Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire will be a valuable text for those seeking to better understand late Ottoman and early republican history from the vantage point of “child-saving” efforts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Nazan Maksudyan's monograph is one of the few book-length studies to examine Ottoman concern over how to address child abandonment and poverty as a matter of modern state practice. While she necessarily focuses on the gradual institutionalization and rationalization of child welfare practices by the state and other actors, Maksudyan also aims to “see and listen to . . . habitually ignored and essentially invisible and voiceless actors” in an effort to write an “alternative history” of the late Ottoman Empire (p. 4).

Maksudyan makes extensive use of the Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archives, the American Board Archives, the French Foreign Ministry Archives, and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archives, as well as Capucin Archives (Archives des Capucins) and Lazarist Archives (Archives Historiques de la Congrégation de la Mission). She also draws on literary works, newspapers, serial publications of social reformers, biographies, diaries, letters, and photographs in order to analyze the broad sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which orphan and destitute children's lives came to matter to the state in new ways.

The monograph is informed theoretically by the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Donzelot, and other philosophers, historians, and social scientists who examined modern forms of governmentality, such as the institutionalization of children in boarding schools and orphanages, and who challenged the idea that such practices led to conditions of improved child welfare. Maksudyan argues that such institutions and practices often limited young children's chances to survive and develop. She highlights the ways in which orphans and destitute children became valuable to the Ottoman state “as questions of citizenship and identity construction redefined the ‘control’ over children as a modernist project” (p. 10). She also underscores how children “gained channels for being visible” or exerting agency with respect to their own lives (p. 12).

The book includes an introduction, four substantive chapters, and a short conclusion. Each of the main chapters addresses a different category of child in an effort to foreground children as “protagonists” and actors within their familial, institutional, and societal contexts. Chapter 1 addresses foundlings and efforts to preserve the lives of abandoned infants; Chapter 2 takes up foster daughters’ roles in households as domestic servants; Chapter 3 focuses on the lives of older orphan children and the role of the vocational orphanage (islahhane) in emerging child welfare practices; and Chapter 4 examines the increasing internationalization of philanthropy and humanitarian action for Armenian children in the wake of the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96. Throughout, Maksudyan develops the theme of how orphan and destitute children took on growing importance as objects of state control and as contested resources in the construction of modern ethnoreligious identities and states.

In the first chapter on “The Politics of Child Abandonment,” Maksudyan outlines the shift from personalized, family-based care for children who had been abandoned in urban centers to increasing institutionalization of care in state or religious-administered orphanages. She describes the opening of “foundling units” in poorhouses, such as Darülaceze in Istanbul, highlighting the perils of “hospitalism” and the high rates of infant mortality in Armenian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Jewish, and Muslim orphanages. Tracing social welfare experts’ goals to reduce infant mortality rates, she elaborates on the growing practice of “professional” wet nursing as a form of social work. Wet nursing in orphanages and poor houses provided a means for destitute women to earn salaries often higher than those in other sectors of women's paid work. But such women were regarded as so poor that they were often seen to be ill-equipped to provide adequate sustenance to foundling infants due to their own lack of nutrition and high demands on their nursing labor at home and in the “foundling units.”

The first chapter also traces the increasing politicization of identifying abandoned children's ethnoreligious identities, as the Ottoman state increasingly challenged local practices of determining whether an infant was Muslim, Greek, Armenian, or Jewish based on where the baby was discovered. Ottoman policies to quickly register abandoned children into birth and population records “became a matter of strife between state and community authorities regarding the future of the abandoned infants” (p. 45). By the early 1900s, non-Muslim authorities were anxious that policemen ignored “indicators of religious affiliation” and often registered abandoned babies as Muslim. The chapter uncovers contestation over foundlings by Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and Muslim authorities through cases drawn from a wide range of archival sources, including official Ottoman sources.

Chapter 2, “Private Negotiations of Child Fosterage,” addresses the gendered politics of the practices of fostering girls. This chapter richly elaborates on the practice of what Maksudyan terms child circulation, in which illegitimate, orphaned, or abandoned girls were raised by “unrelated caretakers” in exchange for their domestic service. The practice was considered a form of charity. Maksudyan highlights the liminal status of girls who were given or taken into households as beslemes (foster daughters who were domestic servants), where they would be raised as servants from a young age. She underscores efforts of the state to increasingly regulate fosterage, particularly as it related to governing girls’ and women's sexuality. Maksudyan also details instances from across the Ottoman provinces in which foster daughters served as unpaid domestic laborers who were vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse, as well as labor exploitation. Notably, the chapter focuses on girls’ or young women's efforts to seek redress for being subjected to rape or other forms of abuse. It underscores the agency exhibited by many female youth in many instances—through acts of robbery, escape, unapproved marriage, filing legal complaints, or even suicide. Maksudyan highlights that the agency of beslemes “did not always imply progressive change; most often it only gave them the capacity to endure” (p. 70).

Chapter 3 addresses the emergence of state orphanages that served as early vocational training institutions or institutions of public education (ıslahhane) for orphaned, refugee, or poor children throughout the provinces from the 1860s until the end of the Ottoman Empire. The chapter provides a corrective to earlier studies that primarily treated such institutions as sites of incarceration for boys. Instead, it situates them as part of an effort to “reform” male children and youth begging, playing, or hanging out in urban spaces into “productive” workers and citizens. Maksudyan makes important connections between early “humanitarian” efforts to address the influx of refugees into urban centers in Danubian cities following the Crimean War (1853–56) and subsequent wars fought throughout Ottoman lands, and the emergence of modern state efforts to police and reform youth through education and work. She also traces the expansion of the ıslahhane through mixed private charitable and state support, successfully arguing that these institutions came to be self-supporting because of the skills that predominantly boys and male youth gained and the work they carried out producing goods for local police, the military, or local consumption. Less fully fleshed out in this chapter, however, is how such boys and youth may have expressed their views and agency while being forced to move from largely unregulated lives in urban neighborhoods to “reformatory” orphanages that operated much like sites of early industrial production.

Chapter 4, “The Internationalization of Orphanages,” contributes important new analysis of the growth of orphanages funded through foreign missionaries, which expanded considerably during the “Armenian massacres in the Eastern vilayets of the Ottoman Empire during 1894–1896” (p. 118). This chapter underscores the emergence of contemporary forms of humanitarianism as matters of transnational concern, focusing on the 1890s. The author argues that quickly establishing orphanages for Armenian children was deeply politicized, with multiple engaged parties, including the Sublime Porte, Gregorian Armenians, and varied groups of Protestant and Catholic missionaries from the United States and Europe. Maksudyan notes that “humanitarian relief campaigns are always campaigns for particular humans, even when advocates speak the language of universality” (p. 146). She unpacks missionary rivalries in post-1896 orphan relief efforts and argues that only certain Armenians were singled out for support by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions—namely, those who would be likely to convert to Protestantism. Maksudyan underscores that their “philanthropic works were motivated and determined by their loyalty to the cause of proselytizing,” and discusses the challenges this posed for local Ottoman authorities and Armenian religious leaders alike.

This monograph is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the emergence of modern child welfare regimes in the late Ottoman Empire. Maksudyan's account compels us to reconsider late Ottoman history in light of the increasingly significant roles that children played and the heightened interest paid to orphaned and destitute children. As such, it is critical reading for anyone who seeks to better understand children as actors in the Ottoman Empire and how their lives were shaped by new forms of regulation and institutional control.