Devshirme: The Bureaucracy of Child Enslavement
By Khaled Salih
“Nine sons I bore nine sons I raised nine sons the Turks have taken now I birth only tears I nurse only sorrow my womb is a grave my breasts give poison.”
Details the Ottoman Empire's Devshirme system, a practice of child abduction and enslavement, is a historical manifestation of Iain McGilchrist’s theory of Left Hemisphere Capture (LHC). It emphasizes how this system was a calculated, systematic, and bureaucratic operation, reducing human lives to quantifiable data and meticulously erasing the identities of the abducted Christian boys. The text profoundly illustrates the unimaginable emotional and psychological trauma inflicted on families, highlighting acts of self-mutilation by parents to save their children and the devastating demographic impact and systematic erasure that left virtually no descendants. Ultimately, this should serves as a crucial historical lesson, warning against the dangers of unchecked efficiency and abstraction overriding empathy and human dignity, and urging humanity to acknowledge uncomfortable historical truths to prevent similar patterns of exploitation from recurring.
