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By Karen VallgårdaNazan Maksudyan, Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2019. Series: Contemporary Issues in the Middle East. 211 pages. ISBN: 9780815636458The history ofchildhood was long dominated by scholarship on children in Europe and NorthAmerica, and changes in childhood ideals were frequently assumed to originate onthese continents, spreading from there to the rest of the world throughcolonialism and other globalizing forces. Recent decades have seen many new workson the histories of African, Asian, and South American childhoods, as well aschildhoods in various transnationalcontexts. These works have helped to “provincialize Europe” in the history ofchildhood, unearthing local particularities and cross-cultural similarities aswell as complex trajectories of global change over the past centuries. Thisbook, shedding light on four different groups of Ottoman children whose liveswere profoundly affected by the events of World War I, makes a valuable additionto that growing body of scholarship. Nazan Maksudyan, Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2019. The first chapter concentrates on the comprehensive network of stateorphanages (Darüleytams) founded from1915 onwards across the Empire in order to meet the pressing need of rapidlyspiraling numbers of orphans. The institutions were officially catered to the childrenof “martyrs,” veterans, and soldiers, but Maksudyan shows that a verysubstantial number of the children there were Armenian boys and girls who hadbeen orphaned as a result of the Armenian genocide. The chapter describes thepolitical processes leading up to the establishment of the Directorate ofOrphanages, as well as the seizure of properties from educational andphilanthropic institutions of the Allied powers for this purpose. The orphanageswere set up swiftly, but they were consistently underfinanced and overcrowded. Portrayalsof poor living conditions in the orphanages include vivid details of childrensleeping on the floor and holding one another to stay warm, constant hunger, andthe ravaging of deadly epidemics. Ironically, as Maksudyan points out, whileinternal correspondence between institutional administrators recountsundisciplined behavior, cases of mistreatment and attempted escapes, the officialreports emphasized the children’s happiness and good character.The second chapter explores the destinies of the approximately 1,000Ottoman boys who were sent to Germany in 1917 and 1918 to work as apprenticesin workshops, mines, and farms. The arrangement between the two statesresembled a fosterage agreement writ large: Ottoman orphans in need of carewere transferred to Germany in exchange for the performance of manual labor. Theyoung men were thus important pieces in a bilateral relationship between the twostates, one of which was struggling to deal with an overwhelming orphan problemand the other from labor shortages due to military mobilization. Poor conditionsin the Ottoman orphanages combined with high expectations for their opportunitiesin Germany motivated young men to volunteer for the adventure. However, theirhopes were mostly frustrated as they arrived in Germany to find that not onlywere they insufficiently clothed, they also had to work long hours under badconditions and with little or no pay. In some instances, this led to resistanceand open revolt as the apprentices refused to perform their tasks and sometimesran away from their workplaces. Most young men eventually returned to theOttoman Empire, but were once again disappointed to find that the authoritiesthere, rather than seeking to utilize their skills, still treated them as needyorphans.The thirdchapter shifts the focus to examine the ways in which the militarization ofOttoman society affected children, particularly in the urban centers. TheCommittee of Union and Progress sought to kindle Turkish nationalist feelingsand behavior in children through paramilitary educational schemes. At the sametime, non-Muslim scout organizations were suppressed. Such interventions taughtchildren to become aware of ethnicity and religion, intensifying tensionsbetween different groups of juveniles. Importantly, the author argues, thechildren were not merely objects of the Turkish nationalist agenda; they alsoembraced it and helped push it forward through “playing war,” even engaging inviolent inter-ethnic rivalries on the streets. The hypothetically universalcategory of the child was thusseverely fractured in the multiethnic and religiously composite Ottomansociety.The fourthand final chapter deals with the children who survived the Armenian genocide.Arguing that existing scholarship “victimizes Armenian children as dependent,vulnerable, and passive beings,” Maksudyan insists that the survivors were “notsimply miserable children who deserved pity” and underscores the importance ofdemonstrating the children’s agency. Following the genocide, Armenian orphanswere more or less forcibly adopted by Turkish families or placed in orphanageswhere they were converted to Islam and raised as Turks. In the immediateaftermath of the war, the children were subjected to a major rescue operationinitiated by representatives of the Allied powers, intended to liberate themand reintegrate them into Armenian culture. For