Chapter 4 discusses the integration of child labor into the capitalist relations of production in the Imperial Arsenal. It connects the militarization of labor with industrial and urban modernization in the context of migration crises throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. It analyses how children were forcefully drafted before the Tanzimat and how child labor was central to the transition from tributary to military labor. It then explores how children served to the efforts to maintain military labor in the Arsenal. As the flow of refugees to Istanbul increased in the 1860s, the demanding need for industrial production and the failure of previous schemes of coercion merged with an emerging middle-class consciousness among urban elites who desired to convert the orphaned and refugee children into industrious citizens. The chapter narrates the formation of naval-vocational schools and boys’ companies and battalions within this context and introduces wages and profiles of Muslim and non-Muslim children throughout the different phases of their employment in the Arsenal and the Yarn Factory.