool of government in terms of dealing with serious tensions at different levels of the state apparatus. In the second session of the workshop, İlkay Yılmaz (Istanbul University /ZMO) presented a paper on the hotel registers in the Hamidian Era, which were part of new mechanisms against security threats perceived by the Ottoman state. Yılmaz stated that some incidents occurred in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance assassination attempts and the demonstrations of Kumkapı in 1890 and Bâb-ı Âli in 1895, which played a major role in the shift of security practices of the Empire. Yılmaz argued that as in contemporary states such as in France and Belgium, the Ottoman government issued new registration regulations not only to collect individual information about the visitors of hotels and residents of apartments but also to track anarchists in the Empire. After presenting the relationship between city and crime in fin de siécle Istanbul, Nurçin İleri (Binghamton University) touched upon mapping criminality through space and time, which existed in the physical and social borders of the city, and analyzed the quantitative and...

The main goals of this article are to review historiographical trends and set new directions for late Ottoman history. First, the paper demonstrates that current research on the late Ottoman Empire still operates within the confines of the centre–periphery model, and sustains dualistic and state-centred narratives. Second, I argue that a ‘historical trajectory’ framework is a better analytical tool and empirical strategy. It is spatial, path-dependent, and comparative. With special reference to the Middle Eastern provinces, I show that the Ottoman Empire was characterized by distinct imperial paths during the nineteenth century, each representing an alternative route to state–society and local–global relations. The article further suggests that a trajectory-specific approach can provide new prospects for understanding Eurasian land-based empires from a comparative perspective.

It is a curious fact that rather little work has been done on municipalities in the late Ottoman Empire. One might think, perhaps the state is trying to promote some sort of local government at the same time, to give locals meaningful investment in the governance of their own locality. The Law of Vilayets of 1864 set out a kind of organigram for the provinces: in 1877 the Ottoman government issued the Provincial Municipalities Law. The Galata municipality had the greatest difficulty collecting taxes, and in fact went bankrupt in 1863. In spite of this it was bailed out and reorganised by the Porte, evidence of its determination that the institution should succeed. In same way, the Commissione di Ornato, which was founded as a board of public works, was a European-inspired attempt to bring some order to the anarchy of local construction in Alexandria. Keywords: Bilad al-Sham; Commissione di Ornato; Law of Vilayets; municipalities; Ottoman empire

With the circulation of Western European works on the history of religion in the late Ottoman Empire, Ottoman intellectuals were confronted with the question of how to situate their religious tradition in global religious history and how to relate it to other religions. The article discusses this question from the perspective of late Ottoman Sufi intellectuals and their reception of Buddhism and Hinduism, focusing on the early 20th-century accounts of the Bektashi Ahmed Rıfkı (1884–1935). Ahmed Rıfkı constructed a teleological history of Sufism, which he explicitly understood as a religious tradition transcending Islamic boundaries. With a particular focus on the ontology of vahdet-i-vücûd (unity of being), he saw the origin of this teaching, and thus of Sufism, in India—albeit at a teleologically underdeveloped level. Acquiring knowledge of Buddhism and Hinduism exclusively from French, English and German texts, the transfer of knowledge took place in a triangle between India, Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Although informed by Western European approaches, the reception went beyond mere imitation, as Sufi intellectuals such as Ahmed Rıfkı selected, translated and adapted the knowledge conveyed in Western European texts according to their ideas, needs and interests.

:Early modernization reform from the 19th century to the early 20th century led to the secularization of the Ottoman Empire in respect to politics, law, and education. Competition between contradicting secular and Islamic thoughts has occurred since then, and it has produced the divisions of pan-Islamism, Modernism, and Turkism in the ideological field of the Ottoman Empire. Such phenomenon is the manifestation of political and ideological chaos of the late Ottoman Empire, which has intertwined with the contradiction of tradition and modernity, between the Orient and the West, presenting the developing trends of diversification, complexity, and variability. Intensified ideological struggle occurred in the late Ottoman Empire previous to its collapse. Social and political reforms began to transform the country from a traditional empire to modern nation-state. Due to the relationship between trends of political thoughts and Islam, nationalism could not get rid of the impact of Islam in the late Ottoman Empire. Islam has not only perpetuated pan-Ottomanism and pan-Turkism in the form of pan-Islamism, it has also exerted a wide range of effects as a relative individual trend of political and social thoughts.

