Modernization of Welfare or Further Deprivation? State Provisions for Foundlings in the Late Ottoman Empire

Though this history has so far received little scholarly attention, child abandonment was practiced in late Ottoman society, and its frequency was related to such factors as illegitimacy, poverty, migration, and war. Relying on Ottoman archival sources, together with periodicals and contemporary literature, this paper discerns major patterns of child abandonment in the late Ottoman Empire and discusses the history of the institutionalization and modernization of state provisions for abandoned children from a critical perspective, taking into account the experiences of infants, abandoning mothers, and wet-nurses. Traditionally stipends were assigned directly to the foundlings from central or local resources as part of the religiously determined policy to care for the needy. In an effort to organize and centralize relief, the stipends were gradually transferred to the wet-nurses, who acted as intermediary agents between the foundlings and the state. With the opening of the Dâr’ül-aceze foundling unit, the abandoned babies were taken care of by institutional, bureaucratized mechanisms in which police departments, birth registry offices, and municipalities played a part. Although these changes have been evaluated and discursively presented as the expansion of welfare policies and the modernization of the Ottoman state, from the perspective of the foundlings, the picture exposes increased deprivation, heightened mortality rates, and further suffering.