The effects of the Gallipoli campaign on Turkish child survivors in Anatolia

The Gallipoli Campaign was one of the hardest fought wars in modern human history. A manmade disaster that occurred exactly 100 years ago on a narrow geographic strip on the Gallipoli peninsula, it claimed the lives of a total of approximately 120,000 soldiers from the belligerent powers, the Ottoman Empire on one side, and Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, British India and Newfoundland, on the other. Despite its significance in the world history, the Gallipoli Campaign has been subject to little systematic investigation for its consequences. We empirically examine the effects of this war on children who lived in Anatolia and were aged under five in 1915. Combining the Turkish census data with military records that provide information on the number of Turkish soldiers killed in the Gallipoli Campaign from each of 67 provinces in Turkey, we find significant evidence that the war severely affected the socioeconomic outcomes of many survivor children later in life. Our estimates document that, for every additional 1,000 soldiers killed from a province, indicating the severity of the war exposure, children from that province lost 0.12 to 0.17 years of schooling, or were 1.3% to 2.5% more likely to remain illiterate. These are substantive effects given that average years of schooling in our whole sample is 1.47 years and literacy rate is 34%. Our results are robust to controlling for birth-year- and birth-province-fixed effects, falsification tests, and alternative definitions of treatment.