My paper examines the changing land tenure in Palu, a town in the eastern frontier of the Ottoman Empire, within the context of the Ottoman centralization program of Tanzimat. Palu was one of the hükümet sanjaks which remained under the hereditary rule of the Kurdish emirates from the sixteenth until the mid-nineteenth century. These lands were granted to the Kurdish emirs who declared their allegiance to the Ottoman Empire during the Safavid-Ottoman imperial rivalry. The emirs maintained their political and economic ‘privileges’ until the mid-nineteenth century, a period when the Ottoman state set out to “turn conquest into government” in its eastern provinces. In this context, Palu gained increased significance as one of the places where hereditary land ownership by the Kurdish emirs still prevailed. Not having conducted land and population surveys (tahrir) in this district and hence, not being able to extract sufficient tax revenues, the state sought to abolish this type of land ownership starting from the 1840s. Ottoman program entailed an effort to divide large lands under the control of the Palu emirs, conduct land and population surveys and establish direct taxation in the region. Using Ottoman archival sources, my paper looks at how these policies were implemented on the ground in Palu. Throughout the process, conflicts revolved mainly around “land” which held different meanings for different parties: a source of tax revenues for the Ottoman state; agricultural surplus for the Kurdish emirs; and finally a means of subsistence for the sharecroppers. As the land program was being drawn by the Ottoman authorities sharecroppers conveyed their demands to the state mainly through their petitions and sought to shape the land allocation process. Petitions present a graphic account of the ordinary inhabitants’ expectations from and responses to Tanzimat state-in-making in the region. The scant writings on the Kurdish frontier of the Ottoman Empire looked at the Tanzimat only in terms of the changing relations between the notables and the Ottoman state. My paper, however, situates land at the center of the conflicts at the local and imperial levels and demonstrates how land relations were redefined, challenged and negotiated among multiple actors including sharecroppers, small landholders, Kurdish emirs, and the Ottoman state. In this way it brings a bottom-up approach to the Ottoman state-making in its Kurdish periphery.