The noun ıslah in Ottoman Turkish refers to an act of betterment, amelioration, and correction. Its plural form, ıslahat, has usually been translated as “reforms” to English – one can recall the famous Imperial Reform Edict of 1856 (Islahat Fermanı). The topic of this paper, ıslahhane, was a new institutional structure, which first appeared in the second half of nineteenth century in Niš and Trabzon. Although the root of the word is reminiscent of a “correction house”, and although indeed modern day Ottoman–Turkish dictionaries define the term in similar way, a dive into the Ottoman archival documentation reveals that in contemporary Ottoman terminology, these were the first proper orphan asylums of the empire. More importantly, the idea of 'reform', inherent in the word, was not coming from the fact that its inmates were necessarily juvenile delinquents. These were important educational institutions with a certain curriculum to follow and with certain messages to inculcate to these orphans. Yet, the reform, in this case, was targeting the outer space of the institution more than its inner constituency: the urban space. After the establishment of the first two ıslahhanes, to be exact in 1864, the late Ottoman period witnessed the mushrooming of the institution. As elaborated in various archival documents relating to the institution, these were introduced in order to collect completely destitute children (without mother, father, or relatives) and the orphans of the utterly poor, in-between the ages of 5 and 13, and to educate them with an industrial-vocational emphasis. Opened always in relatively urbanized localities, ıslahhanes were visible, by 1900, in many big cities of the empire: from Ruse to Aleppo, from Kastamonu to Antalya, from Janina to Jerusalem, from Smyrna to Damascus. These institutions, from the beginning, were in close contact with a number of urban processes. These include, on the one hand, rise of certain problems within the cities such as begging, vagabondage, vagrancy, and new organizations of municipal security, and on the other certain developments, such as the increasing importance attached to industrial productivity and the resulting orientation towards vocational education. In that sense, their appearance was at the intersection of order-keeping and the aim of progress in urban industrial activity. Primarily based on the Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archives, this research aims at analyzing this large network of Ottoman industrial orphanages, which educated the orphan population of the empire on a very large geographical scale, with very similar curricular programs. As one of the first researches on the Ottoman orphanages, this paper may shed light on the intricate relationship between new and overlapping urban institutions and actors, summarized and reproduced succinctly in this new structure.

The overall research of the paper was undertaken in the Prime Ministry's Ottoman Archives (BOA), together with Ottoman yearbooks and yearbooks of education, code of laws, and memoirs.

The establishment of industrial orphanages in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century was a very well-implemented central order, obeyed practically by every governorship of the Empire. The birth of the institution is linked to a number of old and new phenomenon coupled under different circumstances. These include new definitions of vagabondage, vagrancy, and begging; development of new structures of provincial government, municipality and the police; creation of an orphans' fund to turn the inheritances of well-to-do orphans into borrowable money; emergence of a protective stance against the foreign imports; increasing importance attached to industrial productivity of the domestic producers, and orientation towards vocational education. The orphans, as a result, were (re)defined in different terms, other than parentless and pity-evoking children. They were, first, seen as a threat to the law and order in the cities as town as wanderers and vagabonds. Thus, they had to be confined in one way so that safety and security is achieved. Second, they represented an idle army of workers, who can be turned into productive laborers if educated properly and given a duty to perform. That's why the industrial orphanages were concentrated on educating these children on a vocational basis and employing them in the adjacent or related factories and workshops of the governorship. Third, related to the economic concerns of the reformers, and as a parallel development, the property of the orphans of the upper classes were put into use with the establishment of the Authority for the Direction of Orphans' Property in 1851. Therefore, unattended orphans and the children of the poor had to be removed from the urban space as a measure of sterilization of the urban space. Moreover, the state and industrialists were entitled to benefit from the orphans, either the money of the rich or the labor of the poor, in order to accomplish reformers' plans for developing and supporting domestic economy. In that picture, the disciplining or reformation of the orphans was only secondary compared to the larger goals of keeping the public order and security in urban areas, safeguarding the working of commercial activity, and rejuvenation of the urban industrial activity.