Drawing on a broad range of primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English, such as governmental correspondence, memoirs, and local chronicles this paper explores Ottoman government attempts to achieve control over the Zaydi-Shii population of southwest Arabia, one of the most strongly contested frontier regions of the empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I will focus on the Da’’an agreement concluded in October 1911 between the Zaydi Imam Yahya and representatives of the Ottoman central government as well as on the political struggles and negotiations among Ottoman government officials and local leaders that preceded it. The Da’’an Agreement brought to an end more than two decades of armed conflict between the Ottoman imperial government on one side and Imam Yahya and his predecessors on the other. Historians have interpreted this agreement and the political arrangements it helped usher in primarily as the first step towards independent Yemeni statehood under Yahya’s leadership. However, there has been virtually no attempt to analyze the Da’’an agreement within the larger context of Ottoman imperial governance. I argue that the Da’’an agreement reflects government efforts to combine the long-standing Ottoman strategy of devolving power to the leaders of religious communities with elements of indirect rule practiced by the British in India. For instance, it is clear from government correspondence that Ottoman policy makers were favorably impressed by the cost-saving British policy of ruling large parts of India indirectly through local princes. But they hesitated to adapt this form of colonial rule to Yemen by appointing the imam governor over the Zaydi-populated parts of the province because past experience in the Ottoman Balkans seemed to suggest that devolution of power along these lines would ultimately lead to local independence. Rather, the Da’’an agreement made Imam Yahya a dependent ruler under Ottoman sovereignty only in those parts of southwest Arabia that had remained outside the Province of Yemen. In the province itself he became the leader of something unprecedented in the history of Yemen, namely of a Zaydi “millet” that was differentiated through judicial and fiscal boundaries from other local Muslim groups and placed under the sovereignty of the Sunni sultan-caliph in Istanbul. The Da’’an agreement therefore illustrates important ways in which imperial bureaucrats tried both to learn from forms of organizing difference practiced in other parts of the Ottoman Empire and to translate forms of British colonial rule into an Ottoman context.