Between the 1960s and late 1980s, social and economic historians of the Ottoman Empire engaged in the “çiftlik debate’’. Çiftliks were large landed estates formed between the 17th and 19th centuries and interpreted as either a symptom of corruption of the so-called Ottoman classical land regime or a reflection of the Ottoman integration into the world economy. As intellectual and academic interest in rural history faded away starting in the 1990s, so did the debate. Focusing on the expansion of çiftliks in the river basins of Western Anatolia between the 1850s and the 1910s, this paper calls for a revival of the debate in the context of capitalist transformations in the late Ottoman Empire. Based on an eco-critical reading of Ottoman archival materials, this paper, argues that expansion of çiftliks played an instrumental role in the commodification of nature, the eradication of rural commons, and reinforced rural ecological segregation, ultimately becoming a defining feature of Ottoman capitalism in the rural space. This paper approaches Western Anatolian river basins as commodity frontiers of global capitalism, and view frontiers not only as zones where commodities were exchanged but in which capital and power put nature into work in order to extract value out of it. The opening of the frontier for resource extraction and capital accumulation prompted struggles among various actors over the control of the environment, producing new class distinctions in the process. Ample opportunities provided by global commodity markets and the concurrent expansion of railway networks starting with the 1850s brought the river basins of Menderes and Gediz into the extractive remit of the new actors who held economic and/or political capital. Ottoman and foreign merchants, global trade companies, members of notable families, local authorities, and the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II himself through the local branches of Hazine-i Hassa Nezareti (the Ministry of the Sultan’s Treasury) opened previously communally used pastures and woodlands to commercial agriculture by enclosing and converting them into çiftliks. While owning or lacking capital became a crucial medium for how human interacted the environment, this paper demonstrates that control of nature for resource extraction via formation and expansion of çiftliks tied rural communities to particular places while divorcing them from control over the land and environment, and depriving their access of rural commons.