Review of Ottoman Children and Youth during WW1 by Kelly Hannavi, Études Arméniennes Contemporaines 15 (2023): 246-248. (original) (raw)

Review of Ottoman Children and Youth during the World War by Pınar Odabaşı Taşcı

Europe Now, 2020

Nazan Maksudyan’s recent book Ottoman Children and Youth during the World War I follows her previous book on Ottoman orphan and destitute children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries[1] into the last decades of the Ottoman Empire by examining the children and youth during the First World War.

Children and Youth: Ottoman Empire (Ottoman Empire/Middle East)

1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, 2015

Ottoman children were not simply passive victims or casualties; they were engaged in every facet of total war. They also became active agents as wage earners, peasants and heads of family on the home front. They directly contributed to the propaganda and mobilization effort as boy scouts, symbolic heroes and orphans of martyrs. Ottoman children from different communal identities also embodied and reproduced internal political crisis and rivalries as actors and targets of nationalist politics. The development of childhood differed in the Ottoman Empire from in the other combatant states, especially due to the rise of nationalism(s), leading to the extermination of the Armenian population and the fall of the supranational Ottoman Empire. This paper discusses the variegated involvement of Ottoman children and youth in the war effort while recognizing the significant agency exercised by children and youth.

A Triangle of Regrets: Training of Ottoman Children in Germany During the First World War

Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After (ed.) Benjamin C. Fortna, 2016

My paper concentrates on the experiences of this earliest and youngest generation of Turkish/Ottoman migrant workers in Germany. As destitute and rootless lads, these children, collected from orphanages, were not only practically expelled from their home country, but in their migrant worker situation also suffered poverty, exclusion and disconnection. This paper explores their accounts of discomfort and unhappiness during their stay. As a twist to this grey story, which offers little hope for a happy ending, in the final section of the paper I give a relatively more detailed and individual account of the experiences of two Ottoman orphan boys.

A New Angle of Observation: History of Children and Youth for Ottoman Studies

JOTSA, 2016

This section on Childhood, focusing on children in the late Ottoman Empire, strives to go beyond the “rigid boundaries of importance” for Ottoman history and regard children as “significant”—as part of the history. The following papers attempt to bring into light these habitually ignored and essentially invisible and voiceless actors with the conviction that introducing a new angle of observation, that of children, into unexplored or even previously explored fields of study can expose and enlighten hidden or unseen parts of the phenomena. Voices of children can be treated as newly discovered sources or belated testimonies for writing a nuanced and alternative history of the late Ottoman era.

"The Ottoman Fourth Army's Orphanage Policy, 1915-1918," pp. 73-100

Mehmet Besikci, Selçuk Akşin Somel, Alexandre Toumarkine (Ed.), Not All Quiet on the Ottoman Fronts: Neglected Perspectives on a Global War, 1914-1918, Wurzburg: Ergon Verlag (Istanbuler Texte und Studien, 44), 2020

The study shows that the Ottoman 4th Army in Syria implemented an orphanage policy that was distinctly different from that of the central authorities. In emphasizing the split within the Ottoman state apparatus it questions popular narratives and offers a fresh perspective on the Armenian Genocide and Armenian survival. https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783956507786/not-all-quiet-on-the-ottoman-fronts-neglected-perspectives-on-a-global-war-1914-1918