After a terrible winter in 1910-1911, nomads living in the Jazira region—stretching between the Tigris and the Euphrates at the foot of the Anatolian plateau—wished to settle. When members of the Ottoman parliament discussed the appropriation of funds for this initiative, however, bitter opposition broke out. What had seemed a simple matter was anything but, as deputies argued over which province ought to receive funding for the settlement of groups that regularly moved around. Most significantly, deputies insinuated that a conspiracy was afoot. By settling a group of Arab nomads in the largely non-Arab province of Diyarbakir, deputies charged, the Ottoman state was destroying the Arab district of Dayr al-Zur while strengthening Diyarbakir. In response to these charges, the minister of the interior, Halil, lamented, “Is it now that we are inventing such things, even though Arabness or Turkishness never existed in the six-hundred year history of this state?” The episode thus underscored shifting notions of citizenship entangled with the allocation of property to nomadic groups, and, as Halil’s words remind us, many people presented these dynamics as novel. Relying on Ottoman archival materials related to the settlement campaign of 1911 as well as parliamentary records of the debates, the paper makes two interventions in the historiography. First, it suggests how the question of property as it related to the sedentarization of nomads catalyzed debates about ethnicity in the late Ottoman Empire. In doing so, the paper reveals a political economy of identity in which the end of the movement of nomads coincided with broader claims about their membership in an ethnic community. This relationship stands in contrast to the vast and important literature on citizenship and identity in the late Ottoman and post-Ottoman period that emphasizes the cultural imagination and discursive construction of these dynamics. Second, the paper complicates the notion that borders and ethnic identity only began to matter after the end of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, the paper exposes how a political economy of agrarian development rendered these questions pertinent before the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.