Political Marriage: The Sons-in-Law of the Ottoman Dynasty in the Late Ottoman State

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.

Jerusalem: From the Ottomans to the British

<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).

In the mid‐1890s school maps in the Ottoman Empire underwent a simple but important change: maps that represented the empire in its entirety confronted students in the growing number of Ottoman state schools. These new maps, which showed the empire's far‐flung territory within a single frame, began to replace older maps based on European models that had depicted the Ottoman domains as marginal lands clinging to the fringes of Europe, Asia and Africa. This shift in design should be understood within the context of late Ottoman educational policy, which was attempting to inculcate a strong sense of loyalty to, and identification with, the empire as an historical, political and geographical construct. While this effort produced some of the intended results, the attention to geography occasioned by the new emphasis on maps also raised some awkward questions. Students so recently attuned to studying geography naturally wondered why their empire was shrinking, and why its political leadership had allowed this to happen. The change in late Ottoman educational cartography thus highlighted not only the advantages and disadvantages of using maps for socio‐political purposes in general, but also the extent to which the late Ottoman state had chosen a particularly difficult moment to summon the concision and power that maps afford.

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

Modern Bodies and Changing Identities

The frontier has long been a subject of interest for historians of the Ottoman Empire, whether their focus has been on the empire’s origins, its expansion, or its efforts to assert its sovereignty as it faced the threat of European imperialism.1 Gratien’s The Unsettled Plain shows a similar interest. It examines the rationale, implementation, and legacies of various Ottoman political projects that resulted in the environmental transformation of the swampy lowlands of Çukurova in southern Anatolia into an important center of commercial agriculture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The book spans the late Ottoman period, the tumultuous years of World War I, and the formative decades of the Turkish Republic. This important contribution to the steadily growing body of work about the Ottoman frontier draws heavily from the methods of environmental history.2For Gratien, the Ottoman frontier was not simply the sum of regions located along the empire’s geographical limits; rather, its defining features were its spaces, “pockets of transformation within the Ottoman provinces” (14). Moreover, that transformation manifested in at least three distinct ways to create a particular type of frontier experience during the late Ottoman period—new forms of state presence in rural settings (“frontiers of state”), the settlement of millions of people (“settlement frontier”), and human-nature interactions shaped increasingly by the forces of global capitalism (“ecological frontier”) (14). Although Gratien’s use of the term frontier throughout his book departs from the more common meaning of the term, this framing effectively “reveals a common story that was central to the remaking of Ottoman society” (15–16, 14). For example, it helps scholars to describe the process of environmental change in Ottoman lands with greater specificity than that captured by more conventional terms such as “provincial reform” (14).This framing device in place, Gratien narrates Çukurova’s environmental transformation as an Ottoman frontier with great clarity, carefully outlining what this process meant for the many generations of the region’s inhabitants. As Gratien demonstrates, seasonal migration was a key facet of life in Çukurova well-before it became Ottoman territory. The reason varied, but by the Ottoman period, one of the most important was health; locals regularly retreated to the pastures in the surrounding mountains to escape the malaria-prone swamps of the lowlands during the summer months. Seasonal migration also gave rise to a particular political order in Çukurova, whereby the Ottoman state delegated the task of securing the obedience of the region’s nomadic population to local elites in the nearby mountains. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the Ottoman government sought to curb the power of these elites as part of a broader centralization of the empire. It also began to see pastoralism as at odds with its vision of Çukurova as a potential center for commercial agriculture in the future. Thus, from the second half of the nineteenth century forward, the Ottoman government worked to settle not only pastoralists in Çukurova but also refugees in hopes of tapping into the region’s agrarian potential, which Ottoman officials often compared to that of Egypt. Among the many unfortunate consequences of this ecological transformation was the continued exposure of the region’s inhabitants to malaria, which remained a threat during World War I and after the establishment of the Turkish Republic.Historians of the Ottoman Empire and environmental historians in general will certainly recognize the importance of The Unsettled Plain. But non-specialists interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of history also stand to benefit from it. Gratien includes several citations from scientific studies that further deepen readers’ understanding of Çukurova’s environmental history, especially as it concerns the types of mosquitos that transmit malaria and the conditions under which they thrive (37, 159). Indeed, Gratien’s book is just the latest to demonstrate how sophisticated the field of Middle East environmental history has become.

