In 1899, the government of British India signed a protection agreement with Mubarak al-Sabah, the shaykh of Kuwait. Most historians have taken this as the starting point of modern, independent Kuwaiti history, dismissing continued Ottoman claims to Kuwait as posturing. But were they really so meaningless? This paper contributes to a growing literature which has questioned the universality of modern European sovereignty-concepts, pointing to the Ottoman Empire as a rich repository of alternative understandings of power and rule. The paper reads correspondence between Mubarak, British officials, and Ottoman authorities in Basra and Istanbul to show that the Ottomans and British had very different assumptions about what power and sovereignty meant. Building on early-modern ideas about rule, Ottoman officials saw Mubarak (the individual) as the key. And because the shaykh had substantial interests – namely, date plantations – in Basra, which he used to maintain his authority in Kuwait, Ottoman officials were able to exert influence over Mubarak, and therefore Kuwait, through Basra. The British, on the other hand, discounted Mubarak’s interests outside Kuwait, viewing him primarily as the ruler of a defined territory. They therefore understood their agreement with the shaykh to be about Kuwait, rather than about Mubarak personally. As a result, when Ottoman authorities destroyed portions of Mubarak’s Basra date groves in 1905, the shaykh called upon his British allies for assistance, insisting that his primary goal in signing the British agreement had been the protection of “my honor and my property and my land (…) if your protection is only for the town of Koweit, the protection of Koweit does not benefit me at all.” For their part, the British refused to see the date properties as anything other than a distraction. Their interpretation, that Mubarak was primarily a stand-in for the Kuwaiti nation and territory, has persisted in part because of post-World War I histories of Kuwait, Iraq, and the British Empire. In addition to exploring the complexity and layered nature of sovereignty at the turn of the twentieth century, the paper pushes back against the artificial separation of Kuwaiti and Iraqi histories in the late Ottoman period by demonstrating the social and economic entanglement of Basra and Kuwait, as well as the ways that Sabah power in Kuwait was founded in the Basra date groves. In doing so, the paper aims to move beyond the methodologically-nationalist narratives which dominate both Gulf and international history.