Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After pdf

Childhood in the Late Ottoman Empire and After

Edited by Benjamin C. Fortna

CHILDHOOD IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND AFTER

Book preface

In recent years the history of childhood has expanded dramatically in scope and sophistication, but its geographical coverage has remained heavily skewed towards the West. This volume breaks new ground by focusing on the ways in which childhood was imagined and experienced on the eastern fringes of Western Europe.

The contributions that follow show that in the Balkans, Anatolia and the Arab lands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the influence of Western ideas about childhood was important but unevenly absorbed, and always mediated through indigenous institutions, individuals, traditions and desires.

 As the Ottoman Empire gave way to the nationally defined states that supplanted imperial rule, children assumed novel roles and childhood took on new significance and expectations in response to the rapidly changing realities of this turbulent time.

The studies in this volume address childhood in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman and post-Ottoman world. The changing approach to childhood in this period of rapid transformation reflects a confluence of major shifts in societies that were increasingly minded to differentiate it from childhood as it was experienced before the nineteenth century.

The Ottoman lands were buffeted by a number of developments both internal and external that fundamentally reshaped certainly—but far from all—aspects of society. Far from being protected from these trends, children and, indeed, the very conception of childhood assumed a novel prominence that was increasingly linked to the major questions of the modern period.

In order to appreciate the many changes affecting childhood in the late Ottoman and immediate post-Ottoman eras, it is necessary to understand some of the ways in which children and childhood were traditionally experienced and understood before the changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to alter the picture so dramatically, a subject which we will address shortly.

But it is the changes that have usually attracted the most attention. They have been depicted as the products of a top-down process in which the modernizing state set the tenor for the period, effecting a series of transformations that, taken together, went a long way towards altering society as a whole.

Starting with the crucial decision to reorganize the Empire’s military, the late Ottoman state soon found itself engaged in—and assuming responsibility for—areas in which it had traditionally involved itself either minimally or