The Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives prominently displays books on Armenians and its online catalog showcases collections on Armenians, who are presented as a “problem” for the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, different Armenian archives worldwide preserve the dispersed records of Ottoman Armenian history and frame them as objects of national heritage rather than of an Ottoman imperial past. The framings of the Ottoman and Armenian archives are projections of twentieth-century nationalism and of the Armenian genocide and its denial, which have in turn shaped historiographies that situate Armenians in opposition to the Ottoman Empire. This paper overcomes this telos and binary by treating the Ottoman archives in Istanbul and the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate archives, now housed in the Nubar Library in Paris, as connected objects of study. First, I focus on the trajectories, form and affect of both archival institutions. The form of the archive (i.e., the organization of the files, the categories used in the catalogs) reveals both how these archives were constructed and how they shape contemporary scholarship. The organizational schemas in the Ottoman and Armenian Patriarchate archives often compel researchers of nineteenth-century dynamics to begin their studies with the year 1840, reinforcing the Ottoman Tanzimat reform era periodization. Such an approach centers the role of Istanbul as an agent of change in the empire. Thus, I show how the schemas adopted to collect and file documents in both Ottoman and Armenian archives prioritize the role of Istanbul and assert a center-periphery paradigm. Further, I explain how and why the archives of the patriarchate, although framed as national archives, in fact carry a vision of imperial control through the organization of petitions and the legal, cultural, and sociopolitical categories utilized within them. To show how these categories of order and power transcend the boundaries of Istanbul and diffuse into the borderlands, I examine petitions that were sent to Ottoman government offices and the patriarchate in Istanbul from the eastern borderland region of Erzurum, Bitlis and Van between the 1840s and 1870s. I argue that nineteenth-century Ottoman visions and practices of governance crossed confessional and regional lines, thus indicating a dispersed form of power. In sum, by treating the archives as an object of study, I demonstrate how archives that in the twentieth century have come to uphold opposing political projects in fact reinstitute shared categories of power and practices of governance.