In 1881, the Ottoman Empire formalized its financial subordination to Europe with the creation of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA). While other scholarship has debated whether the OPDA represented a bridgehead of colonial expansion or the Ottomans’ best opportunity at cheap credit and development, both approaches tend to focus on decision-makers in London, Paris, and Istanbul. Drawing on Ottoman, Armenian, British, and American sources, this paper shifts the focus to rural, agrarian areas, where the majority of Ottoman subjects lived. Examining those regions reveals how financial precarity on the imperial level gave rise to the same on the individual level: Ottoman imperial debt meant increasing indebtedness among individual Ottoman cultivators. This pattern was most clear during the Anatolian famines of 1888-93, when scarcity pushed many rural-dwellers to the brink. These famines were linked not only to ecological factors but also to the Empire’s debt troubles. In some cases, grain tithes were shipped directly out of famine districts to cover foreign debt payments. When desperate Ottoman subjects requested aid, Ottoman officials offered them loans, facilitated by the newly-established Agricultural Bank (Ziraat Bankası). Obtaining those loans, however, required cultivators to register their lands and offer them as collateral. In this way, loans-as-aid schemes secured for the bank the future bounties of these famine-stricken lands. The loans also helped officials avoid burdens on the imperial budget, impose property registration on cultivators, and wield the threat of dispossession. By analyzing how political economy and political ecology intersected during the 1887-93 Anatolian famines, this paper demonstrates how private property there emerged not as a “right” for which people fought, but as a deepening debt relation imposed by the powerful upon the desperate.