The modern anthropological premise that states play a major role in the formation of tribes, most succinctly laid out by Morton Fried in 1975, has gained some currency among Middle East historians but has hardly been examined in an Ottoman context. This is surprising, as even a quick look at the administrative sources of the 16th to 18th century clearly shows that the tribal formations which dominated the hinterland of inner Anatolia and northern Syria/Mesopotamia in this period were not the same as those named in Mamluk chancery manuals for the preceding period, nor those recalled in oral histories of the region that date from the beginning of the twentieth century. As can perhaps best be demonstrated in the case of Lebanon, the establishment of Ottoman rule in the early 16th century led to the replacement of an older class of mainly Bedouin tribal rulers in the region with a new elite of secondary families, often recruited through co-optation into the Ottoman military apparatus or the awarding of tax farms, to serve as local intermediaries of the expanding state. But whereas the new tribal elites of Lebanon were essentially sedentary and anyhow soon fell under French protection, the Ottomans’ sponsorship of what anthropologists would describe as “colonial tribes” (Neil Whitehead) along the cultivated marges of Anatolia and northern Syria particularly in the late 17th and 18th centuries resulted in a significant shift in alliances and settlement patterns among Turkmen, Kurdish and Arab tribal groups from throughout the region. The aim of this paper is to situate the emergence of the Ebu Ri?, Yeni ?l, Re?wan, al-‘Abbas, Millî and other confederations as evidenced by contemporary chancery sources in the framework of Ottoman state building. By viewing the tribalization of the steppe periphery as a by-product, if not an outright strategy, of governmental control in the early modern period, we will call into question the axiom that state-tribe relations are characterized by tension, bring individual tribal leaders into the current discussion of “who is an Ottoman,” and ask how consciously the Ottoman state contributed to tribal ethnogenesis along what is today the Syrian-Turkish border.