It is a widely accepted argument in political and historical sociology that the formation of modern states and centralization of the political power played a crucial role in the formation of national identities through both state-leading and state-seeking nationalisms. This perspective concerning the formation of national identities in the Ottoman Empire is, however, problematic in two respects. First, the Ottoman political modernization is seen as an uninterrupted and consciously-designed process. Scholars inspired by the modernization theory present the modernization in the Ottoman Empire as a rationalization and integration process, while their critiques focus on the concentration of power techniques as the redeployment of state’s control on social resources. Thus, both perspectives implicitly share the same approach. Secondly, national identity formations are perceived as a compound of unilinear and unavoidable dynamics. In fact, both modernization and the national identity formation are seen as teleological historical processes. Providing an alternative perspective, Michael Mann’s regime strategies refers to the attempts of the dominant power actors to cope with the challenges because of the emerging social classes and ‘nations’. This paper uses this conceptual framework to understand the complexities of the Ottoman political modernization. The Ottoman political modernization witnessed three different regime strategies, namely the Tanzimat, the Hamidian and the Constitutional eras. Characteristics of the political society of each period characterized each regime strategy. In fact, components of the national identity, the major social actors of the political society, and the challenges by the relevant social actors posed for the regime contextualized the space of politics for each period. This periodization allows us to avoid teleological approaches and shifts our focus to the articulation or the resistance forms by sub-state actors to the referred regime strategies. The last century of the Ottoman Empire witnessed dynamics towards the co-habitation of different ethnic and religious groups and the integration with state, while the same century was also an era of fully-fledged nationalist movements. The realization of each of these dynamics was closely related with the performance of the aforementioned regime strategies in each period. Following this conceptual framework, this paper analyzes the responses of the Albanians, Kurds, and Arabs, the non-Turkish Muslim elements of the Empire, against the Ottoman regime strategies. This analysis is intended to contribute to the ongoing debates on the national identity and modern state formations in the Ottoman Empire.