This study examines Kavurzade Huseyin Celal Bey of Crete, a notable example of meritocratically appointed officials in the late Ottoman bureaucracy. The son of a farmer, Huseyin Celal Bey began his education in Chania and continued it in Istanbul, graduating from the The School of Political Science (Mekteb-i Mülkiye) before ascending the ranks of the civil service. Initially appointed as a teacher in Bursa in 1889, he subsequently held positions such as school principal, director of education (maarif müdürü), district governor (kaymakam), and ultimately achieved the rank of provincial governor. Despite his modest origins, his advanced education enabled his upward mobility in the bureaucracy. For years, he served in remote and challenging regions and was rewarded by the Ottoman central administration for his diligence and discipline. This study aims to sketch a portrait of this late Ottoman bureaucrat. While framed as a biographical essay, it primarily focuses on the professional career of an official who rose through education and competence alone, without patronage or aristocratic lineage, a success story that was rare in the late Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was the last great Muslim world empire to survive into the age of modernity. The Ottoman state, together with its contemporaries, Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia, was engaged in a struggle for survival in a world where it no longer made the rules. As the nineteenth century approached its last quarter, these rules were increasingly determined by the successful and aggressive world powers, Britain, France, and after 1870, Germany. As external pressure on the ottoman Empire mounted from the second half of the century, the Ottoman center found itself obliged to squeeze manpower resources it had hitherto not tapped. Particularly nomadic populations, armed and already possessing the military skills required, now became a primary target for mobilization. This study is an attempt to come to grips with the “civilizing mission” mentality of the late Ottomans and their “project of modernity” as reflected in their provincial administration. It is the view of this writer that sometime in the nineteenth century the Ottoman elite adopted the mindset of their enemies, the arch-imperialists, and came to conceive of its periphery as a colonial setting.My definition of colonialism here closely follows the Leninist position as in “Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” In my view, this is still one of the best and most succinct definitions of imperialism. After showing how the partition of the word accelerated in the 1880s, Lenin concludes, “It is beyond doubt therefore, that capitalism's transition to the stage of monopoly capitalism, to finance capital, isconnected with the intensification of the struggle for the partitioning of the world.” V. Lenin, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977), 224.

This paper, by focusing on a secret report delivered by the Ottoman High Commissioner in Egypt—Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha—to the imperial center regarding the Armenian revolutionaries’ movements, aims to examine three important phenomena of the late Ottoman history. The first goal is to reveal the revolutionary mobilities in the late Ottoman Empire by tracking how said revolutionaries took advantage of the borderlands to mobilize themselves. Second, this particular research serves as an indicator of the spatial politics in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire by exposing how the imperial center governed a multi-layered administrative borderland region of Egypt—a semi-autonomous Khedivate. Finally, this paper seeks to confront traditional historiography on the intelligence activities during the reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). By doing so, this paper demonstrates how the intelligence organization stretched from the administrative center to the frontiers and borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, contrary to the common assumptions in the existing literature.

This chapter is an attempt to come to terms with one aspect of the relationship between learning to read and reading and the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic, namely, the extent to which market forces undermined the dominant educational discourse. It grows out of my previous work on state and education in the late Ottoman period and education and autobiography that spanned the Ottoman and Republican eras.2 The question of reading affords the opportunity to get beyond the orbit of the state that dominates Ottoman and Turkish historiography. For it is the state that both monopolizes the history (dictating its periodization, setting its agenda) and provides (through its archives, its decrees and the writings of its ranking personnel) much of the source material upon which this history is based. Indeed, the central question for the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was the unrepentantly state-centred, ‘How can this state be saved?’ In the frenetic, increasingly violent Young Turk, or Second Constitutional, era the focus of politics was on capturing the state and its ever-increasing powers and reach. The early Republic of Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, represented the ultimate expression of the centralizing, self-aggrandizing single-party governmental apparatus whose agenda included ‘statism’ among its ‘Six Arrows’.3 KeywordsReading MaterialYoung ReaderTurkish RepublicMath LessonRepublican PeriodThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.