Drawing on primary sources in Ottoman Turkish and English, such as governmental correspondence, memoranda, and published treatises, this paper examines conservative thought in Ottoman imperial governance during the period of state building known as Tanzimat (1839-1876) by focusing on the ideas of Ahmet Cevdet Pasha (1822-1895), one of the most influential Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals at the time. Historians of late Ottoman imperial rule have studied governance primarily as practice by emphasizing negotiation, bargaining, and the flexibility of imperial policy making. Yet the intellectual history of Ottoman governance in the context of the Tanzimat remains seriously understudied. This paper contributes to closing this gap by analyzing the ideas of provincial governance that Ahmet Cevdet developed in connection with his missions as a government inspector to the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia during the 1860s within the framework of conservatism. Scholarship on Ahmet Cevdet has primarily analyzed his historical thought and his contribution to the codification of civil law. This paper moves beyond these studies by comparing Ahmet Cevdet’s perspectives on imperial governance with those of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) and Henry Maine (1822-1888), two prominent British conservative political thinkers, who wrote extensively about British rule in India. I argue that it is the emphasis on local customs, traditions, and practices as central elements of imperial rule that allows us to identify the ideas of Cevdet Pasha, Burke, and Maine as conservative. However, Cevdet Pasha’s vision of conservative governance differed from those articulated by Burke and Maine in important ways. On the one hand, Cevdet shared Burke’s conservative perspective on imperial governance in that he respected local customs and traditions and recognized that local institutions and elites needed to be incorporated into the running of a given province. Yet, while for Burke Indian society was comparable to and on the same footing with Western civilization, Cevdet viewed the provincial societies he encountered during his inspection tours as ‘not yet civilized.’ However, unlike Maine who dismissed Indian society as fundamentally different and incapable of civilizational uplift, Cevdet insisted that the local people were malleable to be ‘civilized’ and turned into loyal and useful subjects. Thus, Cevdet’s memoirs and inspection reports suggest that his version of conservative imperial governance was not adverse to change but rather sought to strike a balance between change for the sake of ‘civilizing’ these societies and the preservation of local customs, traditions and practices.