Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire is a stimulating narrative about Ottoman orphans and destitute children in the second half of the nineteenth century. The purpose of the book is to tell the story of Ottoman modernization “through children’s lead” and to show that “their part was crucial in enforcing, challenging, or rewriting history” (p. 12). Supported by a well-argued summary of the historiography, Maksudyan departs from the conventional “developmentalist” paradigm established by Philippe Ariès,Footnote ¹ which takes “childhood as a period in the life-cycle” (p. 6). Maksudyan underlines explicitly that she is not interested in the “discovery of childhood,” but rather in “the lives of children” (p. 7). Moving further in the space opened by “new” social historians of “ordinary people,” especially those working on gender and the family, she brings an “alternative vista of Ottoman modernization from within the viewpoint of orphans” (p. 12). Using a rich variety of sources from the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives, yearbooks (salname), compilations of regulations (düstur), the American and French missionary archives, the French Foreign Ministry Archives, the Capucin and Lazarist Archives and missionary journals, together with figures and tables on the location, number of orphans, and institutional features of orphanages, she argues that children were indeed “significant” as both targets and actors in the Ottoman reform era (p. 11).

Maksudyan constructs a working and solid structure based on four chapters, in each of which she tells the story of a different group of destitute children. They are, in the order treated, foundlings, foster daughters (beslemes), orphans, street children, vagrants, beggars, children of poor and/or refugee parents, and finally Armenian orphans. In Chapter 1, she focuses on the politics of child abandonment and shows how the issue of abandoned children shaped the new policies of a depersonalizing, institutionalizing, and centralizing state. Describing the journey of abandoned babies and small children “from monthly stipends to wet nurse assignments to the opening of a foundling asylum” (p. 36), she argues that “modernized administration and institutional progress ironically caused deprivation and had mortal impacts on Ottoman foundlings” (p. 19). She gives a convincing and detailed picture of the milieu in which different actors—such as police departments, birth registry offices, municipalities, wet nurses, and communal authorities—all took part in the politics of child abandonment and in fact competed for those children with different interests in mind.

Chapter 2 narrates the story of beslemes, “who were adopted (though not legally) into relatively rich households at a very young age and brought up as servants” (p. 52). Engaging with a broad historiography on sexuality, gender, Islamic jurisprudence, and the secularization of law in the late nineteenth century, Maksudyan examines how “child labor and child sexuality were legitimized by Ottoman courts and judges” by simply “not declaring the masters guilty of material exploitation or sexual harassment” (p. 54). She convincingly shows how discourses of morality, property, and charity disguised the repressive and abusive mechanisms underneath. This chapter presents most clearly Maksudyan’s aim of letting children speak for themselves. The nature of her sources, mainly legal, in this chapter, as well as the way she uses them, provide sufficient ground to show beslemes’ mechanisms of “agency, resistance, and empowerment” (p. 70), and hence their capacity for action. However, despite the probable existence of happy stories, as Maksudyan acknowledges, this capacity for action implies just enough strength to endure suffering and nothing more (p. 70).

Chapter 3 concerns state orphanages (ıslahhanes). In this chapter, Maksudyan offers a vivid portrait of the ıslahhane as both a home and a place of “modern urban governance” (p. 82). She argues that, on the one hand, the administrative discourse of this new politics of urbanity was based on the protection of orphans and destitute children from danger. On the other hand, however, through a new notion of order and the accompanying legal practices prohibiting begging and vagrancy, the reformers simultaneously deemed orphans and destitute children potential dangers for society. This solution put the ideals of benevolence and education in the same basket with wishes to rejuvenate local economy and industry: the orphans and destitute children in the ıslahhanes “were not only students but also the labor force” (p. 102), providing work as carpenters, ironmakers, tailors, shoemakers, bookbinders, foundry workers, and many other types of artisanal and industrial expertise. Drawing on a few petitions written by children, Maksudyan meticulously describes the experience of being an orphan—whether Muslim or non-Muslim—and a laborer/worker in an orphanage in Istanbul and in other provinces.

Chapter 4, “The Internationalization of Orphans,” deals with the issue of Armenian orphans as a contested terrain between the Sublime Porte, foreign missionaries, and the Armenian Patriarchate following the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896. “The fight,” as Maksudyan states, “was not centered on the actual needs of the orphans but over their futures” (p. 129). She shows the inevitable link between the motives of charity, philanthropy, and “collective self-interest” (p. 116); i.e., each party’s broader political, religious, social, and economic wishes. The data Maksudyan harnesses from missionary journals and correspondence gives a detailed picture of the number of children orphaned by the massacres in different parts of Anatolia, the feature of occupations in missionary orphanages, and the geographical distribution of these orphanages. In addition, she brings the reader one step closer to orphans’ lost experiences by zooming in on the orphans waiting to be transported to already established and more permanent orphanages in İstanbul, İzmir, Bursa, Jerusalem, and Beirut even while the missionaries, the English consul, and local security officials were fighting over them.

Maksudyan’s main endeavor in the book is “to give voice to destitute and orphaned children and let them narrate their own versions of history” (p. 9). To what extent she succeeds in doing this is a question and problem that concerns most of our work alike, as a younger generation of historians whose interests have been remarkably inspired by the development of subaltern studies and the history of “ordinary people” and everyday life approaches. As Maksudyan acknowledges, she does not have many sources that give her the chance to let the orphaned children, “the subaltern of the subaltern” (p. 50), “narrate their own versions of history.” As a result, when she concludes that the accomplishment of her book is “rescuing from oblivion voices and experiences that have contributed to the making of history” (p. 166), it sounds especially ambitious. However, with a solid structure, a clear methodology, and a well-described narration and imagination of the story from the angle and perspective of children, she renders visible their existence and experiences in an affecting and impressive manner, despite the understandable lack of the children’s own testimonies in the majority of cases.

Nurdan Gürbilek—the writer of fine essays that combine literary, political, and cultural critique—asks legitimately in her latest book, with reference to J.M. Coetzee: “Does writing rescue? If it does, what does it rescue?”Footnote ² Elaborating upon writers such as Coetzee, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodor Adorno, Franz Kafka, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Bilge Karasu, and Marc Nichanian, Gürbilek’s answer is illuminative for historians and writers whose inspirations derive from the wish to rescue voices from oblivion: “The only probable testimony is testifying the impossibility of testimony.”Footnote ³ This is especially so when those actors to be rescued were made speechless by indescribable disasters. In Allahın Askerleri (Allah’s Soldiers), Yaşar Kemal, one of the greatest writers and novelists of the century in Turkey, confessed that “children were more realist than any most realist scientist or writer working on children.”Footnote ⁴ Kemal wrote this statement when he was very close to “rescuing their voices”: his book consists of a series of interviews with poor street children in various İstanbul neighborhoods in the 1970s, and Kemal was literally recording the children’s own voices during the interviews. However, as he emphasizes, their true experiences in life were very different from those of protagonists in books: “I couldn’t,” writes Kemal, “convince them that they could rescue themselves from these paths [drug addiction, theft, and smuggling]”.Footnote ⁵ They were born into a cruelty and a system of social and political inequalities that shaped their ordinary lives. They could not rescue themselves; the writer could not rescue their voices; and neither could the historian.

Yet many children grew up and fought against that cruelty that had shaped their childhood. Yaşar Kemal continued to be the writer of hope. Gürbilek finishes her essay by saying, “Now, time to tear out this page, start rewriting, accepting that the sun has risen.”Footnote ⁶ The historian should also continue on her/his way. Maksudyan’s solid inspiration, which she expresses elsewhere, creates enough hope and a strong foundation for this: