In Between Market and Charity: Child Domestic Work and Changing Labor Relations in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul* Yahya Araz Dokuz Eylül University, I ̇ zmir/Turkey I ̇ rfan Kokdaş I ̇ zmir Kâtip Çelebi University, I ̇ zmir/Turkey Abstract This article focuses on children taken by Istanbulite families for upbringing and employment in the Ottoman capital during the 1800–1900 period. It suggests that domestic child labor which was shaped by the concept of ‘charity’ and economic interests during the first half of the nineteenth century progressively turned into wage labor during the second half of the century. The study claims that the nineteenth century witnessed a transformation of labor relations in the domestic service market, implying the transition from reciprocal to commodified labor. The labor of children employed in domestic services underwent a monetization process throughout the nineteenth century. Parallel to this monetization, the status of children under foster care or in domestic service came to be determined by standardized legal contracts. Introduction Child labor became extensively used in domestic services and manufacturing as a result of accelerating monetization and commercialization in the Ottoman world during the nineteenth century. 1 Although in the nineteenth-century Ottoman world children were increasingly employed in many factories and workshops such as tobacco factories, shipyards, textile production, cotton spin- ning and silk reeling mills, 2 this study, however, deals only with the changes in domestic child labor. The transformation of child labor in the nineteenth- century Ottoman world has barely received due attention until now. The current historiography of Ottoman studies is dominated by a static notion of child labor in legal and economic terms. Even in recent studies children employed in domestic services or those sent to other families for foster care are either depicted as weak figures who fell victim to exploitation or as children raised by benevolent families. 3 Rejecting such static notions of child labor, this study contextualizes the mechanism of nineteenth-century domestic child labor within the framework of socio-economic transformations and continuities. This article focuses on children taken by Istanbulite families for employ- ment and upbringing in the Ottoman capital during the 1800–1900 period. It contends that domestic child labor which was shaped by the concept of International Labor and Working-Class History No. 97, Spring 2020, pp. 81–108 # International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2020 doi:10.1017/S0147547919000279 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547919000279 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core . Izmir Katip Celebi Universitesi, on 24 Jun 2020 at 11:01:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms .