Drawing on a broad range of primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English, such as governmental correspondence, travelogues, and local petitions this paper explores practices of the Ottoman central government and their local representatives to devolve power to elites in the Province of Yemen (Yemen vilayeti) between the establishment of this province in 1872 and the end of Ottoman rule in early 1919. Historians of this second period of Ottoman rule in Yemen have often argued that the four decades of the Ottoman presence in southwest Arabia after 1872 were characterized by government efforts to establish a more direct, centralized form of governance under the auspices of the Ottoman provincial law of 1871. Ottoman policy makers, so the argument, thus moved away from earlier arrangements that accorded significant degrees of autonomy to local leaders, such as the amir of ‘Asir. It was only with the Da’’an agreement, concluded by the imperial government and the Zaydi imam Yahya in 1911, that a form of autonomy was once again incorporated into the governance of Ottoman Yemen. Against this interpretation, I argue that a broad spectrum of autonomy arrangements was central to Ottoman governance in Yemen throughout the entire period under study, and thus prior to the Da’’an agreement. For instance, between 1872 and 1886, ‘Abdullah Pasha al-Dula’i, a prominent shaykh of the Bakil confederation, ruled most of the northern portion of the Yemen vilayeti on behalf of the Ottoman government. Moreover, a significant degree of day-to-day governance throughout Ottoman Yemen was in the hands of local lords (mashayikh) who exercised authority over areas that ranged in size from two villages to entire sub-districts. While governor-general Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha sought to eliminate the autonomy of the mashayikh around 1900, key Ottoman policy makers considered autonomy arrangements an essential element of good government in Yemen. Overall, not autonomy itself was subject to contestation among government officials and local elites but rather the question of how much power should be devolved to whom. In drawing attention to these practices, that were differentiating and particularistic in character, I demonstrate that key elements of Ottoman imperial rule retained their relevance at a time when Ottoman governance was – according to some historians – increasingly adopting the centralizing, standardizing and uniform trappings of a nation-state-in-the-making. In so doing, I complicate the “from empire to nation-state” teleology that still informs much of the scholarly work on the late Ottoman Empire.