The Hamidiye Children’s Hospital was founded in 1899 in the Ottoman capital under the patronage of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909). Following its inauguration, the hospital published comprehensive statistical yearbooks (1900-1908) to commemorate the sultan’s accession to the throne and to summarise medical information regarding the treated patients. The yearbooks, written mainly in Ottoman Turkish and French, also contain diverse photographs related to the hospital which were taken by the photography studio established on the premises. These photographs attesting to the modernised healthcare system were not only circulating thanks to the yearbooks sent to institutions abroad as gifts, but they were also frequenting the pages of local newspapers such as Servet-i Fünûn and Malûmat, as well as foreign periodicals. In other words, Abdülhamid II continued the same controlled image circulation policy as he previously did with the Library of Congress in 1893, and the British Museum in 1894, when he sent photography albums showing the modernisation efforts of the Ottoman Empire as discussed in studies by William Allen, and Muhammad Isa Waley. Hence, what might appear at first sight as a magnanimous act of philanthropy on the part of the sultan turns out to be well-calculated imperial propaganda. I argue that with the Hamidiye Children’s Hospital, the sultan aimed to convince and impress both the Ottoman subjects under his rule, and the international powers by portraying a modernised imperial image of scientific advancement on a par with the Western countries, and he specifically utilised photographs to this end. I further suggest that by focusing his attention on children’s health and sustaining the image of a sorrowful father who lost a child of his own to diphtheria, Abdülhamid II was aspiring to rectify his negative image as “the Red Sultan” due to the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, striving to replace the image of tyrannical, cruel, and bloody autocrat, e.g. in satirical caricatures, with that of a compassionate and caring father. Therefore, examining how photographs of the Hamidiye Children’s Hospital circulated in the local and international press would add new dimensions to Abdülhamid II’s image policy and expand on how he instrumentalised photography as a form of imperial propaganda. Moreover, this study aims to analyse the photographs from the yearbooks as early examples of Ottoman medical photography, a topic which has received very scant scholarly attention, and evaluate how they relate to the history of medical photography, and Ottoman modernisation.

On the eve of the Tanzimat, Mustafa Reşid pointed to “honor” as the starting point of the reform in Ottoman Empire, with the reform essentially meaning a radical change in the notion of political power. This curious idea unique to the mastermind behind the arguably most comprehensive reform project in Ottoman history later culminated in the abolition of torture. While gradually abolishing the practice of torture, the Tanzimat’s criminal law codes justified this policy by declaring torture to be a violation of personal honor. This paper suggests that the abolition of torture was actually the most comprehensive and critical reform of the Tanzimat. It was most dramatically through this policy that the Ottoman reformers conceived and ordinary Ottoman subjects made sense of the Tanzimat as a new beginning. The language of the higher Ottoman bureaucrats in the wake of the Tanzimat put the abolition of torture delicately as the embodiment of all the new principles through which political power now should be exercised. As for the ordinary Ottoman subjects, arguably, they expected the Tanzimat to express itself primarily through a decisive end to the practice of torture, which, I suggest, was due most significantly to that torture had for centuries been the single most common practice through which they closely experienced the arbitrary exercise of state authority. This paper relies primarily on a set of original documents, most significantly a group of orders that the Sublime Porte dispatched to provincial governors over the 1840s and 50s. Through them, the Porte often urged and instructed governors emphatically to not only ensure that the practice of torture was no more tolerable but also about why torture contradicted with the new notion of how the state authority should now be exercised. To further explore the mindset and attitude of the ruling elite as regards the practice of torture during the early decades of the Tanzimat, I read through the legal cases filed against torture and focus on the emphatic statements made by the supreme court, the Meclis-i Vala, while reviewing the provincial court verdicts. Finally, to grasp insights into how Ottoman subjects perceived the abolition of torture from the beginning, I delve into the language of a group of petitions all raising official grievances against torture.

In 1909 the Istanbul police commissioner successfully lobbied the Dahiliye Nezareti to create a new police force for the imperial capital. The zabıta-yı ahlakiye (morality police) were tasked with the moral upkeep of the city and swiftly set about harassing the owners, patrons, and prostitutes of Istanbul’s umumhaneler. These sites of sex and vice were increasingly viewed by the state as a fifth column which undermined the empire’s strength from within and had to be countered. Two years later the experiment of the zabıta-yı ahlakiye was codified into an empire wide body called Asayiş Müfettiş-i Umumiliği; the General Inspector of Public Order. In this paper I argue that these inventions were an anxious response to the numerous external threats faced by the empire in its final decade. Those lawmakers, politicians, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and soldiers that clustered around the state hurriedly looked for any and all means of national strengthening to meet this threat. Urban space in general, and Istanbul in particular, became laboratories for a new kind of disciplinary power that aimed at creating a healthy national body, a national body that was unified, defended, and morally upstanding. At the same time, cities were sites where modernity was lived, where technology and social change were at their fastest, and where new alafranga behaviours were first adopted. Anxieties came from within and without. Prostitutes were labelled an existential threat to the empire while foppish, fashionable young men became emblematic of Ottoman impotency itself. Studies of late-Ottoman sexuality have tracked anxious attempts to hide homosexual behaviour seen as “illicit” and a sign of Ottoman decline by European observers. I build on these arguments to focus closely on this anxiety and how it manifested across a wide range of urban socio-sexual practices. I examine the documentary history of morality policing alongside literary sources that narrate, critique, or simply document the changing social life of the Ottoman capital. My argument places sexuality and morality at the heart of late-Ottoman politics, rejecting a historiography that often sees them as epiphenomenal. I emphasise that anxieties connected to public morality were not merely “repressive” but had important productive effects, shaping the norms of appropriate behaviour and sexual practice in the late-Ottoman public sphere. In studying this history, we can better understand the continuity between the late-Ottoman and Republican periods and, indeed, the bitterly conflicted terrain of gender and sexual politics in Turkey today.