Children and Youth Coerced Displacement: A History of Power Struggle between State and Provincial A‘yān’s Families

Abstract

This article offers a new perspective on children and youth’s coerced displacement in the context of the Ottoman Middle East and highlights their potential as a social group to inform studies of children, kinship, and family vis-a-vis the state. Using iltizām contracts, I argue that the Ottoman state prioritized its stability and economic interests and turned a blind eye to promises it made to ensure the “well-being” of young Ottoman subjects. The contracts recorded around the mid-eighteenth century document an institutionalized practice by the state to remove and incarcerate young and minor males associated with the families of multazims, or tax farmers, who generally hailed from the class of provincial notables, or a‘yān, to persuade the latter to render payment of taxes. Although multazims appeared to be indifferent to the fate of their castaway children, evidence suggests that multazims took advantage of geopolitical changes toward the last quarter of the eighteenth century to avoid the incarceration of their children, as the practice completely disappeared at that time. This article also attempts to approach the question of whether this forced displacement of children represents a form of mobility, in comparison to other forms of children’s mobility, like the devširme, and explores what this meant for the expansion, or retraction, of the state power and its governing policies.