Several peasant rebellions took place in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Many of these rebellions included a collective refusal to pay taxes to the state and/or local magnates. In the literature, the revolts have mostly been considered either as nationalist uprisings (those in the Balkans) or conservative reactions to the Tanzimat reform program (those in Anatolia). This paper will discuss these cases of peasant protest as well as the preceding and subsequent actions of the state as part of state formation in the sense that Corrigan and Sayer use. Contrary to the assumption that the insurgent peasants reacted against the Tanzimat, the rebels in some of the major revolts, such as those in Vidin in 1849-50 and Kisrawan in 1858-61 rather endorsed the prose of reform, often referring to the promises of equality and protection of the well-being of subjects. In the 1840s and 1850s, peasants in the Canik area rebelled not to halt the reforms but to preempt a particular way of understanding them which would lead to double taxation. Evidently, the immediate goal of insurgent peasants was to prevent practices that jeopardized their livelihood (Scott's 'subsistence ethics'). Yet, the petitions they submitted to the officials and their radical methods of protest indicate that the cultivators comprehended the transformation the reforms entailed, and that the revolts were part of their endeavors to reinterpret the Tanzimat. Another wave of tax revolts took place in the eve of the Revolution of 1908. From 1906, there were important tax revolts in several Anatolian towns as well as Macedonia and Mosul, largely in response to attempts to introduce two new taxes. These revolts, some of which brought about local disintegration of state authority, were organized by urban middle classes with subsequent peasant participation. While the mid-century tax revolts aimed to radicalize the reform agenda, the 1906-08 revolts took place amid intense agitation by political opposition towards the end of the reign of Abdulhamid II. The earlier peasant revolts had revealed the inherent contradictions of the Tanzimat reform program by pushing it to its limits. The later revolts shook an increasingly oppressive regime and significantly contributed to its demise. Thus, the paper will argue that both the mid-century peasant revolts and the state's response in the form of legal and moral regulation, and the pre-1908 tax revolts and the regime's failure to respond were crucial moments of Ottoman modern state formation.