This paper examines contested conceptions of Ottoman sovereignty through the lens of a single work: a long disquisition on the history and shifting legal status of the mutasarrifiyya, or autonomous district, of Mount Lebanon, completed in 1908 by the Lebanese lawyer and functionary Bulus Nujaym. Scholars have read this work as a secessionist statement of intent, laying bare its author’s nationalist inclinations and desire to establish a sovereign Lebanese state free of Ottoman oversight. But this text was not so much a declaration of national independence as an extended meditation on the workings of sovereign power in an imperial polity whose capacity to direct its own affairs had been compromised by sustained European intervention. A study in what Duncan Bell has called ‘imperial political thought’, it did not so much look to a post-imperial future as engage with three central preoccupations of late Ottoman political thought: the question of executive power and its acceptable limits; the balance between central writ and provincial prerogatives; and the fraught relations of the Sublime Porte to its European neighbours, and their claims to protect, intervene and intercede. For Nujaym regarded the tanzimat as a fundamentally paradoxical process. Even as the ‘strong administrative centralisation’ of these years had done away with the layered sovereignty and local autonomies of old, the Porte had reluctantly surrendered some of its own powers in return for admission to the community of nations. This tension was embodied in the Lebanese statute of 1864. A ‘skilful’ piece of legislation which had enshrined the novel principle of ‘collective intervention’ in the Porte’s provincial affairs while maintaining the ‘fiction’ of Ottoman rule, it had nevertheless armed the ‘governor with almost irresistible power’ over Lebanon. As such, it replicated on a local level the contrary pattern by which sovereignty was simultaneously exported abroad and monopolised locally. Nujaym’s writings provide insight into the precarious life of a state whose sovereign powers were bundled up and distributed between European chancelleries and provincial constitutions and councils, and into the ways in which local literati perceived these diminished powers, and the relation between the provincial, the imperial, and the international. For a figure like Nujaym, bent on preserving Lebanon’s ‘liberal’ status from central ‘despotism’, only international supervision could guarantee veritable ‘autonomy’; intervention, far from a form of political impoverishment, was in his eyes a means of perpetuating a beneficent state of exception.