Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I by Nazan Maksudyan (review)

In Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I, Nazan Maksudyan offers an analysis of the history of Ottoman children under the harsh circumstances of the First World War by situating them as "legitimate witnesses" and "active agents" of war politics. In the introduction of the book, Maksudyan highlights that Ottoman children coming from different ethnoreligious and socioeconomic backgrounds were "legitimate partakers of, actors in, and witnesses to Ottoman political action and experience in the war" whose experiences cannot be dismissed in reading the "home-front suffering" (5).

In connection with her overarching argument that Ottoman children were active historical agents of the wartime empire, the book problematizes and explores the wartime state's humanitarianism, national and communal politics, and the issue of child labor both in domestic and public settings. In the first chapter, Maksudyan questions the proclaimed philanthropic function of state orphanages. Focusing on the orphanages located in Istanbul, the imperial capital, Maksudyan points to discriminatory policies employed by the administrative bodies of orphanages by setting up acceptance criteria that determined priority in admitting children to orphanages (23). The chapter shows that finding shelter in an orphanage did not mean salvation for children in any sense, given the hunger, violence, and health problems children faced due to malnutrition and ill treatment.

In the second and third chapters of the book, Maksudyan moves her discussion of Ottoman children's wartime experiences to national and transnational levels. The second chapter covers the stories of orphan boys who were sent to Germany between 1917 and 1918 to work at handicrafts, in mines, and on farms. In addition to showing how the military and political alliances between the Ottoman and German states affected the lives of these orphan boys, the chapter also explores child labor's impacts on wartime economy both at national and transnational levels (53, 58, 59). The third chapter offers an analysis of children as targets and actors of the Ottoman state's nationalist politics. While touching upon the impact of the militarization of everyday life on the experiences of Ottoman children, the chapter also discusses the children's responses to this political and cultural transformation by reflecting on the "war games" children had played (96–97). The final chapter concentrates on Armenian children who survived the genocide of 1915. Using memoirs and diaries, Maksudyan contends that despite the trauma they endured, the child survivors of the Armenian genocide were more than passive victims; they developed coping mechanisms that turned them into "resilient" actors in history.

The book introduces new archival resources in German and makes an important contribution in situating the stories of Ottoman children in the transnational historiography on World War I by moving beyond children being symbols of the nation and highlighting their role as historical actors with agency. Maksudyan's narration of the orphans in Germany, who experienced cultural and financial challenges, health problems, and issues with adapting a new culture brings to the reader's attention that the everyday life is a fundamental component of understanding the history of war. The excerpts from the children's lives that Maksudyan successfully incorporates in her narrative (mainly in the chapters titled "Ottoman Orphan Apprentices in Germany" and "Survival of Children during the Armenian Genocide") denotes that the fluidization of ideological and physical borders due to a global-scale war crucially affected not only the world of the state and adults but children as well by providing them new social and economic spaces to execute their own agency.

While the book focuses on demonstrating children's agency as active witnesses and partakers of war, it causes empire-wide overgeneralization of the experiences of children in the imperial capital. For instance, by arguing the opening of orphanages in the provinces was directly related to the Armenian genocide, the book overlooks the complex dynamics in both national and local settings that motivated the foundation of state-sponsored and private...