Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) transformed into the largest property owner in Ottoman domains during his reign through acquisition of vast estates in over fifteen Ottoman provinces. This transformation was predicated on the systemized separation of his personal treasury, the Privy Purse, and the state treasury in the 1880s. Abdulhamid II, in his capacity as a private entrepreneur, received revenues from the properties he privately owned, which were exempt from state taxation, and created himself a private source of income. Furthermore, he notably acquired numerous concessions, including oil concession in Baghdad and operation of steamships over the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, under his Privy Purse. In this Hamidian project, which I argue underpinned the late Ottoman political economy and sovereignty, Basra and Baghdad were at the forefront: Abdulhamid II extracted most revenues from his private properties in Basra among all Ottoman provinces whereas those in Baghdad were a close second. This paper revisits the question of “settlement of tribes” in the Ottoman historiography at the cross-section of Abdulhamid II’s private ownership of property and the scholarship on (im)mobility. To that end, I focus on the administration of Hamidian estates in Basra, which was underpinned by the paradox that Abdulhamid II was the monarch of the state and acted in his capacity as a non-state actor. Increased agrarian productivity on Hamidian estates, which augmented the revenues Abdulhamid II individually accrued while simultaneously depriving the Ottoman state from taxes, was dependent on the creation of an immobile labor force. Through a systematic study of revenue registers and legal orders that were produced by the Administration of Emlak-i Humayun, the institutional body under the Privy Purse responsible for the administration of Hamidian estates and collection of their revenues, I shed light on the complex relationship among the Ottoman state, administrators of Hamidian estates, and tribal populations in Basra that enabled the flow of the revenues from Basra to the capital, created on the backs of the inhabitants of these estates.