Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Osman Nuri Paşa served as the governor of Hijaz, Yemen, and Aleppo. In 1885, he wrote a report outlining his plans for provincial reforms in the Hijaz and Yemen. In reality, what Osman Nuri produced was an ambitious template designed to bring Istanbul’s vision of modernity and civilization to the empire’s turbulent tribal frontiers. Over the next two decades, Abdülhamid II embraced many of Osman Nuri’s policy proposals, particularly his vision of tribal education and his strong emphasis on consolidation and centralization via technological and infrastructural improvement. In this paper, I will argue that Osman Nuri’s proposals represent a signature articulation of a Hamidian “colonial policy” on the empire’s Arab frontiers. Alongside the Hijaz and Yemen, the other territory most frequently included in descriptions of Ottoman colonial experimentation was Trablusgarb. The most obvious problem linking these three provinces was Bedouin policy. As Osman Nuri explains, Muslims from Arab, Kurdish, and Albanian tribal areas all represented a massive, untapped reservoir of military recruits and economic potential. In Yemen, the Hijaz, and Trablusgarb, however, the situation was compounded because even the settled populations of these provinces were exempt from military service. As he laments, the difficulties in recruiting and forcing soldiers from Anatolia and Ottoman Europe to go to these provinces stemmed from the grave risks posed not only by local resistance, but also by disease, poor water and sanitation, and extreme climate. Owing to these dangers, he proposed that these “hot provinces” should be considered as a new kind of administrative unit and earmarked for special reforms. Osman Nuri’s novel comparative perspective reflects the widening gulf between the empire’s Turkish core and the Arab periphery. As he warned, however, even these difficult frontier provinces could not be perpetually treated as recently occupied territories. He understood the need to balance the pressure of centralization with a measure of accommodation and indoctrination. Thus, in 1886, a group of students selected from Osman Nuri’s triad of “hot provinces” was sent to Istanbul. This was the pilot program that ultimately grew into the famous Așiret Mektebi (Tribal School). And in 1892, it was Osman Nuri who was called upon to write the school’s curriculum. While scholars have traditionally attributed virtually every aspect of Hamidian policy-making to the Sultan himself. Osman Nuri’s story demonstrates how novel experiments on the frontier could and did reshape policy-making at an empire-wide level.