This paper will argue that scholars have misunderstood the emergence of property right—specifically, property right in regard to land and real estate—in the Ottoman Empire because we expect it to follow a model familiar from Western historiography. That is, we expect that property rights start with a politically elite class and trickle down to other groups. In the Ottoman Empire, however, property right was not characterized by an initial grant of security from monarch to the elites, but as a grant of security from the monarch to the peasants: instead of property right trickling down, it trickled up. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the right of tasarruf (peasant usufruct on the treasury lands known as miri land) became increasingly legally defined and protected from intervention by the state, its agents or other parties. It was characterized by a lifetime tenure and limited right of inheritance that favored vertical descendants. With the approval of an authority figure, it could be transacted with the payment of a large upfront fee and smaller yearly payments thereafter. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, these features served as a model of a specifically Ottoman property right that had spread to other social groups: artisans received this same property right ‘bundle’ in the form of gedik, urban renters in the form of icareteyn, and a‘yan in the form of the malikane. These features were the basis of the property right extended to all Ottoman subjects in the 1858 Land Code—which continued to refer to this right as tasarruf. Based on kanunnames, fatwas and texts of jurisprudence in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic produced between 1540 and 1858, the paper offers significant revisions to the current understanding of the history of property right in the Ottoman Empire. First, it puts the dissemination of the indigenous concept of tasarruf at the heart of the narrative rather than attempting to trace the origin of private property. Secondly, it draws attention to the central role of peasant cultivators in the evolution of property right and ultimately of political right, directly challenging the assumption that peasants are not a class with enough clout to make much of an impact politically. Finally, the paper cautions historians from normalizing specifically European narratives of state development and private property that privilege the role of a landed aristocracy.