many children, however, this meantbeing uprooted once again and placed them in new and difficult circumstances.Yet, in their testimonies, survivors emphasized their own “talent” in makingthe most of the situation. By building friendships, playing games, engaging invarious adventures, the children exhibited resilience and a “will to survive.”Together, thefour case studies show how World War I affected Ottoman children in dramatic,though sometimes ambiguous and unpredictable ways. One of the strengths of thebook is its thorough documentation of the importance of children in macropoliticalbattles. As in so many other contexts across the world, children in the OttomanEmpire were mobilized to forward competing political agendas, and the childrenthemselves sometimes accepted or even participated in these processes, while atother times they more or less openly defied the role they had been granted. Aswith all interesting books, this one also raises issues for discussion. In thefollowing I will probe two related questions regarding agency and methodology.A persistent challenge in the historiography of childhood is that posedby the aspiration to go beyond documenting adults’ views and practices by tracingchildren’s own opinions, activities, and experiences. Given that children are consistentlyunderrepresented in both published and unpublished archives, the ambition to bringforth their perspectives has pushed scholars to come up with innovative methodologiesand locate untraditional sources. This ambition has also given rise toscholarly conversations about the epistemological possibilities and problemsrelated to analyzing children’s “voices” as distinct from those of adults, andto ongoing debates about the theoretical desirability and methodologicalutility of the concept of agency.Maksudyan implicitly inscribes herself into these debates by declaringit as a central aim of the book to “recognize children’s agency” and to resist “victimizing”them. A major argument is that children were indeed “agents” who were “capableof social action.” This gives the book a slightly circular feel; agency figuresas both an aim and a conclusion. Moreover, despite the fact that the concept ofagency is highly contested not only within the field of childhood history butalso within feminist and postcolonial history, on which the author draws, theconcept is not clearly defined in the book. It is used variously in differentchapters to designate resistance to and participation in adults’ designs aswell as to describe resilience and the capacity for survival. But one might ask:if all of these activities constitute agency, would it even be conceivable toargue that children did not haveagency? Importantly, Maksudyan’s analysis demonstrates both complexities andsignificant differences in children’s coping strategies. It also shows that inmany cases, despite attempts to affect their own situations, children had infact very little influence on the courses of their lives, which were shaped byimmense forces entirely out of their control. All of this calls for aconclusion with more nuances than the assertion that they had agency – or thattheir agency increased along the way (how could this be measured?). Finally, thestrong assertion that the perspective of this book, unlike the existingscholarship, resists victimizing children or describing them as “miserable” anddeserving of “pity” implicitly suggests that victimhood is somehow undignified.But just as the capacity for social activity is a fundamental human trait, sois our dependency and vulnerability. Victimhood, one might propose, shouldtherefore prompt not pity, but solidarity.A related aim of the book is to unearth numerous different perspectives andto “give voice” to children. The book is indeed based on meticulous research ina number of official archives as well as on studies of memoirs, autobiographiesand diaries. Yet, in the chapters, the different “voices” are often harmonized intoone singular narrative, making it a little difficult to sort out when differenttestimonies confirm or contradict one another. In some chapters, historical evidenceabout a few children serves as the foundation for relatively generalizingstatements. One might also discuss to what extent referencing – andoccasionally quoting – autobiographies, written decades after the end of the war,amounts to giving voice to children. It would therefore have served the bookwell if the author had shared more of her methodological considerations and discussedhow broadly her conclusions might be applied.In spite of these issues, the book is a welcome contribution not only to the history of Ottoman childhoods, but also to the historiography of children and war and to childhood history more broadly. It offers both horrifying and touching accounts of what was done to children and how children managed, and it will no doubt be of value to students and scholars alike.Karen Vallgårda is a historian. She is an Associate Professor at the SAXO Institute, History Section, University of Copenhagen. Her current research centers on political family and childhood history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Citation: Karen Vallgårda, Book Review: Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 03.09.2019, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/19565. 