Conversant with the recent literature in political economy, political ecology, and new materialist critical theory, my dissertation asks: How did mining in eastern Asia Minor impact Ottoman state-building in that region? As American silver inflows dried up at the turn of the eighteenth century, the precious metal and mineral deposits in the Southeastern Taurus Mountains met an imperial will to exploit them. Founded in 1775, the Trust of Imperial Mines—an administrative province designed to operate the silver, gold, and copper mines on behalf of Istanbul—launched the region’s reconfiguration into a mining nexus. Between 1775-1835, the Trust’s territories continually expanded into the Upper Euphrates River Delta. Deforestation and the continual need for new sources of fuel propelled the expansion of the trust. Power, capital, and expertise coalesced around geology in the mid-nineteenth century, when the Ottomans and European governments entered a new partnership. At the same time, the mining nexus gave shape to insurgent politics that resisted extractive labor, coopted imperial infrastructures, and threatened networks of capital. Supplementing archival research in the Ottoman State Archives and the late-Ottoman press with landscape ethnography, this paper argues that geological knowledge, the mode of production, and state-building in eastern Asia Minor were intimately related. Doing so, my research contributes to our knowledge of Kurdish and Armenian history, the history of mining in the Ottoman Empire, and the history of capitalism in the Middle East.