In an Ottoman Holy Land: The Hajj and the Road from Damascus, 1500–1800

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.

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.

This article discusses the effect of medical education on politicization during the late Ottoman period. The article focuses on the nineteenth-century emergence of the epistemological and etiological shift in medicine on a global scale, which led to the dominance of the modernization paradigm in the environment of the Military School of Medicine in Istanbul. The ideas favoring modernization and progressivism became widespread through partnerships and differences between the two generations of physicians represented by the periods of Tanzimat (1839-1876) and Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Based on the narratives of prominent physicians of the late Ottoman and Early Republican Turkey, the article aims to illustrate that all the activities in the school resulted in the gradual transformation of the perspective of the students in contrast to their professors, interpreting the concept of progress as an effective basis to assist the modern aspirations of the administrative elites, composing the hidden curriculum of modern medical education in the Ottoman context. The younger generation began to equate materialism with solidarity, political activism, and insurgency, which would finally enable them to lead the movement against the monarchy or sultan. This generation would also occupy leading administrative positions in the first decades of the new Turkish Republic.

This study tackles the issue of the Palestinian leaders and elite over two connected periods: the 19th century (the late Ottoman period), and the British mandate period. The study comes under the historical analytical studies that seeks to analyze and explain the historical events. It seeks to answer the following question: to what extent did the external factors contribute and affect the formation and the emergence of the Palestinian elite in the late ottoman period and during the British mandate period? The study is based on a hypothesis says that the political, social and economical transformations which the Palestinian community exposed to in the turn of the 19th century, came under the impact of the external factors and interventions, which highly affected the formation and the emergence of the Palestinian elite.

In the late Ottoman period, foreign schools played a crucial role in educational modernization and cultural diplomacy. The Haydarpaşa German School, located in Istanbul and established as a branch of the Galata Bourgeois School, exemplifies Ottoman-German interaction in education and colonial architecture. Archival records reveal complex negotiations between the Ottoman administration and the German Embassy, reflecting broader geopolitical and cultural imperialist dynamics. The school follows the city school model, a disciplinary architectural approach emphasizing hierarchy, control, and efficiency, aligning with late 19th-century German pedagogical principles. A comparative analysis of the Galata Bourgeois and Yedikule German Schools shows that all three institutions adhere to the city school typology. Unlike the prevailing Neo-Ottoman or Orientalist styles, these schools adopted a rigid, regimented design, serving as tools of cultural imperialism. Its transformation after World War I and integration into the Turkish education system reflect shifts in foreign educational policies. Recent restoration efforts balance historical preservation with contemporary needs. This study positions the Haydarpaşa German School as both an architectural artifact and a colonial instrument, contributing to discussions on cultural imperialism, modernization, and education in the late Ottoman period.

This study examines the members of the ilmiye class, including muftis, mudarris and kadıs, who were educated and served in the Kosovo Province during the late Ottoman period. The primary source of the analysis is the ulema records found in the Sicill-i Ahval Registers, which were initiated during the reign of Abdulhamid II. The research explores the career-building process of provincial ulema through various aspects, such as their family backgrounds, early and madrasa education, institutions’ curriculums, icazetnames, connections with the center (Istanbul), educational experiences in Istanbul madrasas, and their ties to modern schools established during the late Ottoman era. The professional lives of these scholars are evaluated in terms of the fields in which they were employed, the regions where they served, and their linguistic proficiency. Focusing on central districts such as Skopje, Prizren, and Pristina, as well as other districts and sub-districts in the Kosovo Province, the study provides a detailed analysis of educational conditions, the socio-economic structure of the provincial ilmiye class, and their contributions to the Ottoman scholarly tradition. The inquiry aims to provide a biographical and prosopographical analysis of the late Ottoman period to understand the position of provincial ulema within the Ottoman ilmiye class.

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.