In July 1908, the Young Turks – a multi-ethnic, cross-confessional coalition of Ottoman opposition activists – forced the autocratic Ottoman Sultan to reinstate the Ottoman Empire’s short-lived 1876 constitution. Spontaneous public celebrations erupted across the empire’s vast domains. While others have focused on the views, methods, and makeup of the key conspirators who led the revolution, the task of explaining why masses of ordinary people welcomed and joined the movement remains unfinished. More recent scholarship has begun to focus on popular unrest in the lead-up to the revolution, showing how broad-based discontent provided the popular base for the Young Turk Revolution. This paper builds on that work by examining the interlinked ecological and economic forces that immiserated rural areas of the Empire, especially the agrarian regions of Anatolia. There, provincial tax protests erupted in the midst of droughts, poor harvests, and rising food prices that occurred before, during, and after the revolution. It re-conceptualizes the Ottoman revolutionary period as one of famine conditions for rural people. Drawing on sources from the Ottoman archives, the Armenian press, British diplomatic correspondence, and American missionary archives, this paper argues that accounts of the 1908 Revolution should consider not only which group of opposition actors drove the break with autocracy, but also how precipitation, price movements, and bursts of collective action in rural areas enabled those opposition to raise broad-based support among a majority-rural population for a new political order.